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Drones again (this time on the side of Evil)

Summary:
It appears that one important source of the appalling success of the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel was their use of Drones. Israel relied on a medium tech remote sensing and viewing system with video cameras and remote-controlled machine guns connected to controllers through a cell-phone like system. Hamas used drones to knock out the cameras, machine guns, and, especially, the cell-towers. This means they could enter Israel without being seen (or shot). This shows that drones do not always favor the defense. They have much reduced the effectiveness of armor and blitz potential blitzkriegs, but they can also take out (similarly unmanned) defensive systems. I think a key issue is that Hamas did not have older weapons which can do what

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It appears that one important source of the appalling success of the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel was their use of Drones. Israel relied on a medium tech remote sensing and viewing system with video cameras and remote-controlled machine guns connected to controllers through a cell-phone like system. Hamas used drones to knock out the cameras, machine guns, and, especially, the cell-towers. This means they could enter Israel without being seen (or shot).

This shows that drones do not always favor the defense. They have much reduced the effectiveness of armor and blitz potential blitzkriegs, but they can also take out (similarly unmanned) defensive systems.

I think a key issue is that Hamas did not have older weapons which can do what the drones did, so Israel counted on the towers, assumed they were not vulnerable. I don’t think an army attempting to defend against an adversary with howitzers and mortars would count on such vulnerable systems. I think the vulnerability can be reduced by building redundant towers, so the system doesn’t fail if a few are knocked out. Also relay stations (with much lower power so many more are needed) can be mobile and, so, less vulnerable.

But the use of remote-controlled devices against remote controlled devices seems to me to have quite a promising future (unfortunately).

I tend to suspect that a more serious problem was shifting IDF resources to the West Bank to deal with trouble largely started by settlers, but I would think that (I always blame Netanyahu).

On the title, I should note that Russians have been using drones (I think responsible for almost all of their success knocking out Ukrainian armor and artillery). Russia is the aggressor and some Russians have committed extreme war crimes, so I wouldn’t really classify their effort as not evil.

Robert Waldmann
Robert J. Waldmann is a Professor of Economics at Univeristy of Rome “Tor Vergata” and received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Robert runs his personal blog and is an active contributor to Angrybear.

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