Podcast: Unpacking Israel's Air Campaign Against Hezbollah

Robert Wall: Welcome everyone to this special episode of Check 6, where we will talk about what is going on in the Middle East. We are bringing you this episode, not just because of the dramatic developments, but also to let you hear from Steve Trimble, Aviation Week's Senior Defense Editor, who just got back from a trip to Israel. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for defense and space. 

Steve, you were there in the opening days of this cycle of fighting, talking with representatives from the Israel Defense Forces, industry and academics. Can you give our listeners sense of what you observed?

Steve Trimble: So I was there last week. I'm talking about September 16th to 20th, and I was part of a group that was organized by the American Middle East Press Association. 

And going into it, I wasn't sure what exactly we were going to get, but it turned out to be quite informative and illuminating. In many ways, it was not government speak. We got a diverse array of opinion. Everybody from people who want peace at all costs, including some retired generals and those that want war really at all costs at this point, as a way of achieving Israel's security objectives.

We roamed all over the place, went down to the Gaza border, observed just by happenstance an artillery strike in Gaza while we were there, seeing the sort of buildings on the fringe of, I guess the outer eastern side of the Khan Yunis area. Everything was, from what I could tell, was just rubble at that point, or just heavily damaged buildings, hopefully uninhabited. 

Then going north to the Lebanese border, we were there on the day that a whole bunch of, at least hundreds anyway of Hezbollah pagers started exploding on the other side of the border. Obviously, we're certainly not aware of it while it was happening, but started seeing the tweets and messages and news reports about that as we were going from place to place, visiting Israeli units, an Iron Dome battery, going to a think tank to get a good briefing on Hezbollah missile capabilities and rocket capabilities, and talking to Israeli officers now massing on the border. And yeah, and a lot of other, we visited Israel aerospace industries and talked to other retired generals. Just got a very wide and comprehensive, I think, view of the Israeli side of the situation really from all perspectives.

Robert Wall: And when you were up there, you saw, I mean, one of the big issues of course, at least on the Lebanon border is around the 60,000 Israelis that have had to leave their homes up there, pushed south because of rocket attacks from Hezbollah, which is basically what the Israeli government says is what's sparking its desire for the operation to allow them to return. But you had a really good sense where you were about that reality. Maybe tell our listeners about that a bit.

Steve Trimble: Yeah, so we did visit what they call a moshav, which is, it's a bit like a kibbutz, but it's not communal in nature, but it's a community, a small community, agricultural community near the border, literally in the shadow of the Lebanese border because there's a big ridge about two kilometers away, and at the top of the ridge is where the Lebanese border starts. So the side of the ridge facing us is Israel on the other side, and at the top is Lebanon. That village, Metzuba, had been hit by two Hezbollah rockets just two days before we got there. And I think it was two days after we departed, the village next door, basically about a half kilometer away was hit by another Hezbollah ammunition, and that's caused Israel to evacuate that entire area within about four or five kilometers of the border. All the communities that are there, it's totaled around the 60,000 people, although the number is quite hard to pin down, specifically. On the other side, it's also true, 100,000 Lebanese civilians have evacuated from the southern part of Lebanon, really, especially the area south of the Latani River.

And that was before the latest flare-up. That started really in the past week and a half, so even more people have fled from that area since then. And that evacuation issue is really the key driver of what we're seeing right now in the flare up of violence. 

While we were there on, I think it was Tuesday, I guess it was September 17th, I think it was, the war cabinet in Israel added a new objective for the war. This war that really from the Israel standpoint began on October 7th of last year with the Hamas attack into Israel. But this new objective was to return those evacuees, those 60,000 evacuees to their homes safely, which means somehow they've got to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets into that area. Both unguided rockets, anti-tank missiles, mortars, and these exploding drones. And some of these communities have been essentially reduced to rubble on the Israeli side of the border, way up in the sort of northeast pocket near the Golan Heights. That's really the situation where it stands today.

