Technical Predictions, Part 2

Open source warfare, small hat tribe edition

In Part 1, I explained why the future of war in Israel is in a Hegelian synthesis of the poorly functioning people’s army that was the IDF until the 1990s and the poorly functioning professional army that has been the IDF since then, in the form of local militias. To recap: the IDF is now focused on careers, pensions, insane social justice experiments (“ladies can be tankers, too!”) and very complicated, high tech systems that don’t actually translate into successful offense or defense. In short, it’s like Oracle with guns. This system is incapable of winning wars, taking initiative or even maintaining its existing weapons stockpiles. But someone’s got to do all this stuff, otherwise we might as well all pack it in and leave for Williamsburg or San Francisco. Therefore, I argue that our future is local militias working on a voluntary basis and seizing initiative, combined with a large, dysfunctional high tech IDF on the defensive.

Since I wrote Part 1, events have only borne out my assessment of the IDF. We found out that Unit 8200, our signals intelligence agency, stopped intercepting Hamas tactical communications a year ago, since what could Hamas possibly be saying that would be of interest? Not only that, but civilians in the Northern Negev formed their own volunteer signals intelligence organization, intercepted Hamas preparations for an attack and accurately analyzed them. The response of the IDF was to dismiss them and then restrict their ability to collect intelligence!

From Haaretz

At the same time, we’ve seen our enemies use inexpensive open source and commercial-off-the-shelf technology to knock out expensive American and Israeli technology. October 7th involved FPV drones bought on Ali Express dropping antitank grenades on multimillion dollar Merkava tanks and knocking them out. Recently, the Iranians knocked out an American Predator drone with a suicide drone built using off the shelf hobbyist tech.

Source

None of this is new. John Robb and others have been predicting it for two decades now. In fact, his bazaar of violence is remarkable in that it’s mostly failed to appear in first world countries, and failed to cause lasting disruptions to the extremely efficient and resilient global economy. Henry Okah is sitting in African jail and will be for decades, Turkish Kurdistan has failed to gain autonomy, the Islamic State was crushed, etcetera. Militias have failed to win when facing modern nation states, even leveraging the most advanced off the shelf and open source technology. In fact, as technology has advanced, the gap in power between modern nation states and insurgents has increased; where Lehi and Etzel were able to oppose the British Empire successfully with only modest support from overseas, their modern day Muslim equivalents can only fight completely dysfunctional nation states like Syria pre-Russian intervention. Even the most advanced insurgency in modern times, the Tamil Tigers, were absolutely crushed by the Sri Lankan state once the latter got its act together.

Opposition to modern nation states being a non-starter for irregular forces, the role of auxiliary suits them much better. That is to say, rather than being an insurgency fighting the decaying nation state, the irregulars are much better off being militias and filling in the gaps where the state is weak or uninterested.

State organizations tend towards laziness and failure due to internal incentive structures. Local informal volunteer-based organizations with skin in the game can build capacity, as long as they make no demands of the state organizations and help their leadership look good in front of the higher ups.

Community security teams

The militias of Israel will likely emerge in part from the local volunteer security teams. These are unpaid groups providing security to their communities. They have small arms and armor, as well as some mobility and communications equipment. They are led by community security coordinators making a modest salary, and in constant conflict with their overseeing body, the Defense Ministry, which sees them as an unwelcome burden. On October 7th, the local volunteer security teams in the Gaza Envelope found themselves fighting off dozens and hundreds of Hamas commandos, and some did so successfully.

Since the security coordinators are civilians, they are less hampered by protocol and procedure than the regular military is. Since they live in the communities which they defend, they are motivated to go above and beyond the minimum requirements. Even before the war, I’ve seen them working with volunteer drone pilots and dog handlers, more or less effectively, but at least creatively. Since the beginning of the war, I’ve seen local security elements using the local mechanic to fabricate machine gun mounts on their pickup trucks.

If the initiative to move community defense teams to the authority of the National Security Ministry is successful, they may well form the core of a future militia movement, freeing the military to focus on more important or interesting tasks than providing local security.

