Israel has a major problem on its hands in Lebanon.

Hezbollah has made an unmistakable leap in its drone capabilities and tactics in recent weeks, and is using explosive-laden unmanned aerial vehicles to deadly effect against IDF troops in southern Lebanon. Whatever countermeasures Israel has are clearly insufficient.

First-person view, or FPV, drones launched by Hezbollah found their way through to Israeli troops again and again on Thursday. Two UAV strikes on IDF positions in southern Lebanon left one soldier dead and three wounded. An attack earlier in the day wounded 12 troops on the Lebanon-Israel border.

The attacks have continued since, though with less success, but it seems a matter of time until luck runs out. On Sunday, several Hezbollah drones exploded near IDF troops, but did not cause injuries.

Israel should have seen the threat coming.

After decades of military operations in which troops were secure in the knowledge that anything flying overhead was friendly, the IDF is now scrambling to find technological and tactical solutions to the growing Hezbollah UAV threat, including drones guided by fiber-optic cables that are resistant to jamming.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF promise that a solution will be found, but they admit that it will take time.

Until effective countermeasures are developed and deployed, troops in southern Lebanon will find themselves exposed and hounded by Hezbollah’s FPV attack drones.

But not only are troops at risk; so is Israel’s entire buffer zone approach in Lebanon.

The use of drones in war is certainly not new. Militaries have developed and used unmanned attack delivery methods, like explosive-armed balloons, for well over a century.

But over the last decade, drones have assumed an increasingly important role in combat operations. Israel, a UAV innovator itself, had plenty of time to recognize that its enemies would also move in that direction.

As drone technology has been commercialized for the consumer market, terrorist and rebel groups have made effective use of off-the-shelf drones against state militaries. At the same time, both small countries and global powers employed UAVs in ways that indicated a new era of combat was on the horizon.

During the battle for Mosul in 2016-17, Islamic State made widespread use of small commercial drones to conduct surveillance, strike Iraqi forces and document attacks.

“Despite its clear military and technological superiority, the coalition to defeat [the Islamic State] in Iraq faltered in the face of devices that a 20-year-old with no formal military experience could easily obtain on Amazon,” wrote a US officer who fought in the campaign to free Mosul from Islamic State in 2017.  “These cheap and easy-to-use devices, previously little more than toys, herald a democratization of technology on the battlefield that will change the way nations contend with adversaries.”

In Syria, drone swarms were utilized by rebels and by Turkey, among others, since 2018 in an effort to cut through high-powered Russian defenses.

In northern Syria, Ankara carried out simultaneous attacks on Syrian bases, Russian-made air defense systems, and Hezbollah fighters in “an air campaign run entirely by armed drone,” according to the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister.

“Regime attempts to reinforce or resupply previously hit frontlines are being wiped out by [Turkish] drones,” he wrote on X.

Small countries also recognized the offensive potential that drones offered, and used them to hammer their adversaries.

In 2020, tensions between long-time adversaries Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region boiled over into full-scale war.

In 44 days of fighting, Azerbaijan used Israeli and Turkish UAVs to slice through Armenian air defenses. Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry published daily videos of its drones destroying Armenian platforms. According to the Oryx blog, Azerbaijan took out 185 T-72 tanks, 90 APCs, 182 artillery guns and much more.

Some Israeli civilian military experts recognized the looming threat to Israeli forces.

For decades the Israeli army has been used to fighting without looking up to see whose aircraft was rumbling overhead, knowing with virtually 100% certainty it was Israeli.

For decades the Israeli army has been used to fighting without looking up to see whose aircraft was rumbling overhead, knowing with virtually 100% certainty it was Israeli.

“A tactical revolution is not in the offing, however a strategic revolution is. It comes not from the tactical capabilities of the drones, but from their cheapness, simplicity and availability compared to manned aircraft,” wrote Eado Hecht........

© The Times of Israel