Warfare's Future Plays Out in Israel, Ukraine.

"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 fighting.

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 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.

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.

The conflict 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.

Hamas used drones to drop grenades on Israel's observation towers and remotely operated machine guns.

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.

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.

Responding to small, inexpensive drones is vexing for large militaries because defending against them requires expensive new equipment.

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." [1]

 

To the Lithuanian soldiers driving on our roads with terribly smoky fighting machines:  

Dear ones, even the kids with cheap commercial drones will burn you in those iron piles. Learn to dig trenches better and hide in the bushes one by one. Your techniques are already obsolete.

1. World News: Warfare's Future Plays Out in Israel, Ukraine. Michaels, Daniel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Oct 2023: A.9.