by Yoav Limor
In recent years, Israel's operation intelligence has been undergoing a revolution that could transform the way Israeli military forces operate in the field • In the next war, troops will know exactly what they face in each sector.
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Shaping
the nature of the next war. An intelligence briefing
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Photo credit: Ziv Koren
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Very quietly, far from the public eye, Israel's
operational intelligence has been undergoing a dramatic process in recent years
that could change one of the best-known truths about war completely: the one
stating that the battlefield is the kingdom of uncertainty.
This process, which is being revealed here for the first
time, could lift a significant portion of the fog that accompanies every force
that goes out to fight. Although question marks will remain, they will be
accompanied by many more solid facts, the most important of them information
about the location of the enemy and the various threats. No longer will
commanding officers go out to fight with general information, relying on shreds
of intelligence and what they see through their binoculars. The next war will be
based more significantly upon intelligence, and will allow each force to know
what it faces in every sector.
This revolution, which will be called "operational
intelligence" here, is mainly the result of the failure that accompanied the
intelligence that was provided to the fighting forces during the Second Lebanon
War. This took the form not only of meager information that was gathered about a
few hundred incriminating targets, which were all destroyed during the first two
days of the war, but also tactical intelligence that remained in the safes of
the army's Intelligence Directorate and was not given to the units that were
fighting on the ground in real time. "In the Second Lebanon War, we realized
that we were not functioning sufficiently as the army's intelligence officers,"
said Brig. Gen. Eli Ben-Meir, the army's chief intelligence officer. "We were
good intelligence officers for the political echelon, but far less good for the
army itself. The battalion commander isn't interested in what [Hezbollah leader
Hassan] Nasrallah is thinking, but in where the enemy is located."
The result was prolonged marching in place for the field
units in southern Lebanon on the one hand, and encountering blood-drenched
battles on the other. Precise intelligence would have prevented or certainly
made a dramatic change in the bloody fighting in Wadi Saluki, during which
Merkava tanks fell into an ambush of anti-tank rockets that took many soldiers'
lives. "That could never happen today," says Col. Yehuda Fuchs, commander of the
Nahal Brigade, which was one of the first to implement the new approach. "If I
got almost zero intelligence so far, now I have a wealth of information that
allows me to make the maximum use of my troops."
This process has two main stages -- before the battle and
during it. The former includes the methodical transfer of all the information
gathered on a day-to-day basis, in a Sisyphean effort and through an abundance
of intelligence methods, to the commanding officers in the field. All the
intelligence is shared with the division and brigade commanders, who can then
match their operational plans with the information that is relevant to each
area, with an emphasis on Lebanon and Gaza -- the two sectors where it is most
likely that the army will have to fight. By way of illustration, and under
restrictions that are well understood, we can say that a commander who must
fight in a particular village in southern Lebanon, for example, will receive
more than maps and current aerial photographs (rather than ones that were last
updated some years before, as happened in 2006), in color. He will also be given
pinpoint intelligence about the enemy and the various threats in the sector --
and also about the civilian population concentrations so that he may avoid
harming civilians as much as possible. "Once, I would raise my binoculars over a
village and see homes. Today I know about the variety of personnel
concentrations inside the village," Fuchs says. "That enables me not only to
plan better, but also to make better decisions in real time."
Awareness and technology
This information is not decentralized for all the forces,
but rather kept only by the senior commanders. The lower-ranking commanders
(battalion and company commanders) receive it only in general form so that they
may make their plans without risking the intelligence that was gathered. They
are given the full information only when they go out to battle, when they
receive the precise data about the specific sector where they will be fighting.
"This reduces the unknown about the battlefield significantly and allows the
troops to be prepared for the specific threats that they face," says
Ben-Meir.
The second stage of this process takes place during the
fighting. As part of it, the force that is fighting is supposed to receive,
online, relevant information about the enemy and the threats in the sector. For
example, this will enable a brigade commander to ask to zoom in on the entrance
to a village or a particular building so make sure that it contains no threats,
and receive answers from intelligence sources within a short time. At the same
time, all the information that is gathered in real time by all means of
intelligence will be routed to him so that he can increase the force's
effectiveness significantly while neutralizing as many of the threats as
possible and avoiding harm to Israeli soldiers and innocent people on the other
side.
These processes sound so obvious that one must wonder why
they had to wait until now to be used. The answer is twofold: awareness and
technology. It took the army years to free itself from outdated perceptions
about intelligence (which was always seen as the one that was supposed to serve
those in charge rather than the troops) and about the battlefield (that those
who controlled it were the troops on both sides who fought fce to face, and
intelligence was only a supporting player there).
The fact that Maj. Gen. Avi Kochavi, the current head of
the army's Intelligence Directorate, came from the field units definitely helped
to move the process forward. As the commander of the Paratroopers Brigade during
Operation Defensive Shield, Kochavi walked among the walls of the casbah to
reduce the unknown, about which he had been told that "between 200 and 2,000
terrorists" were there. The operational intelligence approach that he now leads
will create a much clearer situation for those who inherit it. The second
answer, technology, is even more significant. The passing of intelligence to the
field, certainly during wartime, was clumsy and often impossible. New computer
and command and control systems allow an abundance of information in real time
from many sources. In general (under information security restrictions), they
can be used to transfer any bit of information that is gathered by any source to
any screen of any commanding officer anywhere -- on a fighter jet, in a tank or
at the top of a hill in the field. When this information is entered into the
intelligence systems that are being used to manage the battle, the result is a
coherent picture in which the commander has all the information about our own
troops and about the enemy. In this way, the company commander can receive on
his laptop, in the field, information and updates that join the information with
which he went out to battle, and the force will have a color printer that it can
use to print out a current aerial photograph of the village -- with all the
threats -- which will keep the unknown to a minimum.
