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The Berlin Wall was in-built 1961 as a typical wire and concrete fence to make it tough for East German residents to flee to freedom within the West. By the tip of the Seventies, its fourth era already included a 127 km lengthy electrified fence, a strip of land product of sharp steel nails, a closely-packed row of watchtowers, a patrol street, an intrusion-tracking grime street, guard canine, deep trenches anti-vehicle trenches, and two layers of concrete partitions. “The fence was initially quite weak, so it was decided to place guards every few meters on top of the wall,” Dr. Avner Barnea, a former Shin Bet senior officer and lecturer on intelligence and nationwide safety, and enterprise intelligence at Bar-Ilan University, tells “Globes.” “But until they mined the area, they didn’t really succeed in preventing escapees. These low-tech solutions made all the difference. None of the authorities ever took the risk of relying on advanced technologies.”
The fence that, till October 7, separated Israel and the Gaza Strip was accomplished in December 2021, 60 years after development of the Berlin Wall started. It was supposed to guard towards a serious safety risk, however in observe it was a lot leaner than that. The fence was virtually unmanned by troopers, and relied primarily on sensors, above and under floor, surveillance cameras, and automobile patrols. And, in fact, there was no surrounding minefield.
After Operation Protective Edge in 2014 revealed that Hamas forces have been in a position to penetrate the Gaza border settlements at a number of factors through underground tunnels, it was determined in 2016 to construct a protection line targeted on this risk known as “the anti-tunnel barrier” that may change the prevailing fence. The higher part of the barrier was based mostly primarily on a fence known as the “sand clock,” which had solely proved itself in stopping unlawful immigrants on the Israel-Egypt border – the identical fence that then-US President Donald Trump enthused over, and needed to duplicate on the US southern border.
The price of the boundaries was NIS 3.5 billion, principally for the below-ground part. It was offered as a high-tech venture and as an important technological achievement that may be a further layer of safety from the Gazan risk, together with the Iron Dome. The Ministry of Defense (MOD) boasted that “the amount of concrete invested in it could pave a road from Israel to Bulgaria, and the amount of iron and steel could equal an iron bar from here to Australia”. At that point, the Ministry of Defense claimed it will be built-in into the “Smart and Lethal Border” venture that was being examined alongside the northern border of the Gaza Strip which, the Ministry of Defense acknowledged, included cellular robots and navy drones for finishing up protection missions, with out endangering troopers’ lives.
At the time of the completion of the fence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then within the opposition, referred primarily to the below-ground facet, saying that “Any time Hamas terrorists have tried to penetrate the border settlements through the tunnels, they were terminated underground. The below-ground barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip has already saved many lives.” Then-Minister of Defense Benny Gantz mentioned, “The barrier, which is a superior initial technological and inventive project that sets an iron wall, sensors and concrete between it and the residents of the south. It provides a sense of personal security that will allow this beautiful region to continue to grow.”
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“The concept underlying the construction of an advanced technology fence relates to the Second Lebanon War, when Hezbollah surmounted a high fence with a ladder,” says Yehoshua Kalisky , senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). “This was the reference scenario. There was no thought that they would use aircraft here to cross it or that they would come with a heavy machinery, and simply breach it.”
The phantasm of superiority
On the morning of Saturday, October 7, the above-ground part of the barrier turned out to be utterly insubstantial, as was its basic idea of protection. Using drones simply bought on the Internet, Hamas disabled each the cameras transmitting pictures to regulate room displays in actual time, and the (See and Fire) lengthy distance stationary distant managed weapon stations (RCWS). There had been a second line of protection, commentary balloons, however for unknown causes, all three had stopped working some weeks earlier than the assault, and repairs have been postponed till “after the holidays.”
Israel’s drone warfare fleet, which is able to jamming alerts of a hostile drone, and the assault drone fleet, recognized for warfare towards incendiary balloons, additionally didn’t work for unknown causes, and dozens of Hamas drones operated with out interruption. The IDF’s Iron Beam excessive vitality laser (HEL) interception system, which was developed for such circumstances, amongst different issues, has not but entered into operational exercise after a few years of improvement. All allowed the Hamas terrorists to shortly attain the IDF bases alongside the Gaza border, disable the data and communications know-how (ICT) techniques, neutralizing the flexibility to name reinforcements with out arousing a lot suspicion at IDF Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Above all there was a way of safety and perception in know-how and the delicate barrier’s means to stop any type of intrusion. With the fence as safety, manned deployment for Gaza border settlements was cancelled, (in any case, these had been diminished instantly after Operation Protective Edge), models deployed within the space have been diminished, changed with cameras and different digital means.
