I’ve often noted the parallel between the IDF’s public statements and Kabuki-style Japanese theater. Everyone wears a costume (or uniform) and mask, everyone plays a role, no one’s actual role or anything they say bears any resemblance to reality. So the Iranian drone incident is in the same vein. Israel’s leadership high-fived each other over the stellar performance of the air defense command in shooting down the craft without causing injury to any Israeli. Story over, case closed.
Not so fast. Along with my posts on this subject, Haaretz defense analyst Reuven Pedatzur and Yediot’s defense correspondent Alex Fishman have insisted on telling their Israeli readers that the emperor has no clothes. Here is Pedatzur who, by the way, was an ace IAF pilot during military service:
When people start praising failures, it’s time to worry. And that’s exactly what happened a week and a half ago: Defense Minister Ehud Barak praised the chief of staff and the air force commander for the “sharp, effective performance in which a drone was intercepted and shot down in the area south of Hebron.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also praised the drone’s interception.
In reality, this incident was anything but a “sharp, effective performance.” By any professional standard, the penetration of an unmanned aerial vehicle into Israeli territory, apparently after it had flown for more than two hours over the sea, and its subsequent flight clear across the country over the course of another half hour, are an embarrassing failure for the Israel Defense Forces.
…The UAV made its way over the sea from Lebanon to the coast of Gaza. During its long flight parallel to the coast, it was not discovered by a single one of the various detection devices that “look” westward. If this wasn’t due to negligence on the part of someone manning these detection systems, who wasn’t alert to what was happening out at sea, then it points to gaps in the IDF’s radar coverage of the western sector.
Moreover, during its flight, the UAV passed over Israeli naval vessels without anyone noticing it. It also passed over the drilling platforms at the Leviathan natural gas site – a point worth noting for those who are supposed to defend our gas production sites in the future. Those who launched it could very easily have loaded it with explosives and then blown it up over one of these platforms.
According to official IDF sources, the UAV was discovered only as it was about to cross the coastline near the Gaza Strip, and at that point, fighter planes were scrambled. Someone in the IDF needs to explain why it was discovered so belatedly. After all, had the drone been laden with explosives, its operators could have aimed it at the coastal city of Ashkelon, the nearby power plant, or Ashdod port…
No less…worrying is the description of the air force’s activity after the UAV was discovered…Fighter planes escorted the drone on its flight eastward for about half an hour before launching two missiles at it, one of which hit. If so, it’s hard to understand the considerations that guided those who managed the interception.
After all, it was impossible to know for sure that the drone wasn’t laden with explosives, turning it into a flying bomb. And if it had been, there was a reasonable possibility that it would suddenly dive and explode over a preplanned target – for instance, the air force base over which it flew. It’s not clear why the IDF decided to take such a risk instead of downing it as soon as it was discovered.
…It’s not clear why they allowed it to continue flying, thereby enabling it to photograph targets in the heart of the country. The explanation that “operational considerations and considerations of protecting [nearby] communities” led to the army’s decision to down it only after about half an hour is unconvincing.
But what ought to be most worrisome about the UAV affair is the depiction of this failure as a success. After all, if the IDF and the air force are being praised for a superb performance, it’s clear there is no need to investigate, ask questions and learn lessons.
Another Israeli report notes (Hebrew) that Israeli Bedouin have found substantial portions of the downed drone in the area where it crashed. In other words, the IDF supposedly retrieved the craft in order to study it. Yet they left almost half of it where it landed and abandoned the area. If you compare this behavior to the way the NTSB investigates an airline crash, in which every piece of a crashed plane is retrieved for purposes of reconstruction, you see the haphazard, slipshod method of the IDF. It claimed it had recovered what it needed from the landing site and didn’t need whatever was left behind. Even if this is so, can you imagine how eager anyone seeking to learn about Iran’s drone capabilities would be to salvage such wreckage, which sits there on the forest floor waiting for anyone to come along and find it?
Not to mention that the Israeli military censor has prohibited any Israeli media from publishing photos of the drone fragments. Imagine the hypocrisy of this considering that the IDF itself has abandoned these remnants leaving them for anyone to find, photograph, sell, whatever. If anyone has access to such photos, please contact me.
Iran has made additional claims concerning the drone flight and its aftermath that induce skepticism, but are worth considering. They say that drone photographed Israeli preparations for next week’s missile defense joint maneuvers with U.S. forces and other military facilities in its path. In addition, they claim Israel’s national air defense commander was sacked. That appears false as the supposedly fired officer ended a normal three-year tour in this position and was rotated into a different one.
