Commentary: Here’s how Israel can ‘stink out’ Hamas

When the Israelis decide to invade the Hamas tunnel network, they will encounter what U.S. Marines discovered as they rooted out Japanese tunnels on Iwo Jima and what the U.S. Army found in the tunnels of Cu Chi, Vietnam: an extremely bloody slugfest.

In effect, the Gaza tunnels are a poor man’s vertical envelopment: attacking from bottom to top instead of heliborne top to bottom.

Tunnels not only provide the Hamas baby-slashers the tactical advantage of popping up from behind, they also provide the only surefire logistics system resistant to Israeli airstrikes.

Given the Israeli casualties that could result from Hamas’ pop-up tactics along an estimated 500 kilometers of tunnels, perhaps some out-of-the-box thinking is in order.

As the progenitor of the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual), a prototype information warfare organization for the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, I called some of my former charges who are superb at television intelligence and cinematic analysis to determine whether they had similar impressions from the Hamas-generated propaganda video of the “Gaza Metro” tunnel system.

They had.

They agreed the tunnels all had a mix of cables — electric, coaxial and telephone — running along the walls. And given that Hamas tunnels are present in both Egyptian and Israeli territory, it is likely that they are blackout-proof because they are stealing power, internet, and telephony from hundreds of taps into the Egyptian and Israeli systems.

What better way to avoid a blackout than by tapping someone else’s grid? Ditto for water.

Thus, while the Gazans above ground are groveling in the dark, Hamas keeps humming underground.

The tunnel systems seem pretty standardized. All of them are about one meter wide and two meters tall, reinforced by concrete walls and arches where needed but unreinforced where the native clay or soft stone is stable, as evidenced by tool marks in the wall face.

The same Hamas propaganda videos also reveal vertical air ducts through which the camera sees daylight.

The oddest thing about those videos is that the black-clad throat-slashers have little or no mud on their boots, whereas U.S. tunnel rats almost always were completely covered in mud. Thus it appears there is very little water that would weaken Hamas tunnel walls.

The solution? Flood the tunnels! Hamas may have forgotten they are native to a beachfront where the Mediterranean Sea laps at the shore. It seems that the Israelis have forgotten that, too.

Hamas brags that its tunnel system sprawls over 500 kilometers in total. This means its volume would be 500,000 meters, multiplied by two meters high and one meter wide, or roughly 1 million cubic meters.

Flooding those tunnels would take an unimaginable amount of water — unimaginable, anyway, if you’re a desert dweller thinking in terms of fresh water, which is at a premium.

Not so unimaginable if you can get your hands on a Fairbanks pump that can knock out 60 cubic meters of water per second. Which means it could flood all 1 million cubic meters of Hamas tunnels in just over four and a half hours.

To the Dutch, a good chunk of whose country is below sea level, a million cubic meters of water is ho-hum. Their Fairbanks pumps move it out all day long.

But how do you find the tunnels? With stink bombs. Essentially, it’s the same idea as those high school pranks where you lobbed vials of smelly butyric acid to clear out a room. The Israelis have elevated that concept to high art in the field of riot control.

The weapon is called the Skunk. (What else?) It was developed a couple of decades ago and smells worse than rancid butter and aged dumpster scum.

K-9 teams can be trained to recognize the unique aroma, which is said to stick to humans for days and clothing for years. Spraying it into known tunnels would reveal the locations of hidden entrances, exits, and vent holes when the dogs smell it. It might take the use of every Belgian Malinois in Israel, but in the end the Israeli Defense Forces would have a current map of the Gaza Metro in detail.

And then when all of those entrances, exits, and vent holes are identified, pump in as much of the Mediterranean as needed. Game over.

Chuck de Caro was CNN's very first special assignments correspondent. Educated at Marion Military Institute and the U.S. Air Force Academy, he later served with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He has taught information warfare (SOFTWAR) at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University. He was an outside consultant for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for 25 years. A pilot since he was 17, he is currently working on a book about the World War I efforts of Fiorello La Guardia, Giulio Douhet, and Gianni Caproni, which led directly to today’s U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.