BRUSSELS–Only a week before Hamas militants breached the Gaza boundary fence, an Israeli one-star general was briefing NATO’s most senior military officer on the nation’s seemingly state-of-the-art defenses.
BRUSSELS–Only a week before Hamas militants breached the Gaza boundary fence, an Israeli one-star general was briefing NATO’s most senior military officer on the nation’s seemingly state-of-the-art defenses.
Walking through Re’im Camp in southern Israel, Israeli troops briefed Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch chairman of the NATO military committee, on everything they had arrayed along the 32-mile border to stop an invasion: Drones. Cameras. Artificial intelligence. Robots. The tall wall ran into the earth–with seismic sensors that could detect if someone was digging under it.
The Gaza Division of the Israeli Defense Forces had once occupied the 141-square-mile strip of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt. The division had been preparing for an invasion by Hamas. The army had been waiting for this moment. Just days after the same Israeli soldiers briefed Dutch Admiral, the NATO military hierarchy’s top dog, they now fight for their life.
Bauer was shocked at how Hamas managed to avoid Israel’s massive surveillance system. Hamas was forced to place paragliders in open space to prepare them for the launch, according to Bauer. The militant group also had to place rocket launchers outside in order to fire them.
For NATO, which is doubling down on artificial intelligence, cyberdefense, and new technology that can connect alliance commanders in Belgium with shooters on the eastern flank border with Russia, the attacks were a wake-up call.
““There was no notice,” Bauer stated in an interview conducted on Thursday, between NATO defence ministerial meeting. “What does it mean if you trust automation or trust capabilities, autonomous systems or AI, or the combination of it all in such a way, and still everybody was surprised?”
None of the more than half-dozen NATO officials and U.S. and European diplomats that Foreign Policy spoke to was jumping to conclusions about how it happened. The gruesome pictures that flashed on the TVs in the entire building, and the fact that neither the United States nor Israel’s intelligence agencies were able to detect any signs of an attack, prompted NATO headquarters to do a collective self-examination.
At a time when the NATO alliance was in Brussels, the war took all the oxygen from the air. One Nordic official said, under condition of anonymity: “The focus is shifting” as the news stations flashed in the background from the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky walking past the headquarters of the alliance to the wall-towall coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas.
And at a time when NATO is trying to help supercharge the trans-Atlantic defense industry to produce more ammunition and smart bombs–and seal itself off from Russian disinformation and cyberattacks–Hamas’s attacks, which breached the Israeli border wall at nearly two dozen points with car bombs and explosive-wielding motorcyclists, left some in the alliance worried about leaning too far in on artificial intelligence.
“How do we team up the humans and the software to create an augmented effect while not losing control of the situation?” asked a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the alliance.
NATO is going all-in on advanced technologies, tapping start-ups and the private sector to bolster its abilities in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, sensing, and surveillance. As the recent surprise attack against Israel showed, even low-tech military solutions are capable of defeating high-tech forces.
Hamas is using irregular tactics, such as stripping water pipes out of the ground and converting them into rockets, digging tunnels, and buying off-the-shelf drones. “A lot of technology they’re using is not new or groundbreaking,” said the senior NATO official. “It’s what people have in their home kitchen drawer that they buy from Alibaba.”
It may be too early to learn the lessons from a war that’s less than a week old. But Bauer, the NATO military committee chairman, said that war-fighting organizations will have to own up to their faults.
“We’re always willing to look at our performance, and the reason for that is because if we fail, there’s a lot of people killed,” said Bauer. We owe the families of the dead and wounded soldiers to investigate what went wrong. Why did it go wrong? What could have been done better?”
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