Israeli military chiefs are being taken out to the woodshed for relying on airpower during the summer campaign in Lebanon. “But after-action data and battlefield imagery are revealing great advances in the ability to respond to asymmetric threats,” says Defense News’ Barbara Opall-Rome. Thanks largely to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), “more than 90 percent of the medium-range missile launchers used by Hizbollah were destroyed almost immediately after they fired their first weapon.“
By the third night [of the war], the IAF [Israeli Air Force] attained full operational capability ofthe worlds first Boost Phase Launch Intercept (BPLI) force[maybe it’s more of a “a search and destroy operation,” as Bill noted in the comments — ed.] a tightly linked network of manned aircraft and UAVs that saturated the airspace to hunt and immediately kill small, mobile, medium-range missile launchers.
It didn’t work against the terror group’s teeny-tiny Katyusha rockets. But Israels BPLI capability did managed to knock out “more than 100 launchers during the more-than month-long war.” UAVs “like the Elbit Hermes 450S Zik, the Shoval (Heron-1/Crusher) and Searcher-2 built by Israel Aircraft Industries” did the lion’s share of the work.
This was the first large-scale use of UAVs, not only for providing a continuous presence over the entire battle area, but in [assisting the direction and delivery of] smart munitions to these very small, well hidden, moving targets, said Isaac Ben-Israel, a retired IAF major general and former director of Israeli defense research and development…
This is not like a targeted killing where we have two weeks to plan, Ben-Israel said. Here, theres only a matter of seconds between the time the terrorists emerged to launch these missiles to the time when they returned to their hiding places among innocent civilians. Those medium-range missile launchers became suicide launchers. They were destroyed either before or immediately after they fired their first missile.
The Israeli Air Force also got better about detecting — and taking out — Hezbollah drones. By tweaking “multiple radars never designed to detect such small, slow-moving, pinpoint targets.… F-16C fighter pilots on air patrol [were able] to blast the [unmanned] offenders from Israeli and Lebanese skies with Python-5 dogfighting missiles.”
According to Israeli military data, Hizbollah launched four Iranian-made Ababil UAVs during the war. One apparently exploded upon launch; another penetrated Israeli airspace, but crashed just south of the Lebanon border; and the other two were downed over the sea southwest of Haifa and near the area of Tzur in southern Lebanon.
Remnants of the downed drones showed that at least one was equipped with nearly 10 kilograms of explosives, which Israeli intelligence sources believe was destined for Tel Aviv. According to officials here, the UAV that crashed upon launch may have carried a payload of up to 50 kilograms.
Examination of cockpit imagery from one of the engagements shows detection of the target at extremely short range close enough for the pilot to actually see the UAV. From an extraordinarily low altitude of less than 2,000 feet and at very low speed, the pilot launched his Python-5, which immediately arched and locked on to its target. Imagery shows the missile maneuvering at nearly 90 degrees for a matter of seconds before blasting the gnat-sized target with its explosive warhead.
This is an historic first for us, and professionals will understand how complicated the mission is. Its not the classic engagement of an F-16 versus a MiG, where you have a competing aircraft and radar. In this scenario, its not plane against plane, but rather network against an asymmetrical target you can barely see, said the senior IAF official.
Maybe I’m viewing this wrong but it seems to be that the Israeli’s idea of Boost Phase Launch Intercept (BPLI) is more like a search and destroy operation for launchers pre– and post-launch. To me a BPLI would be intercepting the actual rockets or missiles, which in this particular scenario would be next to impossible given the short times.
Agreed. I choked on that too a bit.
Bill is correct. The system described in piece was not a “Boost Phase Launch Intercept” system, it is more like a “Weapons Surveillance System” (WSS).
The WSS has two pieces, non-imaging infrared sensors deployed on the border that look into battlefield and some UAVs with imaging FLIRs that loiter over it. When the non-imaging sensors read a heat bloom (indicative of weapons fire), they relay the directional info to the UAVs, which zero in on the target. The Israels basically took this to the next step by arming the UAVs so that they could engage the targets.
Its an ingenious little system if you can get all of your kit in the right place. The only problem is that it isn’t very useful if you mission is force protection. It can dish out plenty of revenge and counterstrikes though.
One question: Aren’t UAVs that are packed with explosives and sent on suicide missions actually “cruise missiles”? I thought the only dividing line between UAVs and CMs was that CMs are designed for one-way trips.
Boost phase? Hunting down hizb-for launch teams and their propaganda fireworks doesn’t quite equate with boost phase anything. The idf had an inconsistent post launch response of between 2–11 min, the weapon of choice seems to have been cluster munitions. The effectivness against mobile teams that set up automated launch rails seems to have been nil. The idf claims of knocking out large ssms are mainly pr with no basis in reality; had the israelis managed to actually take out one of these long range iranian missiles you can bet your bottom buck that it would’ve made cnn and be all over youtube and google movies.
How’s claiming to have had blanket surveillence and to have taken out 90% of launchers really look considering that rocket attacks increased throughout the engagement and their targetting resulted in so much destruction of non-military targets ?
I don’t know about “impressive” but it would certainly make the Israeli air force look better to have said they were relying on clairvoyants for all their targetting data and just had to make random guesses as to where rockets were launched from.
why do people have to pick everything apart? just like my father told me when i was young if you look hard enough you desirve to to find something wrong.we need to stick together and fight the real bad guys.
I reckon that Phyton 5 is probably a lot more expensive then the UAV.
But said that, Israel didnt do that bad at all. Isreal had the UAVs, tweaked radar and a network in time for this war. Of course they could have had more and integrated it better, but all-in-all the 90% is nice. I wonder what would have happend if Isreal wouldn’t have had the UAVs.. maybe a full scale invasion?