Opinion: Just another piece of kit? UAS in the Gaza conflict

While the conflict has largely been kept to the realm of “conventional” arms, with Israel leveraging its immense military might to mobilise, hunt down and prosecute strikes in response to the 7 October surprise attacks by Hamas, uncrewed and autonomous systems have come to the fore for both sides.

For Hamas, the growing proliferation of commercial, off-the-shelf drones and links to established autonomous systems powerhouse Iran has provided the insurgency with a powerful force multiplier to counter Israel’s conventional military power.

Meanwhile, for Israel, uncrewed and autonomous systems have been used to leverage and enhance the already lethal conventional capabilities and provide enhanced support for special operations forces leading the efforts to hunt down Hamas fighters and rescue Israeli civilian hostages taken on 7 October.

For both sides, these platforms provide varying advantages and importantly for the rest of the world an inside look at when at one potential future of modern conflict.

Levelling the playing field

When compared to Israel, Hamas is a featherweight power, relying on tried-and-true methods of guerilla warfare to level the playing field, while also embracing some less-than-savoury tactics involving human shields which complicate the targeting decisions of Israeli forces.

Hamas has extended their tried-and-true tactics, Hamas is leveraging commercially available, off-the-shelf autonomous systems to conduct a range of operations against Israeli forces, ranging from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and dreaded kamikaze attacks to level the playing field.

The controversial Palestinian organisation commenced their surprise attack on Israel with an opening salvo of 35 “single-use” kamikaze-style uncrewed aerial vehicles to confuse and destroy elements of Israel’s extensive border communications network, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras, and destroyed many the remotely-controlled machine gun emplacements designed to pin down and prevent ground incursions from afar.

In doing so, Hamas seized the initiative and caught Israel off guard, paving the way for a coordinated air, ground, and sea invasion. These comparatively “cheap” platforms cost at the upper limit about US$6,500 ($9,899) and proved incredibly lethal against hard and soft targets across Israel.

Hamas has successfully utilised a host of small, cost-effective platforms, ranging from essentially jerry-rigged, commercially available quadcopters to more specialised, mass-produced “military-grade” loitering munitions provided by Iran.

The success of these platforms has revealed, in much the same way as the Ukrainian conflict has, that conventional military capabilities are vulnerable to these cheap, replaceable platforms.

This has presented an immense problem for Israel, despite its immense investment in multi-million or multi-billion-dollar defensive systems like the vaunted Iron Dome and ground-based “active protection systems” or APS for their deployed forces.

Catching up, but still a while to go

There can be no doubt that Israel is a conventional and nuclear power, filling a niche role in the global power paradigm. The envy of many of its neighbouring powers, Israel has been forced to develop formidable defensive capabilities. It has emerged as a hub of defence innovation, yet Hamas’ sneak attack on 7 October revealed that even Israel’s power and intelligence have limits.

However, Israel has leveraged its history as a powerhouse of defence innovation to utilise a range of platforms, like the Elbit Hermes 900 at the upper scale to provide continuous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support to ground troops, alongside reports of the armed, commercially available quadcopters to navigate the labyrinthine tunnels beneath Palestinian population centres.

Israel has also utilised cutting-edge swarm capabilities, like the Legion-X family of small, quadcopter “swarm drones” which are designed to be “adaptive, complex, collective behaviours for intelligent movement, decisions, and interactions with the environment” and be capable of fully autonomous operation.

These soldier portable systems provide the Israeli military with increased flexibility and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to keep their human operators safe in contested and congested urban and subterranean environments.

When combined with Israeli ground forces, and active protection systems like the Trophy APS, these capabilities go a long way to reclaiming some of the advantages taken by Hamas’ uncrewed and autonomous systems, but there is more to be done it seems.

While autonomous and uncrewed systems can and will continue to play an important role in the future of warfare, the very real moral and ethical questions around their use and the technology that underpins them will continue to rage.

It is important for countries like Australia that we learn the lessons of these new platforms and technologies as they are presented but avoid falling into the trap of the “new and shiny” toy while neglecting other capabilities and platforms.

Importantly, we can’t depend on these platforms to be our silver bullet or our one-stop shop “wunderwaffe” as is traditional in Australian defence thinking, rather we need to look at these platforms and technologies as a critical component of a larger, more balanced and lethal ecosystem of defence capabilities.