“When relying on technology, the expectation is that it will warn of the dangers and threats,” Barnea says. “When the thinking is that you don’t need soldiers because there are monitors, you expect in advance that you will receive the warning about the threat via the technological means and no one imagines a situation in which the observation array would be neutralized. On the contrary, it is seen as invulnerable. The problem begins when the enemy is also exposed to these means: RCWS are great, they are important and cost millions, but they are visible to everyone, and everyone knows where they are. Once you begin believing that the fence will stop all the relevant threats, you think even half a battalion on standby is enough. Technology greatly influences our way of thinking and is seen as the answer to everything – only no one ever asks themselves what the vulnerabilities are, and what is the backup plan for the doomsday scenario when the technology layer collapses.”
Barnea compares Israel’s sense of technological superiority with US exercise through the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1968. “The Americans relied on massive aerial bombardment with precision bombs and napalm bombs that burned huge areas, and advocated the “scorched earth” concept. They convinced themselves that the Vietcong could not withstand it. In practice, the North Vietnamese army studied the American activity. It dug tunnels, moved equipment and people between bombings, eventually enabling it to reach the important bases in the south of the country, and overwhelm the Americans. In fact, the US military so believed in the damage it was causing that they reported a far greater number of casualties on the other side than the actual number, which in turn created an illusion of victory. They told themselves, we have B-52 bombers, there’s no way we can’t win.”
Technological sophistication and the large funding in intelligence means have drastically elevated the IDF’s visible intelligence gathering capabilities, in line with former IDF Intelligence Directorate head General (ret.) Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash. “I’m sure it doesn’t come at the expense of human sources, but as time goes by, gathering visual intelligence is easier than human sources and they bring better results. It’s hard to bring in a Palestinian ‘Ashraf Marwan,’ the agent who passed the information to Israel before the Egyptian attack in 1973. It’s a problem because the human source is essential to provide an interpretation of the rest of the information that’s received, and to make decisions. Golda knew who Marwan was and expected to hear what he would say about the Egyptian deployment in the south.” At the identical time, in line with “The New York Times” a yr earlier than the assault, the IDF stopped monitoring Hamas’ radio communications final yr. The US had put inventory in Israeli intelligence relating to Hamas in recent times and hadn’t monitored it independently.
The human issue
The technological idea is, in fact, not restricted to the border fence, or to intelligence, and isn’t just a product of Operation Protective Edge. For years, the IDF has been praising the ethos of a small and sensible military, implicitly if not explicitly. In current years, it has publicized numerous technological initiatives and current itself as a high-tech military: establishing a technological division, known as Shiloh, to coordinate the event of applied sciences for all branches of the military, and with the Directorate of Defense Research & Development (IMOD DDR&D or MAFAT). Shiloh, which is at the moment subordinate to the Ministry of Defense, was established following State Comptroller experiences in regards to the lack of coordination and synchronization between the Ministry of Defense and the IDF models; and lead a brand new border protection idea based mostly on sensors and different applied sciences for gathering intelligence and thwarting infiltration; strengthening the Air Force within the type of further plane and armaments; and strengthening the operational finish of the common entrance models.
All this, whereas on the identical time closing down armored battalions and consolidating helicopter squadrons. Ground power technological capabilities have been additionally addressed, resembling improved coordination between the infantry and air forces in air-to-ground actions, or figuring out terrorists and weapons in an city setting. However, there’s a downside on the outset, says, Prof. Eviatar Matania of Tel Aviv University School of Political Sciences, Government and International Affairs, and founder and first director basic of the Israel National Cyber Directorate: a big hole between the know-how and the officers anticipated to implement it as a part of the safety idea.
Matania explains that the IDF has all the time advocated technological development as a part of an idea that values high quality over amount. “This existed even throughout [Israel’s first Prime Minster David] Ben-Gurion’s time, as a result of it was clear that we couldn’t defeat the enemy when it comes to amount, and it additionally built-in effectively with saving human lives – an essential pillar within the safety idea – however at the moment, innovation was expressed in tactical points. After the Yom Kippur War, Israel pulled strongly within the route of constructing navy technological superiority, and this built-in effectively with the Israeli economic system, which was progressively opening as much as the world, and the pc revolution.
