by Yaakov Lappin
Israel now has unprecedented abilities with which to deal with the types of threats that have mushroomed across the region in recent years, amid upheaval and the expansion of Iran and its proxies.
The Israel Defense Forces’s Skylark Unit prepares one of its drones for flight.
IDF photo via JNS
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 798, April 16, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In the 11 years since
the Israeli strike on Syria’s nuclear-weapons production site, a quiet
revolution has taken place within the Israeli defense establishment.
Today, the IDF’s ability to detect, analyze, and use intelligence
regarding emerging threats is substantially more developed than it was
in 2007.
Israel now has unprecedented abilities with which
to deal with the types of threats that have mushroomed across the region
in recent years, amid upheaval and the expansion of Iran and its
proxies.
Outgoing chief of the Military Intelligence
Directorate, Maj.-Gen. Herzl Halevi, describes the changes this way:
“The integration between Military Intelligence and the Israeli Air Force
has created an intelligence factory for the State of Israel that has no
equivalent [in the world] in terms of the level of accuracy, the
ability to remain up to date, flexibility, and reliability. This
capability has been put to the test many times in recent years, and it
has passed with excellence.”
Halevi seems to be referring to what Israeli
defense officials have dubbed “the War Between the Wars,” which is
reportedly a low-profile Israeli campaign to detect and selectively
destroy emerging threats to Israel’s security.
Only a fraction of these alleged strikes – like
the recent attack on an airbase in central Syria containing Iranian
personnel – receive media coverage. The apparent scope of these
operations, as well as the intelligence-gathering that makes them
possible, boggles the imagination. An industry of intelligence-gatherers
and air-force operations works behind the scenes, nipping threats in
the bud and doing so without sparking major wars in the process.
‘A range of capabilities’
Brig.-Gen. (Res.) Ephraim Segoli, head of the
Airpower Research Center at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space
Strategic Studies in Herzliya, recently discussed the ways in which
these abilities have evolved.
Segoli, who commanded two combat helicopter
squadrons and was commander of the Palmahim helicopter and drone base
south of Tel Aviv, said Israel’s campaign has expanded significantly.
“In recent years, Israel struck a number of Syrian
and Iranian targets on Syrian territory,” he said. “Striking state
targets represents an exception to the attacks that have been occurring
in the context of the ongoing campaign waged by Israel since 1982
against terrorist organizations to the north and south.”
Nevertheless, Segoli added, obstacles remain.
Israel’s ongoing campaign revealed, “time and again, the gap between the
air force’s strike capabilities and the ability to create suitable
targets for attack,” he noted. But this gap will decrease, he added, due
to the development of a concept known as “area acquisition.”
Area acquisition is the ability to continuously
observe a certain area over a period of time through a range of sensors,
and then fuse all the intelligence data together into a single picture.
The air force is getting new tools, particularly
drones that can fly for long periods, to create what Segoli called “a
continuum of learning.” This continuum is complemented by improved
cooperation between the various units responsible for collecting
intelligence and creating targets.
As a result, Segoli said, the gap between the
ability to strike a target and detect it will continue to decrease: “The
air force will be able to express its potential to the maximum.”
Col. (ret.) Gabi Siboni, director of the Military
and Strategic Affairs Program at the Institute for National Security
Studies in Tel Aviv and a former chief of staff of the Golani Brigade,
agreed that the IDF’s intelligence abilities are “continuously and
consistently improving.” This has been the case since the 2007 strike on
the nuclear plant in Syria, he said. “The ability to accurately strike a
target is derived not only from an operational ability – to bring
munitions to a particular point at a particular time – but mainly from
the ability to locate the target,” he added.
Other factors making such strikes possible, Siboni
explained, include the ability to certify the likelihood of an enemy’s
being inside the target, the ability to examine different ways of
striking it, and the ability “to conduct an assessment to see what
happened after the strike and confirm that it has been destroyed.”
Siboni said Israel makes use of many ways of
gathering, analyzing, and assessing intelligence to complete such
missions. “The IDF and the State of Israel have a range of capabilities
in this area,” he said.
Yet he also cautioned that during times of war,
such precise intelligence is not always going to be available. As a
result, other key abilities will be necessary to achieve gains during
war. These include the ability to think cleverly, to get IDF branches to
work together, to have a determined command, and to be guided by
combative spirit.
This article was first published by JNS.org on April 10, 2018.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-intelligence-factory/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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