TERROR DRONE: NO SWEAT?

If you were wor­ried about the drone that Hezbollah flew over Israel the other day, Stratfor has a word for you: chill. At least for now.
The ter­ror­ist group’s “Nov. 7 fly­over is a sym­bolic move by Hezbollah rather than a sign of immi­nent attack,” Stratfor counsels.

European intel­li­gence sources say Hezbollah has acquired two to three UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] from Iran (renamed the Mirsad 1 by Hezbollah, the UAV is also known as the Iranian Mohajer). In addi­tion, Hezbollah has gath­ered an inter­na­tional team of engi­neers and sci­en­tists to equip the UAVs with a weapons sys­tem, enabling it to use the air­craft for a lim­ited com­bat role as well as recon­nais­sance. Some reports indi­cate that later ver­sions of the Iranian Mohajer can be equipped to fire chem­i­cal weapons.
While Hezbollah’s UAVs might pose a seri­ous threat once they have been devel­oped for com­bat oper­a­tions, Hezbollah’s capa­bil­i­ties are actu­ally very lim­ited. Because of flight-​​time restric­tions and the need to main­tain redun­dant sys­tems, pos­sess­ing two or three UAVs gives Hezbollah — tac­ti­cally speak­ing — the abil­ity to main­tain “eyes on” only one area at a time. Due to its short dura­tion, the flight over Israeli set­tle­ments prob­a­bly did not give Hezbollah any sort of strate­gic insight that it would not have been able to obtain otherwise. 

November 10th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.