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Welcome to Rewind & Reconnoiter. Each week, we’ll ask one of our authors to look back at an article they’ve written for War on the Rocks in light of a current news event. Did their argument hold up? Read more below to find out.***In 2015, David Betz wrote “Peering into the Past and Future of Urban Warfare in Israel‘” for War on the Rocks, in which he described a visit to the Israel Defense Force’s urban training facility at Tze’elim and what it revealed about Israel’s approach to urban warfare. As Israel’s ground campaign in Gaza unfolds, we asked him to look back on his article and how Israel’s urban warfare strategy has – or hasn’t – changed in the years since. Read more below.Image via the Israel Defense ForcesIn your piece, you argued that “The mainstream of the conduct of warfare is indeed moving into the urban environment because increasingly that’s what typifies the face of the planet,” and that armies should train accordingly. Do you think this call to action has been taken up in the eight years since you wrote this piece? I think to a large degree armies have responded to arguments like mine, and many others have made it too, that they ought to address the challenges of urban warfare more seriously and more creatively than they had been doing.The British army, for instance, had excellent urban training facilities in the 1980s — reasonably large and very well designed for what they were supposed to do: immerse troops and commanders in a convincing simulacrum of a modern built-up area. They were neglected for a long while through the 1990s to 2000s but more recently have been upgraded and are now pretty good. France has the large and excellent Centre D’entraînement Aux Actions En Zone Urbaine (CENZUB), which is regularly used by allied forces,