Since October 7, The Jerusalem Post has visited four different IDF locations on the southern front, two air force bases, and embedded with a navy fast boat off the coast of Gaza during a real-time attack on Hamas terrorists (the Post has also visited the North and attended countless briefings, but what is listed are visits related to the status of the battle in the field in the South.)
Several of the visits took place in recent days
What emerges has started to explain some of the IDF’s losses and failures on October 7, but more importantly, how the IDF’s revolutionized integrated approach to warfare kicked in and took over the narrative in the war with Hamas in the month since then.
The Post’s visits have included commanders in the field, but also inside field command centers handling real-time targeting decisions and intelligence command centers, providing human spying, signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, cyber intelligence, and other items to the targeting centers.
During one of the targeting command center visits, an interview was briefly interrupted for 30 seconds in which the targeting commander integrated new field intelligence and seamlessly passed it on to another field or air unit, which within minutes destroyed the Hamas target.
While the Post was embedded on the fast boat, there was intelligence that IDF Unit 401 was about to be ambushed by Hamas. It flowed from an intelligence center through a targeting center and further through to the navy, which fired around a dozen shells from a missile boat, destroying the Hamas forces.
A senior air defense official presented the Post with a picture of how IDF air defense monitors look during a “normal” volume of rocket attacks versus the 3,000 rockets that were fired in only four hours by Hamas on October 7.
The difference for a layman was a series of quantifiable and not too hard-to-follow arrows or streaks across the screen, versus the entire screen being filled with streams until it seemed unintelligible to human eyes, and only the IDF automatic air defense aspects could fully follow.
Still, that automatic system responded and, with some delay, the human interpreters responded as well and were also able to analyze and rapidly share the data with other critical units to the country’s defense.
Between signals and cyber intelligence Unit 8200, air force surveillance Unit 9900, and human spying Unit 504, the IDF has always passed around intelligence to assist with targeting and defense in the field and of the home front.
However, the rapid pace and incredible integration have reached new levels in this 2023 Gaza War.
In some ways, none of this should be a surprise. For years, the IDF has talked about the new levels of integration between different intelligence units, and the sea, air, and land forces.
The Post has done numerous visits and interviews before the war, including meeting with the commander of the IDF’s secret artificial intelligence target bank, where descriptions were put out that sharing intelligence and operational targeting had moved from past to almost lightspeed.
However, given that much of the latest revolution was post-2019, this had only been really used by the air force (the last even mild ground invasion of Gaza was in 2014) and statements about using the new systems, capabilities, and speed for the land forces were speculative.
In fact, it was worse than speculative, because given Hamas’s capability to fight from a massive network of underground tunnels, civilian sites like hospitals and mosques, and to boobytrap any spot where IDF troops might try to find shelter or take a rest, there was every reason to believe that the Gaza’s rulers could neutralize the IDF’s technological advantages.
If all you need to do is retro-boobytrap a house, then lightspeed, satellites, drones, and ultra-networked land vehicles, artillery, and tanks do not really help.
That is sort of the first premise of asymmetric guerilla warfare and the reason why the lowly Vietnamese or Afghans could defeat the mighty US (defeated by Vietnamese and Afghans) and Soviet militaries (defeated earlier by Afghans.)
Some might say that the US already had threaded the needle of urban guerilla warfare when fighting against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
But in those cases, there were also significant local forces on the ground to fight ISIS and the entire globe supported overwhelming uses of firepower, even in the face of enormous civilian casualties there.
There are no agreed-upon estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq, but the lowest number tends to still break 100,000 and the higher number could reach several hundred thousand.
This means that the US and its allies had far more “rope” to fight ISIS, even if civilians were collaterally harmed, than Israel, which, with at least several thousand killed Palestinian civilians, (the total high number of around 11,000 includes terrorists) is being pressed globally to stop fighting.
The IDF is still under 50 soldiers filled in the invasion
While every loss of human life on both sides is a tragedy, militarily, losing such a small number of soldiers, when the 2014 Gaza conflict estimates were that IDF losses would hit 500-1,000 soldiers if the military did a deeper invasion, is remarkable.
It is remarkable because the IDF has managed to arrive at a mix of new tactics and intelligence collection speed and distribution which allows air, sea, artillery, and tank forces to kill sometimes 150 Hamas forces in one extended battle, without a single loss on the IDF’s side.
This new integrated warfare, by reducing IDF casualties by several orders of magnitude, has also allowed the IDF the strategic prerogative of continuing the ground invasion, much as Iron Dome has allowed the IDF to continue airstrikes even in the face of rocket attacks on the home front.
Speaking to a wide range of IDF officials at all of the different levels, the picture is clear: they know they have created a new kind of integrated warfare and that new kind of warfare has transformed the battlefield with Hamas.
Whether the impressive gains of this new kind of warfare are sufficient to deter Hezbollah, Iran, and other Shiite proxies from crossing certain unclear redlines of Israeli security is still unclear.
Comments are closed.