Putting this new approach into effect required crossing
quite a few restrictions and boundaries. Besides the built-in problem of
information security, intelligence first of all had to create the information.
That is the heart of the change: in parallel with the strategic intelligence, to
collect relevant intelligence as well for the troops in the field; to develop
means and recruit sources, run them continuously and create a flow of tactical
intelligence. This is a Sisyphean, day-to-day effort that is much less exotic
than intelligence about a large arms-smuggling operation or a change in Iran's
nuclear program, but extremely important for managing the next war.
The next stage was connecting the systems, first of all
within the army's Intelligence Directorate, so that the various units that
gathered intelligence could "talk" to one another, on a single platform, and
pass uniform, available information to the troops in the field and, beyond that,
to the army, whose every branch -- ground, air, sea -- has its own systems for
communications and command and control. To enable the complete flow of
information, the teleprocessing department was brought in as a full partner in
the process (alongside the Intelligence Directorate and the Ground Forces
Branch, and the other branches and district commands to a lesser extent), and it
is supposed to allow the systems to communicate with each other in a single
language.
The final stage is making the information available to the
troops in the field in real time, but also in the preparation processes. "The
intelligence people come to the commanders in the field and implement learning
processes with them in front of specific sectors," Ben-Meir says. "They learn
the enemy and the threats together, and they enter all the information that has
been collected into the operational plans so that they will be a better match
for the reality that awaits the troops in real time in the field." As part of
that effort, two "houses of study" have been established -- one in the Galilee
Division, which is in charge of Lebanon, and one in the Gaza Division -- where
commanding officers go and, together with intelligence officials, update the
operational plans according to the intelligence that has been gathered.
Col. Fuchs says that this has led to a dramatic change in
the plans of combat and even the training exercises themselves. "We still drill
the troops for situations of uncertainty lest they become addicted to the
intelligence, and also because we understand that in war, the situation changes
and the enemy, too, changes its form and location," he says. "But the
operational intelligence allows me to prepare my commanders so that they will
know the enemy's approach, logic and background, as well as the rationale that
governs the specific village where they are about to fight. Add to that the
intelligence that is received, even if it is less than I would want, and they
will run the battle much better than in the past."
One example of this, which also comes up in practice
maneuvers, is the battle of Bint Jbeil during the Second Lebanon War, in which
eight troops of the Golani Brigade were killed. It was obvious to the troops
then that the enemy was in the area and that it was operating there to create
friction that would expose them, so the troops went from house to house until it
was attacked by surprise and hit. Under the new approach, troops operating in
Bint Jbeil in the future will be able to get a far clearer picture of the field
and the threats, and by using methods in real time -- including through
intelligence officials who are stationed in combat units in training and in
combat -- will be able to increase their effectiveness.
While officials of the army's Intelligence Directorate
refuse to state the degree of intelligence precision that will be given to the
troops about each sector, the drills proved that most of the information that
will be provided to the troops in advance or in real time is of a high level of
precision. Still, officials in both the Intelligence and Ground Forces branches
know that the availability of the intelligence in the field during combat
depends not only on the nature of the sources but also on the technology. Since
malfunctions or cyber attacks could disrupt plans, the troops are drilled
carefully in "intelligence blindness" to prevent commanders from developing a
dangerous addiction to the intelligence, which could take the form of
helplessness during battle.
Avoiding technology addiction
At the same time, and to reduce dependence on technology,
the Intelligence Directorate is preparing an alternate plan for the hour of
reckoning. All the intelligence that is accumulated by the various computer
systems has a hard replacement that is kept in safes and will be given to the
troops when necessary. Division and brigade commanders will receive an entire
encyclopedia of their combat sector and the company commander will be given a
pocket handbook that is updated periodically that contains aerial photographs of
every building and as precise information as possible about the threats in the
area. Just this backup requires an investment of millions of shekels per year,
and the entire project requires tens of millions. High-ranking officers are
assisting the process of internalizing this new approach in the field units, and
all the regular army's divisions and brigades have already been made compatible
with the operational intelligence approach. Over the coming year, the process
will be completed in all the reserve units as well.
Kochavi, who is leading this process, has spoken from the first
about how army intelligence must be a "partner." It must not only describe the
situation and the enemy, but also influence and participate -- not only at the
decision-making level, but also at the tactical level of the troops fighting in
the field. At a conference of operational intelligence personnel, which was held
last week with the participation of all the brigade and battalion commanders,
Kochavi warned against addiction to intelligence, saying that uncertainty would
continue to exist in the future. But behind his appropriate and necessary
statement urging caution, a new reality is taking shape that could change the
face of the next war dramatically.
Yoav Limor
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16937
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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