I review Seth Frantzman's new book in the Jerusalem Post Magazine, 6 August 2021
“Everyone who has worked with drones sees them
as revolutionary,” he writes, and the story he tells, and the pioneers,
politicians and military leaders he has spoken to, substantiate this.
The drone saga started
in the 1970s with Remote Pilotless Vehicles, designed by the US to evade
detection by radar in their surveillance operations. Frantzman leads us through their subsequent
history, as their role expanded from mere intelligence-gathering to weapons capable
of striking their targets with pinpoint accuracy. He charts the further rapid expansion of
drone capability to the present stage, where drone units consisting of fleets
of sophisticated UAVs equipped with AI (artificial intelligence) have become an
integral component of the fighting capabilities of a large and growing number
of nations, and of combative organizations like ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
Israel has been involved
in drone development from the very beginning.
Back in 1974, when the country was still recovering from the trauma of
the Yom Kippur war, a young Israeli engineer, Yair Dubester, was employed by IAI
– Israel Aerospace Industries – where the first UAV was being built. Established in 1953 as a government institute
for aviation, IAI has grown over the years to become a world leader in
developing, producing and delivering state-of-the-art technologies and
systems.
Dubester worked on an
early UAV called the Scout, designed to fly slowly and bring back video. Although not highly regarded by the military
at first, the system proved to be a trail-blazer. In 1982 northern Israel came under rocket
bombardment. The onslaught from within
Lebanon was coordinated between the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation),
Hezbollah, elements of the Lebanese military, and Syrian armed forces which were
ensconced within Lebanon.
When Israel launched its
Peace for Galilee operation to stop the rocket attacks, the video sent back by
UAVs of the exact location of Syrian surface-to-air missiles and their radar
deployments proved to be a moment of truth for Israel’s military
establishment. The real-time
surveillance provided by the drones enabled the Israeli air force to strike a
devastating blow against the enemy’s air defense system.
Side by side with the drone story, Frantzman
catalogues the development of anti-drone capabilities such as Iron Dome,
David’s Sling and Arrow-3, among others – systems devised under pressure in
order to counter continuous rocket attacks from Gaza and the threat of further
onslaughts from Lebanon. Although not
originally designed to be used against drones, tests towards the end of 2020
showed them to be very effective for that purpose and for taking out cruise
missiles.
From the state of drone evolution by 2021,
Frantzman can see the direction future development is headed, and maintains that
“somewhere in a hangar” super-secret experimental and classified drones are
already in existence, and may be operational.
In addition he asserts that US and Israeli defense companies are
racing to develop the lasers, microwave weapons, and technology necessary for
confronting the next drone threat, which he sees emanating from some, not all,
of those entities intent on developing their drone capacities – China, Iran. Russia,
Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, among others, together with the
jihadist organizations like ISIS that are intent on waging their Islamist war
against the civilized world.
“Drone Wars” is more
than an absorbing chronicle of a key development in modern warfare. During the
course of his journalistic career Franztman has had a number of encounters with
drones, and his account is enriched with personal experience.
For example, in 2017 he found
himself in Mosul in northern Iraq. He
had entered the city embedded in the US forces intent on expelling ISIS, which
was hell-bent on retaining control of the city it had captured in 2014, and was
fighting a rearguard action street by street.
Beginning as the hunter, Frantzman quickly found himself the hunted.
Evading the booby-traps left by the
retreating fighters was bad enough, “but,” he writes, “it’s the buzzing of an
ISIS drone that I still can hear, years later.”
Since 2017, he tells us, “ISIS had increasingly been using drones to
attack the Iraqi army…there was no way to fight the drone threat…it was always
there.”
“Drone Wars”, he tells us, is based
on years of working in the field under the threat of ISIS drones. It is also the result of months of interviews
with, as he puts it, “the most knowledgeable individuals across the spectrum,
from critics of armed drones to prophets of how they will change the world as
we know it.”
Frantzman is a conscientious
journalist who commits nothing unsubstantiated to paper. The source for every fact he provides and
every opinion he quotes is provided in the rear of the book. A 67-page section titled “Endnotes” contains no
less than 646 footnotes. The
conscientious reader is given every opportunity to check any questionable fact
or controversial statement.
“Drone Wars” is an absorbing account
of cutting-edge military technology.
What drones are already capable of doing is as nothing compared to what
they might yet bring to the art of war.
Some futurologists, says Frantzman, believe that war itself will become
unmanned and turn into a battle between artificial intelligences; others hold that there must always be human
control of the machine. These, together with other possible futures for drones
and drone warfare, open up fascinating possibilities and stretch the mind.
“Drone Wars” is an eminently
readable survey of the past, present and future of what has become an integral
element of modern life.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/war-by-remote-control-drone-wars-book-review-675927
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