Eps 13. Drone Deficit

Did you know that the forgotten founder of Zionism went on to play a leading role in agures Israel or that Rafatramsky was responsible for the continued presence of the Muslim wack on Harabias? It turns out that the margins of history tell the real story. Behind the Times dives into the big concepts and overlooked moments that carry vast meaning all through the lens of Torah and rabbitic thought. Join me, Gdalia Gutag, as I go behind the times to explore the forgotten history, remarkable personalities, and transformative moments that shape current events and explain how we got here. Behind the times with Gdalia Gutag. A few days ago, a disturbing video emerged from a kibutz on Israel's northern border with Lebanon. It shows soldiers running for cover. Some are shouting and pointing skyward. Still others fire their weapon in bursts. The telltale puffs of smoke rising into the air. Their target, tiny firsterson view drones. Little more than toys actually, now turned into Hezbollah's latest deadly weapon. Already during Israel's war with Hezbollah a year or two ago, it became clear that the country had a problem. Iranian supplied drones were penetrating deep into Israeli airspace, photographing and sometimes striking sensitive military sites. Israel had become an anti-roet superpower. But these slow, cheap, hard to detect aircraft exposed an uncomfortable gap. But now with the FPV drones as they're called, the threat has evolved again. These are no longer the large noisy shahed type drones from Iran. Once used to attack radar stations or anti-aircraft batteries. These are tiny FPV drones equipped with explosive payloads, hunting individual soldiers, chasing vehicles, and increasingly spreading fear among frontline units. All of which raises urgent questions that I want to consider as I go solo without my uh dear partner Rabbi Fran Galitzki. But perhaps going solo is suitable for an episode that explores Israel's drone deficit. How did Israel of all countries get caught on the hop by the drone age? Because if there is one country on earth that was supposed to understand drone warfare before anyone else, it was Israel. In fact, many of the ideas that shaped modern drone combat were pioneered here. So what happened? How did the country that helped invent modern drone warfare suddenly find itself scrambling to catch up with the next generation of it? As we answer that question, I want to explore the lives of a couple of the tinkerers and remarkable innovators who triggered Israel's leap forward in the 1960s and '7s in the use of drones. Perhaps most importantly, what direction will this new age of warfare now take? And in the episode ahead, perhaps we can also gain some perspective on how a thinking Jew should look at the eb and flow of technology and warfare itself. The endless cycle of breakthrough and surprise, invention and counterinvention, attack and defense, and the question of what ultimately lies behind it all. To understand why Israel became one of the world's great drone pioneers, you first have to understand the trauma that was the Yom Kipper War. Until 1973, the Israeli Air Force was viewed as almost invincible. The stunning victories of the Six-Day War were brought about primarily by air superiority. That stunning opening strike on the Egyptian and Syrian air forces meant that during that first day and in those first hours in fact the war in a sense was all but won. But that victory created an assumption in Israel and internationally that air superiority would dominate Middle Eastern warfare for the foreseeable future. And in fact that doctrine underlay Israel's lacadasical approach almost criminally so to the gathering threat that was Sadat's preparation for the Yonkipa war because even though Israeli military intelligence could see the large concentrations of Syrian troops and armor on the other side of the Golan Heights and they could see on the other side of the Canal the vast buildup of the Egyptians. They said it's okay. We only need to have these puny forces on the canal and on the heights themselves because our air force will do the job. And then came October 1973. Israeli aircraft on that holy day suddenly found themselves flying into a shocking new phenomenon. Dense walls of Sovietmade surfaceto-air missiles should be supplied to Egypt and Syria. pilots who only a few years earlier had roamed Arab skies almost uncontested were suddenly being hunted by radarg guided missile batteries stretching across the fronts. Again and again Israeli aircraft trying to strike the Egyptian bridge heads across the S canal were thrown back with massive losses. The losses in fact were so extensive that America had to fly its own phantom jets to Israel to replace the jets that had been struck down leading to the Egyptian and wider Arab claim and myth that the Americans were intervening directly and flying on behalf of the Israelis. At moments during the war, Israeli air power was effectively paralyzed, which meant that the ground troops also couldn't make breakthroughs. The old assumptions about air power collapsed overnight. For the first time, Israeli planners were forced to contemplate a terrifying possibility. What if modern anti-aircraft systems could neutralize Israel's greatest strategic advantage? And that question became an obsession among Israeli strategists. How do you destroy missile batteries that can shoot down your aircraft before they even reach their targets? How do you gather intelligence on those missile systems without sacrificing pilots? So, at first, Israel turned to Americanmade solutions. The Israeli Air Force acquired large Americanmade drones known as Firebees made by Orion Company. The systems looked futuristic and in fact