This effort bore fruit as early as 1982, after we proved to the entire world that we might destroy a lot of the Syrian surface-to-air missile array utilizing precision-guided weaponry. Israel’s safety idea was up to date by Dan Meridor and Lt. Col. Ron Eldadi, with the addition of a fourth part, protection, to the three parts of Israel’s conventional nationwide safety doctrine as decided by Ben-Gurion: deterrence, warning, and decisive victory, resulting in the event of techniques such because the Iron Dome, and David’s Sling (previously known as Magic Wand).”
But, emphasizes Matania, “The IDF senior officers aren’t technologically savvy as a whole, some see these systems as black boxes, and don’t always understand their advantages and disadvantages. At the West Point or Annapolis military academies, it’s customary to teach technological subjects as well, because they understand that the military profession today requires a basic understanding of the field. The correct way to integrate technology with security is to implement it as part of an operational concept, not as a single component, and to assume that it is not perfect, but has vulnerabilities, and may suffer from system failures. Therefore, such systems always need what’s known as ‘redundancy’, i.e. backup systems, to make sure there isn’t a single point of vulnerability through which everything could collapse. The Air Force, for example, has several different models of aircraft just for this. Every plane also has several systems to back it up.”
The Iron Dome paradox
Perhaps greater than the rest, the Iron Dome system is consultant because the technological response to the risk from Gaza. Matania explains, “The Iron Dome was built with the strategic vision of giving decision-makers breathing room, to allow them not to react immediately to the rockets, but to have the flexibility to react at the right time, and in the right place, in a range of ways. But some say its success was paradoxical. Iron Dome was so successful it not only supported the decision-making process but fundamentally changed it. Up until October 7, it served as a very successful plaster to threats to a sovereign state, because what legitimacy would a state leader have for going to war when no citizens were harmed?”
Brigadier General Eran Ortal, till not too long ago the commander of The Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, a navy analysis middle subordinate to the Operations Directorate, additionally believes that numerous technological measures such because the Iron Dome, and the barrier, influenced decision-making in Israel. In his estimation, these helped the political echelon conduct a coverage of navy restraint in the direction of the Gaza Strip, which in flip allowed Hamas to strengthen and achieve offensive capabilities.
In an article 5 years in the past, Ortal, at the moment in lively navy service an unavailable for interview, wrote, “Israeli restraint as regards proactive thwarting of offensive capabilities in the Gaza Strip stems from a clear Israeli strategy that strives to reduce the influence of the enemy on the current routine of life in Israel, even at the price of worsening of the threat in the future.” Ortal identified that this coverage was pure and that “a Western nation cannot lead its life in an endless state of emergency. But alongside the understanding of the need for a containment policy, it must be recognized that the risks are high, as evidenced by the steeply worsening intensity of conflicts between Israel and the terrorist organizations in Gaza.”
According to Ortal, in current many years, Hamas and Hezbollah developed ballistic missiles and terror tunnels in response to Israeli coverage that sought minimal friction with the enemy by way of separation and withdrawal from the safety zone in southern Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip. Ortal factors out that between Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Israel considerably diminished focused countermeasures towards terrorist operatives, and none targeted on Hamas operatives. According to his evaluation, this was as a result of, previous to the Iron Dome coming into use in 2011, essentially the most harmful risk posed by Gaza developed within the interval previous Operation Protective Edge. The understandings that Israel reached with Hamas in 2012 have been made “to stop the fighting”, Ortal says, and to get life again to regular as shortly as potential. This, after air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the primary time for the reason that Yom Kippur War, and the training system shut down for greater than per week.
Even after Iron Dome, Israel discovered it tough to face up towards the numerous disruption of day by day life on the house entrance. “Despite the clear threat posed by Gaza, the decision makers preferred to avoid a policy that would mean returning a large part of the country’s population to the reality of air raids and disrupted daily routines. The bottom line: the Iron Dome did not change the essential strategic situation; as firepower from the Gaza Strip developed, so did the terrorist organizations’ ability to control daily life in Israel’s hinterland, hold it hostage, and restrain Israel from taking proactive measures against them.”
