Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles, often referred to simply as UAVs. In the last 20 years they have become an essential element within the military capabilities of nations and other organizations engaged in conflict.
In Drone Wars Seth J. Frantzman, senior Middle East correspondent and Middle East affairs analyst at The Jerusalem Post, has delved deep into the origins, the development and the current deployment of drones. In the course of a fascinating account, he also offers pointers and predictions about their possible future.
“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 artificial intelligence have become an integral component of the fighting capabilities of a large and growing number of nations, and of terrorist groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
Iran’s kamikaze drone attack on the Israeli-managed oil tanker Mercer Street on July 29 marked a further development of UAVs’ fighting potential.
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 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 trailblazer. In 1982 northern Israel came under rocket bombardment. The onslaught from within Lebanon was coordinated between the Palestine Liberation Organization, 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 Israel 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 toward 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” supersecret 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.
THE BOOK is more than an absorbing chronicle of a key development in modern warfare. During the course of his journalistic career, Frantzman 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.
The writer’s latest book is: Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com
DRONE WARS
By Seth J. Frantzman
Bombardier Books
288 pages; $30