the Americans had been in the drone business for a long time because drones themselves the idea pilotless aircraft had this overlap had been going on for decades back before the second world war and in fact you know there's a lot of overlap between that and rocket technology or guided rockets and V2s as the Nazis flew towards the end of the war but going back to the American drones the systems looked futuristic but they had distinct problems It created an intelligence cycle that was painfully slow. What happened was that the drones, the Firebees, photographed enemy positions on film. And then often these drones couldn't land. So they had to basically drop the film physically recovered. Um and then the recovery of the drones was a separate balagan. But anyway, the film had to be brought to intelligence centers where analysts would examine the imagery frame by frame trying to distinguish between the shadow of a tree and the shadow of a missile launcher. And the process could take hours and by then this was the critical flaw given that these were basically airplaneized systems that showed up on radar sets. Egypt or Syria, for example, realized this site had been exposed by on these drones and they could relocate launchers or camouflage positions or construct decoys or such deception operations. And so unless there was an incredibly quick turnaround, so the operational value was often very little. By the time the photographs reached the analysts, the battlefield had already moved on. And meanwhile on the ground what was happening was that the fear of the SAM batteries surfaceto-air missile batteries spread far beyond the air force. What actually happened absurdly the Israeli air force ended up being so neutered in the Yung Kippa war that it was actually ground forces had to hunt the SAM sites. What happened was Ariel Shaon's forces crossed the S canal in between the Egyptian second and third army and they received strange maps marked with mysterious flower symbols. Tank crews were instructed that to proceed to drive into the open desert to where they're going to find these flower symbols and they were to fire at the box in the middle that they found in the middle. Because what actually happened was that these flower symbols mark the surfacetoair missile sites. The armored soldiers did not actually know what they were looking for. The flowers were the surfaceto-air missile batteries and the box in the middle was the command and control center. The tank commanders learned that it was actually great fun. What they did is they fired a shell at this uh you know the truck in the middle, the box in the middle, the computer brain and the missile batteries obviously went haywire. missiles gyrated and exploded all over the place and it was great fun. They were hunting the flowers but in essence that was a desperation to regain the control of the skies that Israeli tanks were effectively being used to hunt anti-aircraft systems which was crazy. The war convinced Israeli planners that unless the sand problem could somehow be solved, Israel's entire military doctrine was up in smoke. And so that obsession would eventually lead to one of the great revolutions in modern warfare. One of the most fascinating figures in this story was an unconventional Israeli intelligence officer named Shai Bril. Bril didn't come from the air force hierarchy but from Aman Israeli military intelligence where creativity and improvisation often mattered a lot. At some point in the late 1960s, Bril noticed the growing hobby of radiocontrolled model airplanes that was arriving from America. Now, while most people saw toys, Bril saw the intelligence gathering future. The prevailing cold war assumption was that reconnaissance drones, as we said before, like the Ryan Fabby, had to be large, fast, and sophisticated. In other words, it was clear they were going to be picked up by enemy radar. So they had to be quick enough to punch in and punch out and to evade the anti-aircraft missile systems which created this loop that they obviously devalued the intelligence that it actually gathered. But Brill with his brilliant Gammorop obviously thought the opposite. He said, "What if we don't have drones that are so large that they have to be powerful enough to outrun the radar and missiles? Why not build something so small, slow, and quiet that that just simply doesn't get picked up by the radar whatsoever? So, what does he do? Together with some fellow enthusiasts and tinkerers, let's I suppose you could call them, he begins experimenting with these tiny radiocrolled aircraft carrying cameras. And so, naturally, the big established bureaucracy, the senior brass of the Israeli Air Force said, "No, it's toys. They're messing around. But actually, as it was, given the competition between the different services, Aman military intelligence, which was where Shabai Bril worked, became interested because, yeah, maybe it's worth looking into. If you have these secret agents with wings that was the breakthrough because the future of warfare would not therefore belong to the biggest, most sophisticated systems. Sometimes it belongs to the basic small systems that simply are too small to actually matter. Brill's early experiments worked very, very well. In one late 1960s test, a small Israeli drone flew over Egyptian missile positions and returned with very, very clear imagery. And the point was, no one had picked it up. It was basically a tiny little flying lawn mower. And suddenly the toy looked revolutionary like a piece of the military future. Now actually what happened the process that happened next showed I think you could call sort of a remarkable parallel to the early days of Silicon Valley. And that's actually a very