Israel’s Tactics May Point to Future of Warfare

One of America’s top generals has offered an assessment of how the lesson from Israel’s war with Iran and the war in Ukraine is changing the modern battlefield. Retired Gen. Phillip Breedlove, who commanded NATO forces in Europe and now teaches at Georgia Tech, believes that air power was the key to the successful military campaign that Israel waged against Iran.

He told Charles Shapiro at the World Affairs Council in Atlanta that air superiority was a “game changer” for Israel. They suppressed Iran’s air defenses and then proceeded “disassembling the Iranian military in detail.”

“It’s almost comical to watch what’s went on, on Fox and CNN,” Breedlove commented. “The Israelis are plinking all these airplanes, plink, plink, and just using what I think is the small diameter bombs, just eliminating the Iranian military and all the other facilities that support them, and this is what happens when you own air superiority.”

Maintaining their control of the skies over Iran made it possible for Israel to destroy what’s been estimated to be two-thirds of the mobile missile launchers that Iran had counted on to help retaliate against Israel. Even though Iran had thousands of missiles at the ready, they were unable to use many of them when their mobile missile force was largely destroyed. What happened in Iran is in sharp contrast to what Breedlove believes has happened in Ukraine, where both the Ukrainians and the Russians are unable to dominate the war in the air.

The result is a conflict where neither side can quickly make gains on the ground. Casualties on both sides have mounted as the war continues into its third year. It has cost Russia, especially, Breedlove believes, with hundreds of thousands of dead in just the last year with little to show for that effort.

“Russia has been unable to fight a war of maneuver and unable to employ air power to advantage itself in this war,” Breedlove says, “and so, this war has gone backwards. We’re fighting on the ground more like we did in World War I with artillery barrages and traditional-based warfare, grinding people down. They’re throwing bodies at their problems, like in the last year, 400,000 lost to Russia, and they’ve gained less than two-thirds of one percent of Ukrainian land for that loss of life.”

Breedlove, who recently returned from a five-week trip to Europe where he discussed military strategy and the impact of technology on warfare, is particularly impressed with the advances that have been made in what he terms, “the sub tactical level of air power,” which is the use of drones launched at close range. They have a flight time of minutes and often are difficult to defend against.

He’s been particularly impressed by the Ukrainian attack deep inside Russia in which drone strikes were successfully launched June l against that country’s strategic bomber fleet. The coordinated attacks by Ukraine’s Security Service, called Operation Spider Web, destroyed perhaps as much as one-third of Russia’s most important attack aircraft. The attack on five airbases was launched by relatively cheap drones from trucks at close range to the bases.

Similarly, the Mossad reportedly worked for years developing a plan to smuggle small drones and other precision weapons into Iran. Israel’s military used the latest artificial intelligence tools to select the military air defenses to target. The same program was used to eliminate Iran’s top tier of military commanders and nuclear scientists in the opening hours of the conflict.

In the future, military forces he believes must be smarter and capable of using all the tools that technology has provided. Future battles will increasingly be fought with sophisticated electronic tools that are capable of providing real-time analysis of all the options that commanders need to succeed.

The effectiveness of operations by Israel and Ukraine has sent military strategists back to the drawing board, Breedlove believes. Surprise attacks behind enemy line like those in Russia and in Iran might point to our own vulnerability.

“I can guarantee you there’s a lot of base commanders in the Army, Navy, and Air Force that are thinking about what a tractor trailer load or a sea land container load of drones could do to them right now. They are out there trying to think through this sub tactical drone problem. Imagine a sea land container, one of the millions that pass in and out of Norfolk, where our Atlantic fleet is sitting, primarily, or into San Diego, which is where our Pacific fleet is based, and all of a sudden, these things pop out and fly. The Spiders Web operation and what you just saw happen with Israel in Iran has given us a wakeup call.”