Now the question remains: why wasn’t someone sacked over this bungle? As Pedatzur indicates above, there’s no need for questioning a military success. The IDF is not the sort of military organization that understands the difference between success and failure so it will swell its chest with pride, pin a medal on a few uniforms and pretend it conducted itself most excellently. Remember what I wrote about Kabuki theater above?
Fishman pursues an entirely different tack (and I disagree with some of his approach), but he takes issue with the claim that the Iranian mission failed:
In Israel, some members of the security establishment have been infected with…blindness. When the Iranian drone was shot down some 30 kilometers from Dimona, Israel cheered: The plot has been thwarted. In Western language, which Israel uses as well, the presence of a hostile drone is supposed to have some sort of operational purpose. Someone had sent it to take pictures, check the alertness of Israel’s defense systems and send back data. In short: It was supposed to carry out a practical mission with tangible results. Since these results were not achieved, the mission failed.
But in the language of the Iranians and Nasrallah, the fact that the unmanned aircraft penetrated Israeli airspace is a huge achievement on a psychological level. As far as they are concerned, this was the purpose of the mission.
On a related subject, Fishman’s article got me thinking about another potential danger that drones might pose to a nation like Israel. There are of course armed drones like those of the U.S. and Israel that have killed thousands of Muslim civilians. But imagine if you will a more advanced drone, one that might carry a compact nuclear warhead. It can’t be done now. But who’s to say that it isn’t possible to develop such a craft in future? All any nation would have to do would be to develop the drone and the primitive nuclear warhead and figure out how to fly it to the target, drop it, and detonate it. Even if the defending state shot the object down, as long as it happened over its territory there could potentially still be an aerial nuclear explosion.
To be clear, I’m by no means claiming that is something that Iran (or Hezbollah) would do. On the contrary, I don’t believe that at all. Everything about Iran’s behavior indicates that it behaves militarily in a relatively pragmatic and measured fashion and acts in proportion to the provocations meted out by its opponents. But can I say the same about North Korea or some unforeseen crazed state that might be motivated to wreak havoc on an enemy in the future?
My point here is that if the U.S. and Israel continue exploiting their current superiority by terrorizing various nations and groups they consider their enemies, then as they sow so shall they reap. If you kill with drones someone will want to kill you with one. If you sabotage industrial plants with cyber-weapons, someone will do the same to yours. If you assassinate scientists, then someone will do it to yours.
We have no monopoly on these systems. Remember what happened in 1949? The Russians exploded a hydrogen bomb and all hell broke loose in U.S. military and political circles. How did Stalin get nukes? We were supposed to be the only ones who had them and presumably would ever have them.
Do we really believe that we can maintain permanent supremacy over our so-called enemies? That they won’t figure out how to hurt us just as we’re hurting them? This is not a game of Monopoly. You don’t buy Park Place and own it forever. Reality has a nasty way of upsetting such illusions.
You write: ” Israel’s leadership high-fived each other over the stellar performance of the air defense command in shooting down the craft without causing injury to any Israeli. Story over, case closed.”
How this calls to my mind a different Kabuki (in fact, an 11-year long Kabuki, the longest Kabuki ever, winner of Guiness records!), the scene near the beginning in the Broadway Hit “Nine-Eleven” when the USA’s military FAILED to shoot down the off-course airplanes which crashed in the twin-towers and how the USA’s leadership FAILED to comment on this failing, failed to blame anyone for this failing (which some attributed to interventions by the Vice President, Cheney), and instead went to never-ending war over the incident.
Indeed this scene worked so well, that it couldn’t have worked better had it been a black-flag attack! Isn’t Kabuki wonderful?
I wonder why people obsess over Iran and nuclear weapons. If either Iran or Israel ever fires a warhead in the middle east, it’s going to kill everyone here. Period. Talk about “suicide bombing,” indeed. I am hoping Israel is never so crazy to do such a thing, but with a maniac like Netanyahu in office, just spoiling for a fight with Hizbullah or Iran, it’s always a possibility that this Hiroshima-like mentality (of mass killing and destruction to “save lives and end the war”) might become official policy. It has already become so in Israel’s policy towards Gaza. Collective punishment as policy may very well spread towards Iran, but if that happens, all of us in the middle east could very well end up “glowing in the dark” and displaying deformities and cancers, including Israelis. This is why I actually favor Iran having a nuclear weapons capability as a balance of power in this region.
The most important Imam of Shi’a was Husayn, whose martyrdom at Karbala is the most important event in the Shi’a experience of history. Husayn and his followers were slaughtered in battle by their rivals, who vastly outnumbered them. It can be argued that Husayn and his followers committed suicide rather than be dishonored.