interesting comparison because one of the pivotal figures of the Israel's drone revolution was a guy called Alvin Ellis, an American who moved to Israel in 1967 and he joined what's called the Tacia Airit I AI or Israel aircraft industries which is one of the country's biggest today uh defense firms. Now after studying the lessons and the problems that the air force had encountered in the young war, Mr. Ellis was convinced that drones were the future. So together with a guy called Yehuda Manor, he began literally Silicon Valley style to build prototypes, UAVs in a garage. And obviously there's strong comparisons. We're going to take this Silicon Valley early startup day comparison further to you imagine Steve Jobs, Steve Wnjak, you know, cobbling together the first Apple computers in literally in a garage somewhere in California, wherever it was. And so here you have this site. It was little teams and it's kind of everything's im improvised and ad hoc and unpolished and basically think uh tinkerers who you know enthusiasts and and mugers who won't give up on something uh despite the fact that everyone else thinks they are crazy and at first the project struggled for backing because I rejected the idea and what happened was Tadan which is one of Israel's electronics companies but you know it's Tadan is really a conglomerate I think they used they make air conditioning and And they used to make fridges, you know, they're into different things. Uh I think they do lifts as well now, elevators. They fund the development of what became one of the first operational successful drones exported to the US as the Mastiff. And the philosophy behind the system was very Israeli. It was very kavan. It was very, you know, it was falafel as opposed to the big American expensive steak because it was small, it was cheap, and it was persistent and it was crucially capable of real-time surveillance as opposed to the expensive American systems which needed to break through to to hurdle through and to evade all the radar systems to get that physical kind of real back to the intel technicians. It just went inside, photographed and live streamed it and got out. So, Israel wasn't simply photographing the battlefield. It was operating inside it continuously. It wasn't just tinkering with drones. It was actually reinventing them. In June 1982 came the big test. It was the BA Valley in Lebanon. Remember this is 9 years after the shock of the Yom Kippa war when the Israeli air force was humiliated. During those nine years, the air force had fundamentally rethought things and had worked single-mindedly on the crucial national security project of how to destroy these vast Soviet supplied anti-aircraft arrays. Israel faced one of the densest Soviet style anti-aircraft missile systems in the world over Syria. Syrian sand batteries spread across Lebanon under heavy Soviet guidance and doctrine. And obviously only a decade earlier, the war had shown how dangerous these systems could be. And now was the crunch time. Israel wanted to destroy them. And what in fact happened stunned military planners across the world. Because in a battle and airto ground battle, Israel destroyed the entire anti-aircraft array and the Syrian air force. And that effort was led by the drones. Large decoy drones imitated fighter aircraft and showed up cruising around and they caused the Syrian radar operators to activate the missile systems and try and shoot down the Israeli air force. But in the process, these were just the phantoms. These were the fakes. In the process, Syria was wasting all its missiles against unmanned targets. Meanwhile, smaller drones were quietly feeding live intelligence back to Israeli operators. They were tracking Syrian aircraft and missile batteries in real time. And once the Syrian radar is activated, Israel deployed new anti-radiation missiles which are basically missiles whose nose cone the seek latches on to the radar systems and basically rides the radar waves right down to the emitter to the radar itself, smashes into them and destroys them. And what happens and ground forces actually targeted the missile defense system command centers at the same time. The upshot was that within hours much of Syria's missile network was shattered and what followed was one of the most lopsided air battles ever because Israel was able to shoot down dozens of Syrian aircraft without losing a single aircraft in combat. And obviously that stunned western military observers, but it also stunned the Soviets because interestingly enough when the Iron Curtain had fallen, a Soviet general actually told the Israelis that it was that display of Israeli drone and anti-missile and overall air superiority that convinced the Soviets that they had fallen behind and they could not match Western technology. So in retrospect, some historians view the Bikar Valley battle as the Middle Eastern battle that actually was in some way sped up the end of the cold war itself. But what is for certain is that the battle over the Bear Valley showed that the drone age had shrewdly arrived. One of the figures who would carry that revolution into the wider world was a Baghdad born Israeli engineer who's still around living in Los Angeles named Abraham or Abe Karim. Now Karam's story is just one of these amazing stories of Israeli startup culture that kind of feels symbolic of the broader drone story. He was born in Iraq and he actually obviously went through the Farhood which was which was the riots anti-Jewish riots in 1948 that triggered the exodus basically of the vast majority of Iraqi Jews and he immigrated to to Israel as part of that great wave and he'd been fascinated by model aircraft from childhood. I think he'd had a teacher who had flown