Back To The Future
What if we could go back to October 6th and change everything?
If you wish you could go back to the day before the Simchat Torah massacre, know that you’re not alone. Our politicians and generals also want to go back, and they are getting what they want. The difference is that you presumably want to go back to prevent the disaster, whereas they want to go back in order to do the exact same things as last time. In order to finally achieve the Israeli dream, where the Arabs police themselves and we are free to eat yummy hummus in Damascus, our leaders are doing everything possible to set us up for the next catastrophic attack.
This sounds very panicky and similar to something one of our many amateur Alex Jones imitator hummus eaters might say. (By the way, I’m still waiting for our real estate prices to collapse as mRNA zombie prion turbocancer takes out the 70% of Israelis who got the coronavaccines-I was assured that this would happen within a year, four years ago.) But consider the facts: Israel has been arming a Gazan militia led by a Bedouin drug dealer for months.
Also, Israel has apparently gotten onboard with the legitimation of the Jabhat Al Nusra Syrian regime, and is handing over border areas to its armed forces (who have made an extra-binding promise on Mohammed’s honor not to bring anything heavier than small arms there.
Look, surely, it’s not so bad. Our military leaders can definitely outthink the enemy. Sure, Hamas got one over on them, but that was a random, once-in-a-lifetime thing. Our generals are deep philosophers, conversant with the heritage not only of 4000 years of military history but of all human thought itself, from the most ancient to the cutting edge, and…
Israeli military leadership, turning the Breakfast Question itself into Schroedinger’s Cat. “How would you feel if Hamas had not been eliminated?” “Why are you asking me that? Hamas has been eliminated.” “Well, then, how would you feel if Hamas had not been eliminated?” “Why are you asking me that? Hamas was not eliminated.” Truly Deleuzian discourse for the modern battlefield!
Okay, it won’t have been the first war where some of our senior leaders were not exactly on point, mentally speaking (though at least Rabin’s insanity was not organizationally induced). But surely our technological superiority will buy us some breathing room during the beginning of the war, as we get things worked out and competent leaders take initiative. Right?
Unfortunately not. Wherever all that military budget money went, it was not towards equipping the IDF’s fighters with the equipment and training needed to be ahead of the game on the 21st century battlefield. This is especially clear in two critical areas: radios and drones.
Secure, reliable communications are the foundation of modern warfare. Without them, battlefield awareness and dominance are impossible. Comms are the foundation of fire and maneuver. Insecure communications will be exploited by the enemy to blunt the effectiveness of fire and maneuver, to gain real time awareness into your disposition and intent-for example, the USAF’s bombing campaign against North Vietnamese forces in Laos and Cambodia was blunted by the early warning provided by NVA electronic intelligence collectors. Today’s IDF ground units widely use unencrypted, single channel tactical FM radio and push-to-talk commercial radio sets, which anyone with an AR8200 scanner can listen in on for a comprehensive view of our forces and their intent. A backup channel is Whatsapp, reliant on connectivity to easily disrupted cellular networks. Commercial solutions are at a very basic level: while Somalia and the Congo have Starlink access, Israel still doesn’t.
If the radio situation is bad, the drone situation is worse. In the last decade and a half, drones have gone from an expensive and complicated platform for bespoke surveillance and national-level decapitation strikes to a ubiquitous reconnaissance tool to the premier weapon on the battlefield. 70-80% of casualties in the Ukraine are caused by drones. A $300 dollar FPV drone with an RPG warhead ziptied to it can take out a tank or a fire team of soldiers. Fiberoptic control cables make drones unjammable and allow them to fly up to 40 kilometers away. The impact in terms of lethality can be compared to that of firearms on the medieval battlefield. Large, deep attacks are a thing of the past. Even short range logistics packages are roboticized, because anything that can be seen is killed. The cost effectiveness of today’s drones is unparalleled. Autonomous deployment and targeting software will represent yet another magnitude of a breakthrough.
In this environment, the IDF’s level of battlefield drone usage is approximately that of the US military 10 years ago. Drone integration, latitude for use and sophistication is unimpressive. Countermeasures to enemy drones deployed at a scale and quality comparable to those in the Ukraine are nonexistent at the squad, platoon and company level.
Our Syrian neighbors are neither stupid nor inexperienced, and won’t fail to take advantage of these vulnerabilities in the next war. The last one showed that even a brigade-sized force of very poor quality infantry-the Nukba troops could not read maps, employ drones tactically or combine fire and maneuver effectively, to the extent that community defense squads were able to fight off their companies-can inflict operational defeat. A surprise attack by several divisions’ worth of Syrian jihadists, with massed FPV drones and effective off-the-shelf SIGINT and electronic warfare tools, threatens strategic defeat, especially if combined with an attack from Gaza or Egypt.
Fortunately, technology which 20 years ago was used only by American military units is now cheaply available off the shelf; in addition, Israel has excellent electrical engineers and modern manufacturing equipment, from the desktop to the industrial level. This is more than enough to build serious technical communications and drone capacity from the bottom up. While it’s unlikely that the IDF’s senior leadership would take initiative or refrain from strangling it, for reasons seen above, there are now over 1,000 community defense teams with a high degree of independence. Many of their members rotate to the battlefield as they are called up to miluim on a regular basis. This presents an opportunity for fielding the technology and providing training in its employment, and a rapid path to its ubiquitous use. All it would take would be a workspace, a small budget and a few dedicated personnel.
What if you could go back to October 6th and change everything?
Depressing.
The problem will always be willpower. An army without vision and willpower is an army that will waste it's ammo, lose it's surprise, purchase half-assed products, fail to maintain them, and so on.
When the IDF had it, we kicked enough ass to crawl out of the darkness. When these same ISIS thugs you worry about had vision, it carried them against the entire neighborhood and could only be deterred by truly unbeatable NATO air bombardment (which big picture still could be waited out).
Willpower and vision are a component in all choices that carry armies forward. Or backward if they should so choose.