Israel's Increasing Use of Drone Warfare

Henry Srebrnik, Calgary Jewish Free Press

In an article published last July in the Los Angeles Times, veteran journalist Doyle McManus noted that “The drone has become America’s counter-terrorism weapon of choice.”

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they are aircraft controlled by operators from the ground, thousands of miles away, at American bases in places like Djibouti or in the United States itself.

Carrying lethal missiles, they can hover for hours over potential targets, and kill suspected terrorists with relative precision. And of course they don’t endanger American lives.

But while many in the U.S. are concerned with the moral issues surrounding the use of drones, this is not much of a factor in Israel, surrounded as it is by enemies many times its size and population. The country has become a major player in the development of drones.

According to a 2013 report produced by U.S. consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, Israel is now the largest exporter of unmanned aerial systems.

The report said that from 2005 to 2012, Israel exported some $4.6 billion worth of systems, including aircraft, payloads, operating systems and command and control caravans. One of the main producers, Israel Aerospace Industries, unveiled the Super Heron refinement of its Heron drone at the Singapore Air Show in February 2014.

The Hermes 450, built by Elbit Systems, has been “fighting terror for over a decade” and the company touts the aircraft as the primary weapon used in counter-terror operations.

Israeli officials have said that the Air Force has been rapidly building a UAV fleet at the expense of manned aircraft. It has reached a point where more than 50 percent of flights have been conducted by UAVs as part of reconnaissance and other missions.

Israel is one of only three countries that have used armed drones in conflict; it has launched numerous airstrikes in Gaza using its armed drones during the wars with Hamas. There is also evidence that Israel has used its armed drones to undertake attacks in Sudan.

In 2013, an Israeli official confirmed the use of combat UAVs, and envisioned the use of drones that could both conduct reconnaissance as well as fire missiles.

Jordan in April 2013 allowed Israel to fly military drones over the country en route to Syria in order to monitor the situation there and, should the need arise, target chemical weapons caches in the civil war-torn country.

Israel’s drones are technologically superior and able to evade detection by the Russian air-defence systems used by the Syrian army, according to experts.

In August 2012 Ibrahim Awaida, who was responsible for attacking a troop carrier within Israel in Eilat a year earlier, was killed by an Israeli drone in Egypt’s lawless Sinai desert. And an Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Sinai in August 2013.

For Israel, the enemy is close and dangerous, and drones, no matter our opinions of them, are a very useful weapon.