Israel-Border Fence at the Gaza Strip, near the Karni Crossing (source: Wikipedia)
Israel’s Response to the Asymmetrical Threat of Hamas and Hezbollah
Israel has a long-standing strategy of UAV use against Hamas and Hezbollah. For example, since Israel withdrew forces from Gaza in 2005, the IDF’s main element for control and retaliation became UAVs. Hamas fighters have had to learn how to hide from drones in crowded streets or slip through narrow alleyways. Hamas’s fighters are not only hiding from the Israelis drone in the urban areas of Gaza, but have developed two important strategic components, military and political. The political component is to use civilians as a “human shield” or “press shield” tactic against the airstrikes, actually a common guerrilla stratagem of many non-state actors. The military component consists of two elements. First it uses drones itself against Israeli soldiers and Israeli infrastructure. Second, is the development of the system of tunnels that deeply complicates the anti-terrorist operations of the IDF. Hamas had no other option as it could only hide underground from the Israelis drones if it wanted to operate successfully.
Another rival to Israel in the Levant is Hezbollah, which for years has been building a system of tunnels from Lebanon to Israel. According to the IDF the tunnel system was equipped by 2019 with advanced infrastructure for electricity, ventilation and communications systems. Reports from May 2021 indicate the evolution of these tunnels, this time the IDF having found that command and control headquarters have been built underground. Circumstances pushed Hezbollah to build these tunnels in order to conduct swift and covert operations against Israel. Ordinary citizens are not able to detect such underground works hence in January 2020, the IDF began installing a series of underground sensors along the northern border in order to detect any new subterranean tunnels.
Moreover, former Hamas leader Khalid Mishal in his interview honestly described why Hamas and other anti-Israeli forces are developing the underground tunnels. It was Hamas’ asymmetrical answer to the Israelis’ air and ground superiority. According to him, “in light of the balance of power, which is shifted toward Israel, we had to be creative in finding innovative ways. The tunnels were one of our innovations. The Israeli army is stronger than us. It possesses a great destructive power. It has airplanes, artillery. It possesses the strongest weapons arsenal in the region… The tunnels come in this context, that of putting more obstacles in the way of any Israeli attacks, and enabling the resistance in Gaza to defend itself.” He added that they also use the tunnels to infiltrate behind the back lines of the Israeli army.
Israel’s strategy against the nonstate actors in the region can be summed up in the following points:
Non-state actors drone warfare in Syria against Russia
The first big attack on Russian air bases in Syria, Tartus and Hmeymim, occurred in January 2018. The drones used in the attack were neutralised, partially destroyed by the Pantsir-S1 and destroyed or captured using electronic warfare equipment. Russian electronic warfare units managed to take control of six small air targets by taking over external control of the drones. Of these, three were planted in the controlled area outside the base, and three more drones collided with the ground during landing and detonated. Pantsir-C1 destroyed seven drones. Russian specialists, after careful analysis, emphasised that this was the first time that Islamists had used fixed-wing type drones from remote areas (about 50-100 km away).
Interestingly, Russia blamed Turkey for this operation because according to them the C2 Center was located in the Idlib zone. Furthermore, Russia didn’t accept the idea that the insurgents had been able to build such technologically sophisticated systems without “foreign assistance” (state sponsorship). Officially Moscow announced that the insurgents were from the Jabhat al-Nusra. In December 2019, the insurgents launched about a dozen drone attacks against Russian and Syrian regular forces, who throughout 2019 had to respond to up to 53 drone attacks altogether.
It has been reported in Russia that the number of drone attacks on Russian troops and military bases have significantly decreased in recent years. According to Russian officials from the Ministry of Defense (the 20th Shift of Radioelectric Warfare), this was made possible due to an increase in the activities of Russian jamming systems and other types of electronic warfare, including portable “Stupor” and “Stylet” systems, which allows operators to take control over enemy drones at a tactical level.
After careful study into the military strategies of drone use during the Idlib crisis in 2020 and the fight against drone guerrilla tactics, Russia is developing a new electronic warfare strategy known as “Radioelectronic Kupol (Dome).” This is a local copy of the Israeli Iron Dome defence system which includes anti-missile air defense and sophisticated jamming systems, etc. Complexes of electronic warfare in Syria have created a ‘dome’ against the UAVs of the Islamists. Russia relies on two main jamming systems, the Pole-21 jamming module and the “Ratnik-Kupol.” These systems create a radio and electronic environment which makes it impossible to fly over this ‘dome,’ because the complex covers all heights at which UAVs can operate. Russia is expanding this “Kupol” strategy to other regions in Russia. For example, in Crimea, the Northern Caucasus and the Arctic. Russian specialists do recognise the vulnerabilities of this strategy because the jamming systems are able to disable all electronic devices within a certain radius. In other words, these systems can easily disable Russian drones or blockade the normal operation of Russian aircraft. In this regard, Russia is developing complexes that isolate the drone then disable it with a point wave pulse and after restoring the radio and electronic environment to the normal state. Otherwise, for the Islamist proxy groups it would be highly attractive to expose the tactic of constant or prolonged attack on the military base that would blockade the operation of Russian or any other airbases. Such drone attacks would be especially dangerous in the case of conventional war with another state and could seriously undermine the effectiveness of air forces. The system of Command and Control would be facing a dilemma: whether or not to concentrate on the defence of air bases from drone attacks at the cost of putting their own air force operations at risk.
