In April 2018, the leading Israeli Hebrew-language news provided a rare window onto a scenario the IDF is planning for: fighting Iran’s proxy force, the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, far from Israel’s borders, in Lebanon.
The force from the 101st Paratroopers Brigade advances by the light of a full moon in southern Lebanon. The soldiers are attacked at close quarters. Some are wounded and the battalion doctor is treating the injured. The orange lights blinking in the far ridgeline, south of them, are not in Israel. There is no reassuring sound of evacuating helicopters on the way. There is no other unit in the area. As their adrenaline subsides and the dawn breaks, the paratroopers start realizing: they are deep inside of Lebanon. They are on their own.
The last time Israel squared off in a full-scale war with Hezbollah was in 2006. Back then, Hezbollah was closer to a guerrilla force than an army, though it was armed with thousands of missiles that it rained on the towns and cities of northern Israel. In the years since, Hezbollah has become one of the strongest armies in the Middle East. And its fighters now have combat experience in Syria.
Hezbollah reportedly has more than 40,000 fighters and as many as 120,000 missiles in Lebanon, many with enough range to reach Israel’s major population centers. And Iran is the primary weapons supplier, funder, and commander of Hezbollah.
In the next war, as always, intelligence will be critical, and not just to locate missile launchers. Before those launchers can be rooted out, there is a crucial need for even more granular intelligence to solve a thorny prob- lem. How will Israeli ground forces (who will have parachuted or rolled deep into enemy territory with not much more than what they can carry on their backs) survive and fight for days and weeks?
A deciding factor in this conflict is whether these troops will be able to operate independently. The soldiers will have to find the food, medicines, and fuel they need in the local towns and villages around them. For that to happen, they will need to know where the markets, pharmacies, and gas stations are. Looking at aerial photos is not enough. They need to know which of these places are operating and stocked.
This problem presents an almost impossible intelligence challenge, one that in the summer of 2013 confounded Avi Simon, the officer in charge of a satellite imagery intelligence analysis unit. The Chief of Staff’s General Headquarters, the most senior command in the Israeli army, had assigned Simon the job of scanning 80 percent of northern Lebanon by the end of the year, to identify sources of supplies for troops on the ground. Six months into the job, Simon was nowhere near finishing the task and had nothing to show the high command.
Simon was a lieutenant colonel in Unit 9900, the full name of which is the Terrain Analysis, Accurate Mapping, Visual Collection and Interpretation Agency. It’s a mouthful but, in short, this unit trains analysts to make sense of the microscopic details in the millions of images gathered by
Israeli satellites, airplanes, and drones. Given the overwhelming amount of visual data, the unit’s engineers code algorithms to train computers to process and interpret the reams of data into actionable intelligence— everything from long stretches of desert to dense urban areas.
But there was a limit to what computers could do. Simon explained: “We are constantly scanning huge areas and trying to understand them—if there’s some orchard in Lebanon that’s not on the map or isn’t easily identifiable in the aerial footage, and you didn’t know about it and therefore didn’t plan around it … suddenly your tanks can’t maneuver around it.”
He rattled off other examples: “There’s a small stream that you thought was uncrossable for a vehicle, but then you realize that it is sometimes crossable. My normal analysts see the stream and just think, ‘It’s in the way.’ It takes an entirely different level of concentration to make sense of the tiniest degree of change—depending on the day or the hour of the day—in the size of the stream that may make the difference.”
Staring at aerial images for hours at a time and studying the minute details sitting in plain sight was too boring and too difficult for Unit 9900’s analysts. Then a new cadre of cadets finished their training course and joined Simon’s unit. “I was getting a lot of heat from the general. We thought there was no way we’d finish on time,” he told us. “But then, four months later, it was complete. My commanders were astounded.”
Senior brass from different intelligence units started visiting, wanting to meet the team that had pulled this off. “The commanders didn’t realize they were talking to a special group. All they knew was that one minute we were flailing and the next it was done,” Simon said. The special group was part of a program called Roim Rachok, which in Hebrew means “to see far.” The Roim Rachok soldiers didn’t understand what the fuss was about; they had been given a mission and they did it. But as Simon told us, “All these cadets that solved the impossible had one thing in common: they were on the autism spectrum.”
Excerpted from The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. Copyright © by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Avid Reader Press.