And how does Israel go about doing that? Does it go beyond this current airstrike campaign, this mass airstrike campaign, both at really all over Lebanon from the Beqaa Valley in the northeast to southern Lebanon to Beirut or is it necessary as Israel started messaging yesterday that it may be necessary to maneuver forces, ground forces into South Lebanon, at least South Lebanon, perhaps even further, to clear these missile and rocket firing teams out of the border as perhaps the only way to make it safe. Of course, that expands the work considerably, while at the same time they're still dealing with a situation in Gaza that is not settled. Hamas has been broken in Gaza, they're incapable of operating in large formations, but they still are the most powerful force over the Gaza population, and they're still operating at the small unit level according to the Israeli military officials we talked to.

Robert Wall: Steve, let's talk a bit about the air campaign, especially the one that's now been unfolding in Lebanon. You've alluded to it. I mean, the pace of operations is tremendous. It's quite stunning, actually. And also the targeting seems, you can argue about what, whether it's precise or necessarily, but it's certainly some of the videos that are being released, we see huge secondary explosions. They've gone after some high-profile leadership targets within Hezbollah. What strikes you about this? The Israeli Air Force has a history of having a lot of credibility, but this does seem to show a level of effort we haven't really seen.

Steve Trimble: It really shows the capacity and depth of the Israeli Air Force that is pretty remarkable given the size of Israel. I mean, you got to think about Israel as their population is about the same as Austria or Hungary. It's a bit less than the Czech Republic or Sweden. But as they've demonstrated now in the real world, and they have previously done this in exercises, that they can, as they did on September 23rd, they possess the capability of striking 1,500 targets within a single day with 2,000 munitions launched from hundreds of combat aircraft or fighters.

And if you break that down, that implies a much wider capability, especially in a time critical targeting scenario as most of these cases are, where you've got the ISR and targeting, the reconnaissance targeting system in place to find these targets, very fleeting targets and a command and control system that can ingest that data, process it, feed it to the right platforms with the right munitions in the right places at the right times, and do that on the order of hundreds of targets per hour a year into a war and then keep doing it day after day.

There's not a lot of air forces in the world that are capable of it, certainly none at Israel's size. Even Swedish Air Force has got some pretty good capabilities, but they do not have that kind of capacity. So that's really what stands out so far. The question is whether that's enough to achieve this objective of making that border area in the north of Israel safe from rocket and missile fire from the Lebanese side of the border by these Hezbollah paramilitary forces. And that is very much an open question and a subject of quite a bit of debate that we heard while we were in Israel.

Robert Wall: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because over the last few years, it feels like when we've gone to defense exhibits, the Israeli booths more and more have gone away from showing kits to showing networks, and it almost feels like we're now seeing where that was all headed. So very interesting. But I also wanted to let our listeners in on, before we started recording, you made the point about Israel's conflicts are not just interesting because they're inherently interesting and the region is so...

Steve Trimble: Dynamic.

Robert Wall: ... dynamic, thank you. Exactly. But also because it really tends to shape military thinking more broadly. And I always think about Israel wasn't the first to do UAVs, but they were first to really embrace UAVs, and everyone's decades later jumped on the baton wagon, of course, now that it's like, yeah, who doesn't have a UAV now? So I'm curious, if you look at the campaign, what do you think is the thing that people will take away and saying, this has wider resonance, this has resonance beyond the Middle East, potentially even in the conflicts in the Indo-Pacific?

Steve Trimble: Yeah, and this is how I wanted to focus our coverage in Aviation Week, is how this relates to the broader picture and the things I write about, especially even Indo-Pacific or Ukraine-Russia. And there's a lot of different threads to pull on there, but one that really sticks out to me is the anti-access issue and how Israel is dealing with a kind of anti-access issue. Now, it's not the same as say in the Indo-Pacific. It's not a multi-domain, anti-access issue. Hezbollah does not have an air defense complex. They don't have S-400s. They don't even have SA-2s, right? So the Israeli Air Force can roam pretty much at will. I mean, Hezbollah does have MANPADS and other types of those very basic capabilities, but nothing that really threatens the type of advanced platforms that Israel has. So that's the air domain.