a Lancaster bomber, a British Lancaster bomber in the Second World War and he started the aeronautics at the Technnea and he joined the Israeli Air Force engineering world and he later recalled that the culture then of innovation amongst Israeli engineers was such that whereas it could take it takes currently something like 20 years to get something from the drawing board into the battlefield in America back Then he said an Israeli team could move from concept to flight testing in 6 months and that's just going to be a very very crucial part of the story over here. And that shaped what he did and the lessons Karum absorbed were profound that you had to have small teams moving quickly and breaking things. Those people who were you know furiously dedicated to innovation could out innovate these giant bureaucracies. Then he moved to America and he encounters something entirely different because what had happened is by the late 1970s the Pentagon had basically given up in drones because the American programs are very expensive and very bureaucratic and one of the drone the stage at which Americans were up to when he arrived was that it needed dozens of people to launch this particular version of the drone that they had. And so Karum said to the Americans, you don't get what's happening over here. So what does he do? He's an Israeli. He's arriving in the the capital of uh you know in the Silicon Valley area innovation. So he gets a garage and he starts tinkering putting stuff together using plywood and fiberglass and little engineering teams. He developed an Israeli style of drone and eventually the system he created evolved into something very very recognizable even decades later America's predator drone which was one of the defining military technologies of 9/11. think this was the drone by which operators could sit back home in Wyoming and hunt al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan using the killer drone. But KM's importance was that he understood what the incumbents were doing wrong. He said the incumbents, these sort of giant aerospace companies have a problem creating anything that compete with what they're already doing. He said, "You need inventors who are dreaming and tinkering to make new things happen." That quote explains the entire drone revolution. Because from Shapi Brill's model airplanes to Ukrainian FPV workshops that were going to see, the future arrived from the tinkerers before the large institutions recognized what they were looking at. But the drones that Israel pioneered still belonged to what we might call the first drone age because these were elite systems of reconnaissance platforms, precision tools, and they required this sort of giant and sophisticated American military bureaucracy to produce. And what came next was something very different. It was firstly much cheaper. FPV drones emerged out of the Chinese consumer electronics and people wearing gaming goggles and hobbyist engineering. Basically people jerryrigging different systems very very cheap. And then what happened is Ukraine turned them into weapons. This is very important to understand because what Ukraine did upended modern warfare. What they did was democratized air power. The Ukrainians have shown that a very much weaker military power can use enormous quantities of cheap throwaway disposable drones are worth a couple of hundred dollars to exhaust really a much larger army. And so you have all of these videos, these crazy videos of of Ukrainian drones hunting and destroying a million dollar tank, Russian tank or going after individual soldiers. And it's got to the point where the front lines is basically without drones you can't move there. It's a drone hunting arena. And now what happened actually was that the problem was that now it became obvious to many that this new model of warfare would eventually arrive here in the Middle East. And yet Israel appears to have drawn the wrong conclusions. I think what happened is that because Hamas only used them to a limited extent initially on October the 7th, they didn't have the saturation and access to FPV drones that Ukraine did. That essentially Israel seems to have absorbed the lessons that drones dangerous but manageable and he could manage them with existing technology and doctrine. But what happened is that technology kept evolving and Iran accelerated drone production and then Hezbollah adapted. Suddenly, Israel has found itself confronting a battlefield where drones are no longer just surveillance tools or flying bombs aimed at infrastructure, but cheap weapons capable of hunting individual soldiers. And so you get to the stage where one of the world's most advanced militaries is forced to improvise very quickly with primitive defenses and Israel has absorbed and rushed shotguns to the front line because essentially they give frontline soldiers the ability or a chance to hit back with some buckshot at the tiny aircraft that are hunting them. At the same time, we've suddenly seen on the northern border Ukraine style cages and wire mesh on armored vehicles and even on tents all around them to disrupt the incoming FPVs. And it's one of the strange, I suppose visual ironies of the modern battlefield. You have very advanced militaries defending themselves against hobbyist style drones using metal cages and shotguns. But perhaps it shouldn't be surprising because low tech threats often force low tech solutions. And the lesson is that not every battlefield answer is a billiondoll system. I think that the in the story of Israel's drone deficit, there's a deeper irony running through over here because when it comes to Shabai Bril and Abe Karim, the original Israeli drone pioneers were themselves the same would had been