For Russia, Turkey and some other countries, the Islamist groups are perfect targets for testing new weapons and as well as UAVs. In recent months, Moscow announced that it had tested several new drone concepts against different Islamist proxies. First up was the tactical loitering munition (“drone-kamikaze”) ZALA LANCET-3, equipped with aiming systems (coordinate, electro-optical and combined systems). These systems were employed in the Idlib zone and targeted fighters from the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Russian media reported that Russia had already started testing them in October 2015, when five kamikaze-drones attacked the positions of fighters near Idlib. Earlier, the use of these Russian flying shells was classified. Second was the world-class “Orion” strike drone. Lastly, again in Syria, Russia observed the work of “Ochotnik” – a Russian stealth heavy UCAV that undertook several air strikes on the positions of fighters in Syria, but whose main mission was more strategic than merely bombarding the positions of rebels.
Experience of drone warfare in Syria shows that drones have become an indispensable element of the country’s Civil War. A combination of electronic warfare and drones can be effective, but not absolute against drones at a tactical level. In Syria, drones are used by all actors involved in the conflict: the insurgents use them versus each other and simultaneously against the regular armies that are stationed there. At the same time, the regular armies are also using drones against the militants.
One of the main conclusions which it is possible to make is that drone warfare in general and more specifically drone guerilla warfare, have emerged as important elements of new generation warfare in recent years in many different hotspots of the world, but mostly in the Middle East. Paradoxically, the bloody conflict in Donbass never took on much of a drone dimension because both the Ukrainians and the Russians work within a similar strategic culture that they inherited from the global Sparta, the Soviet Union.
Islamic State Drone Warfare
The geopolitical entity which existed for several years in the areas of Mesopotamia, Islamic State no longer possesses a global or regional threat. However, uniquely from a historical point of view, this phenomenon interests us as an insurgent group that actively used drones during its active phase of existence and power in the region. IS had developed quite a diversified drone strategy. They used drones against the regular armies of Turkey, the United States, Iraq, Russia and Syria, but quite often they also utilised drone warfare against other non-state actors like the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Syria and Iraq.
The lack of external and internal resources determines the strategy and tactics of any insurgent group, but often these groups are part of the bigger geopolitical confrontation in the region, therefore they receive some sort of state sponsorship. In the case of Islamic State, the situation was different because none of the geopolitical powers in the world have affiliated themselves with this radical phenomenon. Hence, they were forced to be innovative because of their fanaticism. Where for example, Hezbollah and Hamas with the help of Iran were one of the first non-state actors to use drone warfare, Islamic State – during its short period of existence – developed, unprecedented for that period (the 2010s), an empirical concept of drone warfare. The integration of the drone warfare concept to day-to-day operation is impressive and was made possible with the rapid development of the availability and commercialisation of drone technology.
During the war in against Islamic State it became clear that IS…:
ISIS Documents reveal “State Drone Program”
In April 2017 unique documents were uncovered in Mosul that indicated that ISIS had developed in a theoretical, bureaucratic and practical way, a comprehensive drone program. All of these documents were apparently put together in 2015 and the collection includes a mix of official ISIS forms and handwritten notes. According to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), the notes and documents can be divided into four main categories: drone use reports, equipment list/purchases requests, receipts or purchase forms, and permission documents. Experts from the CTC gleaned from the documents the following conclusions:
The existence of the so-called indigenously-created “Drone Program” means that ISIS had intellectual, engineering capabilities and personnel. Furthermore, it gives some understanding of the historical trends of future drone warfare. ISIS leadership understood the importance of the new historical phenomenon of drones and invested intellectually and technically in the process of dronization of their guerrilla warfare against its enemies.
In Part Four, the theoretical aspects of guerilla drone warfare: non-state actors, A2AD and Drones; State sponsorship of proxy groups; threat scales and military implications; the psychological factor and a decrease in the human factor; tactical-level threat; information warfare and asymmetric response; strategical level.
Autor
Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Senior Analyst at Strategy&Future
Strategy&Future
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