Logistics and manufacturing

As long as the IDF and the Israeli security system maintain a relative monopoly on violence, all logistics and manufacturing must be dual purpose. That is to say, militias can’t build their own attack drones, missiles and mortars, but they must develop the capabilities to do so by acquiring access to production capacity which, in a time of systemic failure, can seamlessly transition to producing offensive weapons.

Fortunately, more and more capacity is being pushed down to the ground level; one no longer requires a hundred million dollar factory to produce small arms and even antitank weaponry. Desktop manufacturing tools and skills are becoming more prevalent across Israeli society. For instance, four years ago, I met a rabbi in Beit Shemesh who had dedicated an entire floor in an apartment building he’d built to a 3D printing lab. Networking distributed production capability from desktop manufacturing to small factories will allow emerging militias access to any necessary technological capacity.

Funding is a separate consideration. Due to the nature of militias, they are largely volunteer funded and much more effective than the governmental bureaucracies in terms of value delivered per shekel. The Field Security Operational Monitor guys spent a few thousand on equipment to run an operation which would have cost many millions if it had been conducted by Unit 8200. Nonetheless, some level of funding is necessary. This money will likely be raised from contributions by private donors and businesses supporting their local security efforts.

Intelligence gathering and analysis

There are already widespread community intelligence gathering and analysis efforts, as discussed above. OSINT, SIGINT and HUMINT are being gathered and processed by volunteer groups. As it becomes increasingly obvious that the IDF and security apparatus are incapable and unwilling to cover everything that needs to be covered, more volunteers will join these efforts.

Processed intelligence needs to be routed where it is effective in informing decision makers in time for the necessary actions to be taken. The traditional intelligence and law enforcement communities have solved this problem through the creation of fusion centers, and there are fusion centers organically emerging from the community intelligence gathering efforts in Israel. As militias gain the ability to take initiative and act preemptively on intelligence, there will be a natural collaboration established between them and the fusion centers.

Engineering

Combat engineering largely amounts to creating and reducing battlefield obstacles in order to control the enemy’s movement. Irregular forces do not have the privilege of the expensive combat engineering equipment and vehicles of the regular military. Fortunately, in a low intensity warfare environment, civilian earthmoving equipment is usually sufficient for combat engineering tasks. In fact, Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are already using such equipment to close off high speed avenues of approach to potential terrorists or clear access roads for themselves to avoid having to move through high threat areas. As militias develop, they will increasingly leverage this available capacity to solve their battlefield tasks. Explosives will not be relevant to the situation as long as the GOI maintains overall control of the situation, and it’s unlikely that their synthesis/recovery from existing munitions will play a major part in events until a sustained systemic failure occurs.

Fieldcraft and strike units

Community security teams are not currently trained or organized to project force outside the immediate surrounding of Jewish communities. Their members are, on average, older family men with a focus on defending their community. Small units of young men will naturally form to seize the initiative and conduct offensive missions: reconnaissance, patrols, raids and ambushes. They will require training in fieldcraft and tactics. This will come from retired IDF special unit veterans volunteering their time, and is already taking place to some degree.

Psychological warfare

Psychological warfare involves manipulating enemy perceptions in order to maximize the effectiveness of one’s own actions and disrupt enemy initiatives and reactions. The Middle East, with its culture of rumors, posturing, exaggerations and lies, is a natural substrate for psychological warfare. Psychological warfare is the flip side of intelligence, and will naturally grow out of the fusion centers described above, as they become more effective and increase their reach.

Systemic integration

The emergence of the Israeli militia ecosystem described above will be a more or less natural, organic process, promoted by Arab violence and terror on one hand and the continued sclerotic breakdown of the IDF and security apparatus’ ability to repress that violence. Natural processes can be accelerated by catalysts which bring their reagents into proximity. In counterinsurgency, these catalysts are called “facilitators”, but I prefer the term “integrators”.

Integrators must have a wide-ranging background, personal charisma, dedication and patience to bring all the disparate moving parts together. The required personality type is not that of the type-A hard charging leader, but rather that of an omega man, an outsider who is comfortable with many different groups but not a member of any of them.

Integrators will be key personnel who have the vision and networking abilities to combine the various people and resources to speed up the emergence of a robust militia network which will be able to step in as the ossified Israeli security system fails, in order to prevent catastrophe for the Jews of Israel.