dismissed because they looked unserious. Toy planes and improvised systems and hobbyist gadgets. And decades later, the battlefield is rewarding the same innovation and breakthrough that has emerged elsewhere, rewarding precisely those kinds of lowcost innovations over elite, beautifully produced systems. And Israel along the way became very successful at building advanced systems, the Iron Dome, the Arrow, precision strike systems, and obviously elite intelligence breakthroughs that can hack through enemy intelligence. But FPV warfare rewards something different. Mass and cheapness, speed, decentralized innovation, and rapid battlefield adaptation. And the IDF is scrambling to respond here. We're told reports that the IDF is building its own production lines actually staffed and manned by, I think, Khedi soldiers who are going to be turning out tens and tens of thousands of these things. Israel is scrambling to catch up and to close the gap on what may prove to be one of the defining military lessons of the 21st century. I think in this story of Israel's battle and the fear of that has been created over these FPV drones, there's perhaps a final lesson and I'll tell you the following story. The lesson is is really about how we as thinking and believing Jews should relate to this whole scramble, the ceaseless effort to match and outmatch an enemy. How should we think about this in terms of amuna of belief? So, one of my favorite stories is about a man called Arisaka, one of the engineers behind the Iron Dome. I've written about this and I've said this repeatedly, but I'll say this again in this forum. He's one of the original engineers, Americanb born engineers who was working on the iron dome system and he was actually sent because he is a Ari if you're listening is a very entertaining speaker as well as being undoubtedly a talented engineer he was sent to brief Congress during in the long aruous process of development of the unknown system they needed funding from Congress and he had to provide the congressman with key insights into why the system was going to be so revolutionary and I once saw him speak in a kov of an outreach setting in Tel Aviv in front of a secular audience and he said the most it was actually just before Burim and he said one of the most remarkable things he told the story and then asked a question he said the story was the story had been going around must be about 15 years ago of a time when Hamas fired a probably in 2008 fired a Kasam rocket at Tel a Viv and the Iron Dome system responded once and missed and responded for a second time and missed and given the short distance there was no time for a third missile and this Kasam rocket was headed straight for the Azraeli towers in the center of Tel Aviv and obviously would have caused on impact mass casualties. They didn't know what to do. That was it. The system had missed and then out of nowhere came an enormous wind or so the story went. An enormous gust of wind that took this missile from its trajectory to central Tel Aiv and hurled it into the sea. That was the story and people had actually heard whenever he spoke 10 years ago people had heard of this story and Ari got up and he said a show of hands who believes who believes this was true and surprisingly given the audience actually about probably about 40% of the audience put up their hand and said yes they believed it's true and Ari said to them actually it's not true and I here I explain to you why very simply if given the distances involved if a gust of wind was going to be powerful enough to divert a missile from the center of Tel Aviv, a couple of miles down towards the beach into the sea itself that wind that tornado that the cyclone and hurricane would have needed to be so powerful would have knocked the entire Azraeli center into the sea itself. And so he said, "That's why it can't be true." And then he said, "But here's why it doesn't matter. Here's why it doesn't matter. Because why do we only think of a miracle as a wind that comes out of nowhere and chucks a missile 2 miles off course? Do we not think it's also miraculous? The very creation of the Iron Dome. Yes, it is because the creation of the Iron Dome was itself miraculous. The fact that the engineering came online just when Israel needed it. the fact that the funding came and that people backed it against the other proposals. It's very hard to back a huge costly missile project like that when so many people and bureaucrats want to defund it. So many politicians have better ways to spend the money. All of that is miraculous. The Iron Dome is miraculous. And he went on to say that that was the lesson of Purim. Purim itself was a hidden miracle. The Iron Dome being a hidden miracle. Arisaka's words are perhaps worth remembering in this latest crisis of the drone age as well because Israel is clearly being caught on the hop by this latest revolution in warfare and the battlefield is changing. You have cheap drones that are forcing even the most sophisticated militaries to improvise with crazy stuff like cages and shotguns. But the history of warfare has always moved in waves. breakthrough and counter breakthrough, weapon and response, innovation and in surprise. And perhaps a thinking Jew should remember behind all the eb and flow, behind the technologies and the tech doctrines and the improvisations and the material shell lies something larger than the battlefield itself. So, as Israel faces its drone deficit, it's time, I think, to look to the heavens once again. Thank you for listening to Behind the Times. We appreciate you joining us as we explore the stories and people that shape Jewish history. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends. Until next time.