The Israeli Air Force struck a Hezbollah drone launch position in Lebanon on May 9. Hezbollah is using First Person View (FPV) drones attached to fiber optic cables to attack Israeli soldiers. Fiber-optic cables make FPV drones impossible to jam. FPV drones equipped with fiber optics have been widely used on the frontline in Ukraine.
Israel Faces a New Hezbollah Problem
On May 9, the Israeli Air Force struck a drone launch position in Lebanon. The position had been used by Hezbollah to launch drones toward IDF soldiers, the Israeli military said.
The strike is part of an ongoing drone war with Hezbollah. Hezbollah is increasingly using types of First Person View drones, attached to fiber optic cables, to attack Israeli troops.
The Iranian-backed group has found success with these drones because Israel has largely outwitted other drone threats.
The use of FPV drones with fiber optics is not new. They have been widely used on the frontline in Ukraine. Drones have become so ubiquitous in Ukraine that an entire military doctrine has grown up around them.
The frontline no-man’s-land appears to resemble something like a First World War-style battlefield. Although the casualties on the Ukraine front and between Israel and Hezbollah are lower than First World War battles, the overall lessons that are being drawn here have much in common with that war one hundred years ago.
The First World War saw an explosion in new technology. The tank made its first appearance, for instance. Airplanes were also used in the war.
Neither the airplane nor the tank was yet mature.
They would go on to dominate the Second World War. Warplanes would sink battleships, and tanks would enable armies to break through and sweep across battlefields.
This new technology, first pioneered in the First World War, would shock France in 1940 and lead to the fall of Paris. It would also lead to the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
Today, we are living in an era of emerging drone warfare. Drones have been around for decades. They were used in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, the well-known Predator drone was seeing its first battlefields.
When the Predator was armed, it became a symbol of the Global War on Terror. However, the Predator was only the beginning. Commercial drones, manufactured in large numbers by China, inspired a generation of drone users to put commercial-style quadcopters to use on the battlefield.
They can carry munitions and conduct surveillance. At the same time, new drone models, often called loitering munitions, can be used as one-way attack platforms, slamming into targets.
This has rapidly moved the drone war concept away from expensive drones such as the American Predator or Global Hawk, to cheap drones that can be lost in large numbers.
The recent conflict with Iran and also the conflict in Ukraine and in places such as Gaza and Lebanon have shown how drones are transforming the battlefield.
In the hands of hi-tech militaries, such as the US and Israel, drones can provide surveillance and strike capabilities. In the hands of terrorist groups or countries such as Iran, they provide a kind of ‘instant air force,’ meaning that they can be used in large numbers to attack the bases of the US in the Gulf, or target Israeli troops in Lebanon.
They appear to negate some of the technological advances that should give Western militaries a battlefield advantage.
This use of drones by adversaries to overwhelm or penetrate air defenses, or to use novel low-tech devices such as optical fiber cables that make the drones impossible to jam, means there is a constant arms race to stop the threat.
The lesson from the First World War to the Second World War is that technology is a game-changer on the battlefield, but it must be used correctly.
France in 1940 had plenty of tanks, but they were not used well against the Germans. The Japanese may have surprised the US with carrier-based airplanes at Pearl Harbor, but not long after, at Midway, it was the Japanese who lost a carrier battle.
What this teaches us is that the future battlefield will not just be a drone battlefield; battles will be won by those who understand how best to use the new technology. Drones have many vulnerabilities.
They can be shot down because most are slow-moving and not stealthy. They can also be jammed and intercepted with emerging technologies such as laser air defenses. As such, the drone faces the same challenge that any platform has faced on the battlefield.
Tanks, for instance, have had to keep up with the arms race against anti-tank guided-missile threats. Today, they face attack by drones, which makes them vulnerable.
Expensive radars, which are used by air defense systems, appear to be especially vulnerable to drone attacks. They are also not easily replaced and are usually not particularly mobile.
Another vulnerability when it comes to drone threats is modern high-tech artillery. As artillery has moved from large concentrations of guns to mobile, more expensive, and produced in smaller numbers but more precise platforms, those platforms will be vulnerable to drones as well.
What this tells us is that the battlefield in Ukraine and in places such as southern Lebanon is only the beginning of the next phase of war. Israel has one of the most hi-tech militaries in the world and has been innovating by moving new technologies to front-line troops.
However, the IDF did not see the FPV threat coming, even though it had emerged in the Ukraine war. It appears that Iran was able to do damage to numerous facilities in the recent conflict using a variety of drones and missiles.
This should be concerning. It shows that even relatively poor adversaries can innovate quickly in drone and other unmanned systems. This is true at sea, on the ground, and in the air.
In many ways, we are facing rapid technological evolution similar to that of the 1920s and 1930s of the last century. Some of the new technologies will become obsolete.
This was true of the use of airships, such as the German Zeppelins, to conduct air raids. A slow-moving, large dirigible quickly became obsolete. It was an innovative air warfare concept only for a time.
We will soon have drones in a museum that have suffered this fate. What will emerge from the evolutionary explosion in unmanned warfare are systems that work.
FPV drones on fiber optic cables are not the future of drone warfare. One can’t have thousands of these things attached to cables everywhere. They are a deadly novelty. However, they tell us to be wary of what comes next and plan ahead.
About the Author: Seth J. Frantzman
Seth J. Frantzman is the senior Middle East Correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post . He has covered the war against Islamic State, several Gaza wars, the conflict in Ukraine, refugee crises in Eastern Europe, and also reported from Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Senegal, the UAE, Ukraine, and Russia since 2011. He is the author of three books: The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza (2024), Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future (2021), and After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (2019). He is an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
