Drones again (this time on the side of Evil)
It appears that one important source of the appalling success of the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel was their use of Drones. Israel relied on a medium tech remote sensing and viewing system with video cameras and remote-controlled machine guns connected to controllers through a cell-phone like system. Hamas used drones to knock out the cameras, machine guns, and, especially, the cell-towers. This means they could enter Israel without being seen (or shot).
This shows that drones do not always favor the defense. They have much reduced the effectiveness of armor and blitz potential blitzkriegs, but they can also take out (similarly unmanned) defensive systems.
I think a key issue is that Hamas did not have older weapons which can do what the drones did, so Israel counted on the towers, assumed they were not vulnerable. I don’t think an army attempting to defend against an adversary with howitzers and mortars would count on such vulnerable systems. I think the vulnerability can be reduced by building redundant towers, so the system doesn’t fail if a few are knocked out. Also relay stations (with much lower power so many more are needed) can be mobile and, so, less vulnerable.
But the use of remote-controlled devices against remote controlled devices seems to me to have quite a promising future (unfortunately).
I tend to suspect that a more serious problem was shifting IDF resources to the West Bank to deal with trouble largely started by settlers, but I would think that (I always blame Netanyahu).
On the title, I should note that Russians have been using drones (I think responsible for almost all of their success knocking out Ukrainian armor and artillery). Russia is the aggressor and some Russians have committed extreme war crimes, so I wouldn’t really classify their effort as not evil.
Ukraine has also used drones against Russian forces with great effect.
Does anybody remember 2006, when two Israeli soldiers were captured and three killed, in uniform, on duty in the southernmost 25 miles of Lebanon — probably for the purpose of trading prisoners later.
Israel had not been occupied and turned into an outdoor prison for decades but Israel responded by carpet bombing purely civilian — occupied — southern Lebanon for 34 days; killing 1200 civilians, including 400 children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War
Anthony Bourdain was on the spot to do an episode — but had to go home.
https://offthebroiler.wordpress.com/2006/07/14/no-reservations-the-shwarma-and-shrapnel-episode/
Where is the Western media when Israel is perpetrating cold blooded genocides? Nowhere near as close as when Israel is the victim.
Well feeling like this is not genocide and the idea that it’s cold-blooded is simply preposterous. I doubt blood can get any hotter without massive numbers of self-combustion events.
What is badly needed is unbiased on the ground reporting by credible news sources. What we’re getting now is claims that thus and such happened because some people claim it. That’s not the same as combat reporting. The attack on the Gaza hospital is different; it has been verified.
Jack:
Pre-Gaza attack there were a lot of other incidents reported by news against Palestinians. They seem to have disappeared. In the end and sometime down the road, the Palestinian dead will probably be far more than the Israelis.
Perhaps a main point of asymmetric warfare is to use cheap off-the-shelf components that are not hard to come-by, against expensive, hard to develop, hard to come-by weaponry. The downside is the cheap devices are available to both/all sides. But obviously, their use can give underdogs an advantage. Doesn’t mean the underdogs are the ‘good guys’. Just ask the Viet Cong about that. Or maybe you think they were the good guys.
Who were the good guys in the 20 odd year Indochine debacle?
I dutifully served our country. After all, I was raised as a Boy Scout.
I had a friend who dutifully served as a teenager in the Civil Air Patrol, tried to get me to sign up for that. Later high-tailed it to Canada when our time came. Lived there ever since. He may have been one of the ‘good guys’.
Some of my ancestors likewise high-tailed it Up North back in the American Revolution, as Quaker pacifists I guess.
This will get even worse is my bet. It seems to me that the two most effective steps to reduce violence and specifically reduce violence against non-combatants both are controlled by Hamas much more than Israel. Return the hostages right now and also establish an internal military partition of Gaza. If you don’t want non-combatants in the way, well get them out of the way. But I suspect that keeping them in the way is actually the plan.
Oops I considered the Ukrainian success with drones to go without saying (hence the “this time”).
At last count there were 1900 Palestinian deaths reported in the Gaza Strip (so I think not counting Hamas terrorists killed in Israel). That is more than the 1300 Israeli deaths already and the reprisal is just beginning (also there are non counted dead Palestinians under rubble).
I think the key lesson of recent experience with drones is that we should stop wasting money on weapons systems with huge unit costs and extremely costly maintenance. Eric Lipton has been arguing this at the NY Times. Mark Sumner more forcefully at dailykos.com . A tenth of the money spent on a genuinely huge fleet of drones would get the job done better.
On solutions, I think Israel will gain nothing from continuing attacks on Gaza, so all benefit if they just stop.
A longer term solution is for the Gaza Strip Palestinians to overthrow Hamas. Anyone who thinks they will do that if it is clear that Hamas just brings them bombs and death has not been paying attention (it could not be clearer).
both my “solutions” are fantasies as they won’t happen. Having no useful thoughts, I shall write a post.
Having lost sight of our objective, we redoubled our efforts.
Walt Kelly
We have a densely crowded planet in many places these days.
In this setting, civilians get to be participants in combat, their lives put at risk & taken as hostages. Useful in strategies for conducting warfare. More or less impossible to exclude from ‘collateral damage.’
The days of quietly observing battles from a safe distance while enjoying a picnic lunch from one’s carriage would appear to be long behind us.
Despite repeated guv’mental exhortations to ‘Leave the civilians out of it please.’
Israel’s likely objective in this war is that an armed Hamas ceases to exist in Gaza. It probably is a little bigger that an “armable” Hamas not remain in Gaza. Achieving this could be so difficult that the goal might scale back during the war. I think it will prove to be very horrendous as it is probable Hamas judges that heavy civilian casualties are a key element of their military survival.
Russian President Putin’s remarks about Leningrad are worth thinking about. At least as I read, he only discusses behavior that Israel should be responsible for to avoid such a result, when Hamas could take steps on their own that would significantly reduce the possibility of a Leningrad-type situation. Is “Leningrad” as bad as what we possibly will actual see in the coming days? Well if you get blown up or have 500 tons of concrete bury you, you are dead and no future decisions can change that. If the only way for Israel to stop aggressively attacking is to be certain Hamas has zero access to provisions and Hamas insists on keep non-combatants in Gaza, what should be done? ‘We won’t allow food or water in because Hamas will take it. We won’t allow electricity as Hamas will use it to make their tunnel system better. Israel (and the USA?) will make a maximum effort to met your humanitarian needs, but not in Gaza for the benefit of Hamas fighters.’
Seems like one of the consequences of there being nuclear weapons ‘in the world’ is that the tacit rule ‘Never use nuclear weapons except as a last, final recourse’ crowds out practically every other rule of war. Especially the one that says ‘Leave the civilians out of it.’ But, really, that probably started more than a hundred years ago with ‘strategiic bombing’ over London in WW1.
The Birth of Strategic Bombing
But then, such bombing is just a modern form of siege warfare that has been around for thousands of years, alas.
Siege Warfare – Wikipedia