Ukraine War Shows Israel Tech Weapons Support, Dont Replace Traditional Ones

Israel's digital Maginot Line failed miserably to pause, let alone stop Hamas's asymmetric attack. 

And what Israeli forces are now seeing as they invade Gaza is further proof  that technology is not a panacea. It is, at best, a supplement to the traditional weapons, wielded by foot soldiers, that win wars. JL 

Daniel Michaels reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The fusion of inexpensive, high-tech weapons and low-tech brute force that Palestinian militant group Hamas used to attack Israel on Oct. 7 echoed tactics used on the battlefields of Ukraine that could transform the future of warfare. The war in Ukraine has seen commercial and consumer technologies mix with traditional military explosives. Ukraine has shown that you need sophisticated, multilayered defenses." Israel has developed antidrone technology, covering a majority of mass-market drones. (But) unusual drones or ones modified to thwart countermeasures can evade those defenses. “It’s a constant competition between measures and countermeasures.”

The fusion of inexpensive, high-tech weapons and low-tech brute force that Palestinian militant group Hamas used to attack Israel on Oct. 7 echoed tactics used on the battlefields of Ukraine that could transform the future of warfare.

Hamas blasted holes in border fencing using explosives and at least one commandeered construction vehicle. But before smashing its way into Israeli territory, Hamas used pinpoint drone attacks in an effort to blind sophisticated surveillance systems and cripple local military command-and-control capabilities.

Israel has spent years and billions of dollars building border barriers, monitored by guard towers bristling with electronic sensors and weaponry. These automated sentries can identify and shoot at land and air threats, including helicopters and large drones, people familiar with the systems said.

Hamas boasted in videos posted on social media that it used small and relatively slow commercially available drones, modified to carry explosives, to knock out Israel’s security systems.

The strikes, using off-the-shelf equipment, are similar to those by Ukrainian forces who use improvised drone-bombers to hit Russian troops. The inexpensive makeshift weaponry has defeated advanced air-defense systems and destroyed costly tanks and other equipment.

Ukraine’s hybrid devices, which Russian forces have since copied, built on developments in other conflicts. Most of those fights involved what strategists call asymmetric warfare, where one side has much greater firepower than the other. 

A military drone flew last month near the Israel-Gaza border, before the current conflict erupted. PHOTO: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS

Islamic State is widely considered to have been the first group to drop explosives from commercial drones in a conflict, in Syria around 2016. The innovation, which evolved from improvised explosive devices used on the ground, was soon replicated by other nonstate actors, from antigovernment rebels in Myanmar and the Philippines to Mexican drug cartels.

“With each conflict you see iterations of the technology,” said Mike Monnik, chief executive of DroneSec, an advisory firm specialized in drone-threat intelligence. He said Hamas’s attack showed greater sophistication and operational capability than its past use of drones had.

The war in Ukraine has also seen commercial and consumer technologies mix with traditional military explosives. Ukrainian troops, and more recently Russian forces, have used off-the-shelf drones to improve the targeting of decades-old artillery. Drones have dropped grenades and other weapons on trenches, depots and even individual soldiers.

 

Ukrainian forces have also used drones to carry supplies to troops in trenches that are little different from those dug in World War I. In a more innovative application of technology, Ukrainian forces have used software similar to ride-hailing apps to gather old-fashioned local intelligence from civilians and soldiers, allowing leaders to better target traditional attacks. 

Hamas in its attacks used drones to drop grenades on Israel’s observation towers and remotely operated machine guns. One video, released by Hamas less than two hours after the initial attack began and independently verified by The Wall Street Journal, showed a drone flying over a tower along the Gaza fence and dropping a bomb on an unmanned machine gun.

The attack is an embarrassment for Israel, which has led the world in developing sophisticated drones and antidrone technologies. The ability of Hamas to hit towers that were designed to defend against airborne incursions is likely to be a focus of extensive analysis in Israel, the U.S. and among other allies, particularly since the threat from commercial drones was already evident.

But the attack also drives home the difficulty of defending against such strikes. Most existing air-defense systems are designed to spot large, fast and higher-altitude threats approaching from far away. Small commercial drones like the quadcopters used by Hamas can hug the ground until near a target, have a radar signature too small for detection by most existing arrays, and can pop up at distances too short for sensors to spot them.

“Even if you know about the threat, you still need to prepare for it,” said Samuel Bendett, an expert in technology and national security at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank. “Ukraine has shown that you need sophisticated, multilayered defenses to stop these—you still don’t down them all.”

Ukrainian troops have been rigging drones to carry explosives in their fight against Russian forces. PHOTO: BRAM JANSSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Responding to small, inexpensive drones is vexing for large militaries because defending against them requires expensive new equipment. Governments are struggling to figure out how to avoid countering airborne threats that can cost hundreds of dollars with countermeasures that cost millions of dollars. Israel and the U.S. are already tackling the problem with missile-defense systems.

Israel has developed a lot of antidrone technology, covering a majority of mass-market drones, said Monnik of DroneSec. Unusual drones or ones modified to thwart countermeasures can likely evade those defenses, he said.

“It’s a constant competition between measures and countermeasures,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. 

U.S. forces in Iraq, responding to Islamic State drones during a fight over the city of Mosul almost a decade ago, first used electronic jamming, but it proved indiscriminate and interfered with Iraqi and even U.S. communications, Pettyjohn said. Instead, the U.S. destroyed the factories where ISIS was producing the drones. 

Today, drone production and modification is too widespread for militaries to effectively target. Knowledge of how to create lethal drones is shared in online tutorials and components are easily smuggled because many have multiple uses or don’t resemble weapons parts.

Groups like militant organizations and drug cartels also move much faster than national militaries, which have long acquisition cycles, often involving protracted threat assessments and strategic analyses.

“These types of nonstate actors, which operate at a very tactical level, just acquire technology and don’t have an acquisition cycle,” said Bendett.

They also learn quickly. Monnik said the attack was the first time DroneSec had seen Hamas use multi-rotor drones to drop munitions using payload-release devices, employ munitions modified with 3-D printed stabilization fins and record video from a drone for propaganda.

“This certainly shows an increase in their capability”—and one that easily could have come from online tutorials, he said.