But the ground domain looks a lot different. And this is something that became very clear during the 2006 war in Lebanon, the last time Israel invaded southern Lebanon. These missile firing teams of Hezbollah make conspicuous ground maneuver forces quite vulnerable. When you think about the Hezbollah side, these are teams that they don't need conspicuous armored fighting vehicles to get around. They can use covert tunnels, they can use resonances, they can move in between houses. They pop up very quickly, maybe 30 seconds at most, launch their missiles or launch these rocket tubes and then just melt away, unless you can find them. So the debate for Israel has long been, it's not a new one, but it certainly has been a big issue lately, is how do you find, what's the best way to do address this anti-access problem? Is it these mass airstrikes or is a better way to do it relying on the ground forces and building up the ground forces with the capabilities because of their proximity to the shooters, to these Hezbollah missile firing teams, be able to detect them and respond to them much faster.

Now, when we talk to Israeli ground officers, they say the Israeli Air Force is very effective, but at the same time, they're further away. The situation, the picture they see is much more complex. The time it takes to coordinate and de-conflict those kinds of strikes, it just takes too long from the air. But you can do it much faster if you're on the ground, you've got the sensors, you've got the shooters, they're right there, and things happen much faster. At the same time, you're exposing your ground forces to these lethal attacks. So they've been reluctant to do that, and that's why they've spent, so they've made it such a big priority to build up this rather impressive from a military capability standpoint, no matter who side you're on, it's just an impressive military capability standpoint, this reconnaissance and airstrike complex that they've been displaying, as we've seen. When I think about it, it's not unlike that scenario and what to do about it.

This debate that I'm writing about in the Indo-Pacific Theater from the US Military's perspective of what to do if a war breaks out with China. China has the Rocket Force, thousands of long range missiles attached to mobile launch systems, and how do you... And that's their anti-access, aerial denial capability from an aero domain, maritime and land perspective. So how do you hunt down those complexes? How do you maintain custody of them? How do you keep track of them as they move around? And then when the decision is made to strike them, what is the best way to do it? Is it through an airborne platform at standoff or airborne platform at stand in range? Is it from ground long range artillery with hypersonic missiles or something like that? It is very much a very active debate. I'm sure we'll hear a bit more about that at AUSA coming up from the Army's side.

And it is completely unsettled at this point because no one's had to actually deal with this. Now, Israel, potentially we'll see this play out in Israel if as they've been messaging really within the past day. Today is September 26, the Thursday. So a day ago, the chief of the Israeli Defense Forces visited troops at the front line and suggested it may be necessary for them to enter Lebanon as a maneuver force to deal with these rocket attacks. And so again, we might see this issue sort of play itself out in Israel first before we see it in other places, and we'll learn what comes out of that.

Now, it is a very different scenario. It's a very different situation. It may not apply directly, but I'm sure there'll be lessons that will be observed and quite closely scrutinized by militaries all around the world on all sides about how that plays out. I think about what happened in 1973 and the Yom Kippur War, how that revealed that the inferior Egyptian Army when armed with surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank missiles are able to effectively, to a certain extent, but at least cause significant or disproportionately significant casualties on a sophisticated Israeli Air Force and Israel Tank Force, that it really changed how the entire West viewed modern armored combat and drove this whole investment, at least on the US side, in stealth and precision warfare and creating this very elaborate, reconnaissance, targeting strike complex that we have today.

Robert Wall: Yeah. I want to take one more moment here to ask you a bit of a question. I mean, if you look across both the conflict in Ukraine and now Israel, I mean, perhaps the most obvious realization is that arsenal depth really matters. You really need to go into these fights able to expend a tremendous amount of ammunition, missiles, air defense interceptors, whatever. I'm wondering though if you think there are other takeaways or to what extent, especially again, talking of Indo-Pacific, we always talk there about the tyranny of distance. And I think that also applies here a bit. The lessons from Ukraine don't translate necessarily to those distances.

You're not going to fly an FPV, first person drone from Guam to strike something in China.

And also Beirut flight out time isn't that far from Israel, very much different than a Pacific theater would be. So I'm just kind of wondering from your perspective, are there other observations where you would say, "Yeah, this actually matters to the Indo-Pacific as well," or, "Well, it applies, but it still needs something." For example, OODA Loop plus hypersonics might get you something similar. I'm just wondering, since you were thinking about the wider theater, what your observation would be.

