Israel Must Fix Its Deadly Overreliance on Defense Technologies | Opinion

Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip caught the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the middle of a technological revolution. For the last 10 years, the military had been in the process of becoming more compact and technological, relying more on standoff munitions like long-range missiles and drones as opposed to infantry soldiers and boots on the ground.

In July 2020, for example, the government cut mandatory military service for men, which had been three full years for decades, to just two-and-a-half years. For women, the service was set even shorter—two years.

The change was not only in the shortened service. IDF infantry and armored units had not crossed enemy lines and seen combat since the 2014 small-scale ground offensive in Gaza. Instead, while there were periodic clashes with Hamas in Gaza or the occasional flareup with Hezbollah in the north, everything was handled by the Israeli Air Force. Troops rarely needed to fight.

And Israel fell in love with the new reality. Its young men and women might have needed to serve, but for the most part security could be attained through sensors, drones and F-35s. Soldiers, for the most part, did not need to put their lives on the line.

And alongside that shift, technology became the focus. It was seen in the physical defenses Israel deployed along the border with Gaza, made up of sophisticated sensors, radars, and remote-control guns but with few actual soldiers. When Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, it basically had free run of southern Israel. The few soldiers who were deployed there were quickly overrun and outgunned.

The reliance on technology manifested itself also in the way Israel collected intelligence inside Gaza. While Israel's intelligence agencies—the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the Military Intelligence Directorate—were believed to be of the highest caliber, in Gaza it turns out they were blind—or worse, if The New York Times reporting is accurate.

One of the reasons was the reliance on technology over human agents. Since Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005 and pulled back its military outposts, the country lost its physical presence as well as a real ability to operate human agents. Instead, it increased its SIGINT coverage, the term for collection of signal intelligence from cellphones or even sidewalk conversations.

Missile defense was another illustration of this technological misconception. There is no question that Iron Dome, the innovative missile defense system that can intercept Hamas rockets, has provided Israeli cities with unprecedented protection, but the overreliance on the system led the country's leadership to believe that the threat brewing in Gaza could be contained. Israel could let Hamas vent and fire missiles since Iron Dome knew how to intercept them.

As seen over the last eight weeks, though, an enemy like Hamas, which embeds itself in civilian infrastructure and hides inside a maze of tunnels, cannot be destroyed from the air or contained by sophisticated fences and missile-defense systems. Hamas, and adversaries like it, need to be engaged in close combat with troops moving slowly through narrow alleyways searching buildings and tunnels for enemy fighters.

This does not mean technology cannot help. Israel is using AI systems to identify targets, new battle management systems to shorten the sensor-to-shooter cycle, new loitering munitions to engage the enemy and new high-tech armored personnel carriers to get there. But soldiers need to be on the ground, fighting with the basics: a ceramic vest, a tactical helmet and a M4 carbine.

Over the last few weeks, the IDF has had two full divisions inside Gaza, operating something like 40,000 troops on the ground at certain points, constituting one of the largest ground forces in modern warfare.

The long-term consequences of this for Israel and the world will be dramatic. In Israel, there is already talk of the need to return mandatory military service to three years and for the military to even grow in numbers. If people thought a few years ago that the IDF was going to become a professional army that would be smaller and technological, today that is no longer the case.

As a result, the military is looking for ways to attract new recruits from the ultra-Orthodox community which has traditionally been exempt from military service. Already, IDF recruiters are going to pre-military academies and asking students to cut their studies short and enlist now when they are desperately needed.

This war will change not only the way Israel secures its borders, but also the whole approach to the land-for-peace negotiations of the past. High fences, Israel has learned, do not make good neighbors. Instead, Israel will need to deploy larger forces along its southern and northern borders to ensure that Hamas or Hezbollah never again try anything like they did on Oct. 7. The idea that Israel will one day withdraw from territory like the Jordan Valley is now immediately dismissed.

For some parts of the world, like Europe, the last two years of the Russian invasion of Ukraine have led to an understanding that threats exist and so does the need to invest in arms. What the Hamas war teaches us, though, is that defensive systems will not be enough. Countries need fighting forces that can maneuver, quickly deploy, and move in close quarters to neutralize enemies.

This does not mean that all technology is useless. Israel, for example, has been using its tanks effectively in Gaza these last few weeks thanks to the Trophy active-protection system that can detect and intercept incoming anti-tank missiles and RPGs, a preferred Hamas weapon.

In other words, while technology can be an assistant that helps conventional militaries adapt to new battlefields, it cannot replace simple soldiers. Boots will still be needed on the ground.

Yaakov Katz is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), a former editor of the Jerusalem Postand the author of three books on Israeli military affairs, including "Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower."

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.