DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis October 7, 2012,
However Israeli official spokesmen present the incident of Saturday, Oct. 6, the penetration of Israeli air space by a large unmanned helicopter should not have been allowed to happen. The surprise interloper should have been shot down before spending nearly half an hour over southern Israel. The incident showed ID intelligence and command not up to handling enemy surprises, even after countless drills and exercises.
Four months ago, on July 20, Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech, “The resistance movement will surprise Tel Aviv in any future war.”
Hizballah with Iranian backing almost certainly proved its point Saturday, very likely in collaboration with its Palestinian ally, Hamas.
Our intelligence experts note that before the Israeli Air Force fighters scrambled to shoot it down, the intruder would have had enough time for its surveillance equipment to beam to its Iranian control station, wherever it was, the electronic signatures of US and Israeli military installations within its purview in the South and the Negev.
This was a major lapse.
The alien aircraft should have been intercepted the moment it flew in from the Mediterranean and entered the skies of the Gaza Strip. By then, it was clearly seen heading toward Beersheba. Had there been weapons aboard, the incident would have ended in a worse disaster, reminding Israel of its worst nightmare: an Iranian plane flying over with a nuclear bomb.
As it is, the sophisticated aerial surveillance vehicle was able to cover the space over the IDF’s southern facilities, the town of Beersheba and the Israeli Air Force base at Nevatim before it was shot down over the Yatir forest south of Mt. Hebron. Its primary missions may have been to record the electronic signatures of the Dimona nuclear reactor’s air defense systems and the American X-band radar station in the Negev, which is linked to the US X-band station in Turkey. Together, they are the “forward eyes” of the joint US-Israeli shield against Iranian ballistic missile attack.
If the intruder came to spot the gaps in that shield, it would have succeeded.
It is therefore important in this context to recall a more recent and explicit threat, this one by Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s ground forces, who said on Sept. 23 that his country was not waiting to be attacked but ready to carry out preemptive operations against the US and Israel.
The aerial overflight Saturday may well have been a preparatory step for such an attack.
Tehran would also have noted the time lapse before Israel acted: The IDF asked the Defense Minister Ehud Barak what to do instead of acting at once and Barak passed the buck to the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
They decided initially to down helicopter by electronic means and capture it intact in an attempt to establish who sent it and study its systems. However, the Iranian controllers fought back – hence the cyber battle rocking back and forth over southern Israel for nearly half an hour – before shooting it down.
The image the IDF spokesman put out of a ball of fire in the sky was misleading. On its way down to earth, the vehicle broke up into fragments large enough to offer up important secrets to Israel’s military researchers.
On Saturday, Israel’s electronic warfare systems were fully operational and effective. However, Israel’s leaders were struck dumb and caught unawares by Iran’s audacity in springing on them an overt act of belligerence against their own and American military installations housed in the Negev. Israel officials have vowed to respond to an obvious act of war.
Netanyahu and Barak are too busy destroying Jewish outposts and homes in the middle of the night to worry about a UAV drone taking intelligence over Israel. They are a dismal failure when it comes to defending Israel.
dweller Said:
stealth drone electronically without damage and got the fiberglass stealth technology from that. It appears that their abilities overrode those of the americans and Israelis in the battle of controlling both drones.
@ Bernard Ross:
Back-channel discussions, inter alia, betw Jerus & DC (or for that matter, betw Jerus & Tehran!). Who knows?
I mean, “what political motive,” for example, would’ve kept Arafat alive so long? More grunts than a camel’s tail has fleas had had him squarely in their sights & could’ve put him down w/ nothing more than a 2-cm tug of an index finger.
— Every PM since Levi Eshcol had the oppty to order a hit on his miserable butt; yet they all (apparently) turned it down. . . .
Patience. We’re probably going to hear all kinds of stories till this thing shakes out.
Right; though I would tend to doubt that Iran has ventured successfully into I-T territory where IDF hasn’t yet explored.
Yes, but Gaza is densely populated. NOT what one would call “safe.”
And then there would be the political fallout.
I’d reserve judgment for the moment.
dweller Said:
Possibly but I dont think likely, what political motive would trump downing it?
dweller Said:
not apparently the entire flight, I read that it had come down the coast and eluded radar and was discovered to have the stealth property fiberglass of the US drone that the Iranians were gifted. also, that the IDF were trying, and failing, to seize electronic control. That it was during this period that it traversed Israeldweller Said:
Kind of risky, in WMD times, to assume one knows it all, that the enemy could not have devised a system to elude detection. I am always reading how something was not known or taken into consideration(eg the stealth material).
dweller Said:
Possibly but unlikely,it was over the med and gaza and they could have shot it down there if what they say is true. Sounds like a cover for an error. Thesee are the same people who keep telling everyone that they have everything in place to deal with any situation and then a simple thing like this shows up. I doubt they would just accept egg in their face.
@ Bernard Ross:
Possibly they wanted to allow for a political assessment before proceeding.
Yoav Mordechai (IDF spokesman) says they were tracking it the entire time of its flight.
Perhaps they had sensing systems capable of determining (among other things) whether it was armed?
Once the drone was destroyed there would be no intel to acquire from it.
Seems possible that they deliberately waited for it to pass over a relatively “safe” area before taking it out (Yatir Forest, northern Negev)
— to avoid harm to more heavily populated districts.
HUH??? (keystone cops in action?)
Is it systems or people that are the problem?