Steve Trimble: Well, I mean, there's probably not a lot of brand new insights yet that we've heard. I mean, we've talked to an Israeli ground commander near the Lebanese border, and one of the big takeaways from that was something that we've known for a long time. Everybody's known, is that these first person exploding drones and those types of capabilities are a real problem. And you need something and to counter them. And he was saying, our problem is we retired what they called their mock bet self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, which are actually American systems that were adapted by the Israeli Defense Forces. And they don't have them, and they do have other means. They have directed energy type system. Well, they don't have iron beam yet, but they have high power microwaves. They have surface-to-air missiles, obviously Iron Dome itself. But he said that we still need something like that, mock that, and he said, "I really hope we get something like that urgently." Obviously, because especially if they move into southern Lebanon, something like that would very, very helpful to protect his troops.

So that's one thing. You mentioned capacity, and it's just impossible to underscore how important that is now. At every level, it is capacity of munitions, it's capacity of platforms, it's capacity of processing and command and control and capacity of reconnaissance and targeting. And then even further back, industrial capacity. When I visited the Iron Dome battery, one of the things I asked the interceptors, these sergeants essentially with their finger on the button, is we keep hearing in Ukraine and so many other places, this issue with shortages, they don't have the interceptors they need, the number they need to deal with the volume of fire they're getting. And nobody's getting more volume of fire than Israel right now. I mean, with the exception of Ukraine, but not in the same way because just these unguided rockets are just pervasive, 3,000 different attacks in the past year from Hezbollah into Northern Israel. And to my surprise, they said they don't have a problem with that. And they don't ask why or how that is the case. But they said, whenever we've needed the interceptors, they're always there.<\/p>

They have the Tamir interceptor that's supplied by Rafael and Raytheon and that they don't have an issue with supply of that. So that's important. And in talking to the Israeli industry while I was there, both with Rafael and IEI, it is remarkable to see how they've managed to weather the storm here. This is something I wrote about earlier this week. On the day of October 7th, the Israeli military called up 300,000 reservists. Many of them have stayed on duty since then, or at least shuttled through in several different tours. Of those, more than 300,000 reservists, about 15% came from the defense industry. Basically, reservists who were in their civilian lives were working for Rafael or IEI. And so in a single day, they lost 15% of their workforce and some of their most experienced people, and the people most attached to what's happening in the military currently. And this was at a time where arms sales internationally are at their peak and Israel's defense industry defends heavily.

Somewhere around 70 to 80% of their business comes from the export market, especially at IEI and there was going to be this new surge from the IDF. So how are they going to just cope with all that? And so far, I mean, based on all the financial results, the rating agency's reports, I mean, they're doing okay. They're keeping up with the demand. They're delivering things for the most part to their international customers without major complaints. There was one thing that happened in Brazil with the Spike missile delivery getting postponed, but wasn't clear what that was really about. And they're meeting their surge requirements for the IDF. They talked about, and this is something, I mean, it's sort of reminiscent of the US industrial base from World War II. This is a national emergency, it's a national crisis. And so the workforce just went to double shifts. Everybody who was doing a single shift, now you're doing two shifts, and it is a national industrial mobilization that I don't think we've seen since World War II, and you wonder how that would play out today in the US if it became necessary.

Something I was thinking about as they were sort of describing it, they've also hired a whole bunch of people, where they're getting them from, I don't know. What their capacity is for getting the things that are tripping up a lot of other companies, solid rocket motors, microelectronics, those kinds of things. Those are issues for everybody everywhere. But so far they seem to be holding up okay. But I think part of it is just because they have this sort of, we're in this kind of spirit, and even if what I encountered was an extreme diverse array of opinions about the government's policy and the government's legitimacy, as I talk to people around Israel, but it doesn't matter, they put that aside and just go to work. It was interesting to observe that in this context.

Robert Wall: I bet. Yeah. And I think some of the companies also re sacrificing maybe some margin by keeping extra stocks of this and that around, supplies just to make sure that they can keep on cranking out things for their home customers. But yeah, very interesting. 

Well, Steve, great. Thanks for that and glad you're back safely. And also, thanks to our listeners for your time. You can find all of Steve's reporting on Aviation Week Intelligence Network, and we're also going to have some of that password free for you on Aviationweek.com. Our producer, Guy Ferneyhough, will put a link in the show notes. Thanks Guy. And we also look forward to hosting you again in the future on another episode of Check 6 on Israel,  the Middle East, or any other topic.