Wow, Joel, that’s so off topic, and such a weird reply to my comment, that I’m shaking my head. Obviously, if you don’t know enough about Hussein to know who he was (an “important Imam in Shia Islam??? LOL), you don’t know enough to try to pass him off as a suicide, do you? Kindly enlighten me.
It is clear that all technologies, warring or not, eventually spread. The name of the game from a military point of view is to take advantage of the superiority you have now before the other guy reaches there, or, in the same vein, keep advancing things so that a decisive gap is never lost. The early invention and development of the so-called (now) conventional armament in `The West` enabled it to make the big strides whose consequences lasted long after those capabilities reached everybody`s hands.
Likewise with Cyber and drones now – if the huge gap between the US and Israel on one side and Iran and allies on the other side will assure a collapse of the latter`s current regime and occur before it has reached nukes (yesterday`s “new” omnipotent tool), then an important payoff from these new tools has already been materialized. In particular, it would make it unnecessary to resort to the “conventional” warring modes (bombing etc.), where Iran is already in a developed state and so the conflagration it will be bloody for both sides.
It seems:
(1) No military advantage by other countries will cause the collapse of the Iranian regime. As we saw in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and now Syria, and in 1917 in St Petersburg, a large percentage of the population can bring down a government. Often that takes years and enormous bloodshed: see the 1905 Russian Revolution and Syria today.
(2) Iran has the ability to fly a drone over Israel. The Iranians could arm drones with “ordinary” high explosives if the Israeli government ever tries to bomb Iran.
Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense, warned that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would lead to a catastrophe. This is more evidence that he is right. I assume that the US government has been saying the same in private to the Israeli government.
All one needs to do to see what happens when a nuclear reactor is damaged is look at Chernobyl or Fukushima power plants. Huge and long-term catastrophes from meltdowns caused by accident or an act of God is severe enough; imagine reactors being damaged or obliterated by large explosions, that radioactive material rising into the atmosphere and drifting over the planet, and ironically, it’s possible it could float directly over Israel.
Attacking Iran just isn’t worth it, unless of course you’re a lunatic obsessed with stopping Iran’s nuclear program and you don’t care that you’d be “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Some historic facts regarding Nukes, drones ansd espionage.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the first US Jewish couple, who were executed in 1953 for being Russian spies – who stole nuclear secrets for Russia.
US Jewish Lobby and successive Israeli governments have been demanding pardon for Pollard – claiming that though he confessed his crime – but he committed those crimes for the “US ally”.
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan (b. 1944), an Egyptian intelligence officer, who has the distinction of being the only Muslim spy considered by Israel as its spy hero
Israel used its first drone against Syria in 1973.
Iran tested its first drone in 2004.
http://rehmat1.com/2009/05/30/israels-egyptian-spy-hero/
Iran tested its first drone in 2004.
Obviously not true. Iran had domestically made drones already in the Iran-Iraq war. Prototypes existed already in 1985. See wiki article Ghods Mohajer.
” > > But imagine if you will a more advanced drone, one that might carry a compact nuclear warhead. . . ”
Both the US & Russia have built what are known as ‘suitcase nukes.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_bomb
“But imagine if you will a more advanced drone, one that might carry a compact nuclear warhead.”
you mean a cruise missile?
All of you missed the main point in the article. It’s all about the mask not the weapons ! just look at the mirror can you see it? well done !
what was the point of the article then?
in one paragraph, Richard says “If you assassinate scientists, then someone will do it to yours”.
and right after, he says: “We have no monopoly on these systems. Remember what happened in 1949? The Russians exploded a hydrogen bomb and all hell broke loose in U.S. military and political circles.”
If the US assassinated the USSR Nuke program leaders / top scientists, maybe they would could have been saved from 40 years of cold war and the fear of a nuclear holocaust.
Thank God we had the leaders we did in 1949 & not yr ilk. If we’d assassinated Russia’s scientists we would’ve had a genuine war against Stalin, possibly a nuclear war. I simply can’t believe there are idiots like you walking the planet. I’m just glad you don’t have your finger on the button.
This is the kind of world some people want to live in – if anyone crosses you, just kill them. No diplomacy, just the bunker mentality some right wing Israelis favor.
Obviously not true. Iran had domestically made drones already in the Iran-Iraq war. Prototypes existed already in 1985. See wiki article Ghods Mohajer.absolutly right and i gess the first country that used “waponized” drones….
maybe the point silverstein wants to make is EMP.
“When the Iranian drone was shot down some 30 kilometers from Dimona, Israel cheered: The plot has been thwarted.”
30 km = 18 mis. Iirc, that was the official first report, not the final (ca. 16 km) one.