John Spencer

John W. Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, researcher of urban warfare, and author. He currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point. He is a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.

He has commented on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His comments on the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip and denial of the Gaza genocide have been controversial.

Military career Spencer enlisted in the United States Army as a private, immediately after graduating from high school at the age of 17, eventually reaching the rank of Sergeant first class, until receiving commission; he retired from active service with the rank of major.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he started giving advice on "how to resist the Russian invasions" through Twitter. This culminated in him releasing "The Mini-Manual for the Urban Defender: A Guide to the Strategies and Tactics of Defending a City", which was translated into more than 10 languages.

Opinions on the Gaza war

Civilian to combatant casualty ratio Spencer praised Israel's ratio of civilian casualties in Gaza as "historically low for modern warfare," citing IDF claims that 50-60% of Gazans killed were civilians and previous estimates of 80-90% of casualties in modern conflicts being civilians. Spencer's claims were echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,

However, Professor Michael Spagat of the University of London wrote in August 2025 that the statistics Spencer cites, and his conclusions, are both false. Spagat cites academic analysis showing that the idea that 80-90% of casualties in war are civilians is a myth. Spencer said the following month in a Newsweek article that "Israel has not created a gold standard in civilian harm mitigation in war. That [would imply] there is a standard in civilian casualties in war that is acceptable or not acceptable". Spencer further asserted that the IDF was "taking unique precautions [...] to protect the innocent", claimed that "Israel's critics [... did not] mention the efforts of the IDF to minimize civilian casualties", and opined that Israel set a "remarkable, historic new standard" in terms of civilian safety in war zones.

In December 2023, Spencer asserted that Israeli attacks on Gaza were "proportional, very discriminate, very precise". His comments were criticized by Wes J Bryant, a former JTAC in the United States Air Force who coordinated airstrikes against ISIS. He said IDF's deliberate and continued targeting within densely populated refugee camps showed its campaign was neither discriminate nor precise. In a January 2024 Newsweek article, Spencer argued of the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip that Israel "has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war". He states that the IDF issued warnings in northern Gaza to notify civilians to evacuate before attacks began; that the IDF calls and texts nearby civilians before an attack; and that the IDF employs "roof knocking," using a small, non-destructive munition on the roof of a structure to create a noise and warn civilians to flee before attacking it—and that these are practices that no military has ever implemented before. In the March 2024 article, Spencer stated that the Israeli military has created a "new standard" consisting of a multitude of precautionary measures it has implemented during its invasion of the Gaza Strip, including giving them days or weeks to evacuate.

Larry Lewis of the Center for Naval Analyses has criticized Spencer's positions. He argues that the IDF's order for 1 million Gazans to evacuate from northern Gaza to southern Gaza in 24 hours was deemed practically impossible by experts, and that Israel attacked civilians while they were evacuating and then again once the civilians were in southern Gaza. Lewis also questions the effectiveness of communication with cell phones, given widespread destruction of Gaza's infrastructure; and that interviews with Gazans after the 2014 war showed that the effectiveness of roof knocking was mixed due to confusion among civilians caused by Israel's tactics.

Gaza genocide In December 2024, John Spencer co-authored an opinion piece with Arsen Ostrovsky in Newsweek criticizing Amnesty International's characterization of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, which they described as "no less than a blood libel." The article originally stated:To demonstrate just how utterly ludicrous Amnesty's accusation of genocide is, one only needs to see that, according to the CIA World Factbook, the population in Gaza has actually increased 2 percent in the last year. This is the very opposite of seeking to destroy, in whole or in part or in any way, a group of people.

Publications Liam Collins and John Spencer, Understanding Urban Warfare (2022; ) John Spencer, Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War (2022; )