“Why didn’t the relative success of the Iron Dome translate into the even more important strategic achievement of restoring Israel’s freedom of action against Hamas in the Strip?” asks Ortal rhetorically, and names a number of elements. “The first, like any other operational system, Iron Dome is also not perfect. The enemy studies it and develops its own challenges against it, and the decision makers recognized the fact that the State of Israel is not hermetically protected. Second, the enormous cost involved in deploying and operating [Iron Dome] batteries significantly impedes a policy based on continuous rounds of violence. Thirdly, as long as the rockets are intercepted in the skies over Israel, and not the skies over Gaza, the Israeli home front is forced to experience sirens, security rooms and shelters, and disrupted routine living. In other words, even the complete success of the Iron Dome left daily life on the home front in the hands of the terrorist organizations.”
In 2018, Ortal wrote about “the barrier” that, “it would be wrong to assume it will turn out to be more immune than its predecessors. The longer as we delay cutting the direct connection between the Hamas rockets and those of our other enemies, who make extensive use of this method of operation, and the idea of attacking our territory, the longer we will be condemned to watch from the sidelines and look at their constant enhancement.”
A strategic shock
In the months main as much as October 7, the previous head of the Planning Division, Major General (Res.) Giora Eiland, held a sequence of lectures for senior officers on the explanations for the strategic shock that fell on the IDF within the Yom Kippur War. “Not one of the officers imagined that 50 years after that mistake, it would repeat itself in exactly the same way,” he tells Globes.
The strategic shock that hit the State of Israel about 4 weeks in the past bears comparable traits to the Japanese assault on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941; to the Argentine shock assault on Britain’s Falkland Islands in 1982; the Al-Qaeda assault on the United States on September 11, 2001; and to the unfold of ISIS all through the Middle East in 2014.
In truth, Barnea claims, regardless of the technological progress and class, intelligence officers are questioning whether or not there actually is a pattern in the direction of enchancment of early detection and thwarting of strategic threats. A complete research carried out on intelligence failures within the nationwide enviornment, from the autumn of the Iron Curtain in 1989 to 2010, confirmed no enchancment in offering or thwarting warnings about strategic surprises, even when the technique of gathering data had improved. Four years after signing the research, former US President Barack Obama admitted that US intelligence had not appropriately assessed the severity of the specter of giant elements of Iraq and Syria being occupied by ISIS.
“No matter how technologically advanced your army or how effective your intelligence gathering system, identifying strategic surprises is a human process that depends on analyzing what is called, in the intelligence community, ‘weak signals,'” Barnea says. “These are pieces of relevant information that have been conveyed to the organization, but because they are low-key, or because of the information overload around them, the organization fails to identify and interpret them correctly.”
On Saturday, October 7, for instance, suspicious motion in Gaza satisfied the Shin Bet head to ship a particular workforce to the southern border, however he was unable to persuade the highest IDF echelons to organize accordingly. To deal with these weak alerts, Eiland claims, one should use “scenario theory”, that means, making an allowance for eventualities which have a low chance of occurring, however with devastating outcomes ought to they happen, and the straightforward method to put together for them.
Eiland explains: “You detect sure noises on Friday evening, however conclude that the chance of an assault is low, as an example solely 10%. Those who act solely on the chance don’t think about the query: if this assault occurs – will you have the ability to stay with your self for eliminating this risk? There’s additionally a 3rd consideration, which is ease of effort: what’s the effort required of me to organize for this unlikely however harmful state of affairs? It could also be a comparatively easy effort, like waking the troops up at 4:00 am, putting them place, and placing an plane within the air for just a few hours. You don’t even want pilots – unmanned plane operators are sufficient. There’s no must mobilize reserves or convene a cupboard. Every commander is allowed to present directions to these underneath him – if that may have occurred, every part could be completely different.
“This is exactly the same type of failure that was at the basis of Israeli thinking at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War,” Eiland continues. “After information was gathered that indicated the intentions of the Egyptians and Syrians to launch an attack, they decided not to mobilize reserves because the cost was high. But why didn’t they order the regular army to get ready? They thought the chance of war breaking out was low, they thought it was an exercise, but they didn’t calculate the potential damage, they didn’t imagine how serious the extreme scenario could be.”
Published by Globes, Israel enterprise information – en.globes.co.il – on November 5, 2023.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2023.
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