Oops! They Did It again

It's rare for the same trick to work twice. It's not unheard of, though - especially, it seems, in Lebanon.

A Hezbollah member’s car burns in Beirut earlier today.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s exploding pager attack, it seems Hezbollah have moved quickly to put together a new communications network. With its collection of pagers reduced to scorched shards embedded in hands, faces and groins across Lebanon, the terrorist group fell back on ICOM hand-held VHF radios. These have a relatively short range compared to the cellular network both mobile phones and pagers rely on, and they’re not particularly secure (a fact that got a lot of Taliban killed), but they’re simple and Hezbollah already had plenty of them. Using the radios, at least temporarily, to let the group’s leaders keep in touch was an obvious solution.

This just turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea.

It appears today’s ICOM radios came from the same branch of Cohen’s Budget Electronics as yesterday’s pagers - because around 5pm local time the radios exploded, too.

Naturally all the people who were already wailing about Israel’s indiscriminate terrorism and baby murder after the pager attack have turned the screeching up to eleven in the aftermath of today’s wave of unexpected bangs, but nothing has changed: This was still a very carefully targeted attack, blowing up Hezbollah-owned devices to get at the Hezbollah members they’d been issued to. The explosions were apparently somewhat larger than yesterday’s, which makes sense - there’s more room to hide explosives inside a radio. They also appear to have started more fires, with reports showing burning cars and several shops and flats being ignited, too. I suspect this is a side effect of the radios’ larger batteries being disrupted by the explosions. Of course there will be other, more interesting, side effects too.

Hezbollah’s Troubles Just Got A Lot Worse

In my post yesterday I talked about how the pager attack is going to make Hezbollah members somewhat nervous of technology from now on. Mossad have just rammed that point home very firmly. One day after Hezbollah’s super-secure new communications system went boom, exactly the same thing happened to its replacement. And this time the Israelis added a new twist. Yesterday’s attack seems to have involved a single model of pager made under licence in Hungary. Most of today’s weapons appear to have been Japanese-made ICOM IC V-82 radios fitted with remotely detonated explosive charges, probably fired with a coded VHF signal transmitted to the radio’s pager feature (after all, why change a winning formula?). However, not all of them were. While the situation is a little confused right now, some reports say more pagers also exploded - and so did a variety of other devices. Solar power systems on several homes are reported to have blown up, as well as at least one smart door lock equipped with a fingerprint scanner.

Frankly, this was a stroke of genius. It’s safe to say Hezbollah now know that pagers can be dangerous, and ICOM radios just joined the list of things well brought up Jihadis know not to put in their pockets. But if solar panels and door locks are exploding too, nothing electronic that’s capable of receiving signals can be trusted. Nothing at all. Mobile phones, radios, tablets, laptops, Ring doorbells, smart fridges, any car manufactured in the last decade - anything electronic ordered by Hezbollah might have been intercepted by Mossad, fitted with an explosive charge and then sent on its way. Everything these people own that’s more advanced than a toaster could be a Mossad bomb. Just sitting there, in their home or office. Waiting for the firing signal.

That isn’t going to do much for their morale - and it isn’t going to do much for their combat effectiveness, either. Hezbollah, like Hamas, is an Iranian proxy, but that’s pretty much all they have in common. Hamas are just murderous scum; Hezbollah are equally savage and fanatical, but they’re much more organised and far better trained. When Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 2006, in response to cross-border raids by Hezbollah, the Israeli Defence Forces got an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the usual terrorist tactics the IDF has come to expect from its opponents, Hezbollah fought as a conventional light infantry force. Although the IDF managed to secure the border area after four weeks of hard fighting, the experience was unpleasant enough to prompt a shakeup in its tank and infantry units. Israel now knows that if it fights Hezbollah in Lebanon, it will be facing a real force on force conflict. Except this time it will have a decisive advantage.

Data Rules The Battlefield

I follow and comment on various internet question and answer sites, usually on military topics, and I’m aware that most laymen looking at the capabilities of a military force are focused on - frankly, dazzled by - weapons. They’re making a mistake. Weapons are important, but in modern war they’re much less important than communications.

Modern troops rely on communications to a huge extent. When I joined Glasgow and Strathclyde UOTC in 1988, every section commander carried a PRC 349 voice-only VHF radio and every platoon of three sections had a larger, longer-ranged (but still voice-only) PRC 351 in the platoon headquarters. These radios were unencrypted, and if you wanted to send anything sensitive - the map reference you were at, for example - it had to be painstakingly encoded by hand using a BATCO wallet. If you weren’t a platoon or section commander, and you wanted to communicate with someone too far away to talk to, you used a communications cord (a fancy term for a length of hairy green string between two positions, which could send simple signals by giving it a brisk tug), a whistle or hand signals.

Now every infantryman has a lightweight Personal Role Radio in a little pouch on their body armour, and every section commander and upwards has a secure, encrypted voice and data radio that can transmit images, target information and overlays for the electronic mapping it’s capable of displaying. Information flows around the battlefield with almost bewildering speed, allowing commanders at all levels to quickly see what the enemy’s doing, come up with a plan to defeat them then distribute the orders to their troops that will put that plan into action. Cut off that information and what you have is a force that’s suddenly in deep trouble. A platoon of modern infantry, unexpectedly deprived of all their communications gear, would be easily defeated by a World War Two platoon that had been handed the same communications gear and given a half-hour lesson on how it worked. Their more modern rifles and equipment would count for nothing against a less well equipped enemy that had information dominance.

If the Israeli army goes into southern Lebanon again to stop the indiscriminate rocket barrages that have made their country’s northern towns uninhabitable, its troops will be fully equipped with reliable, secure voice and data communications. Every Israeli commander will know what his scouts and reconnaissance assets can see. Every Israeli soldier will know exactly what his commander wants him to do. Meanwhile Hezbollah might try to refight the conventional battle that worked for them in 2006 - but, when any communications device more sophisticated than a despatch rider on a motorbike might suddenly explode in their hand, they can’t.

Actually, scratch that. One news report from Beirut says a Hezbollah member’s motorbike was among the things that unexpectedly went boom this afternoon. So if you’re reading this, Hezbollah commanders, it’s probably time to break out the carrier pigeons. Good luck :-)