(Israel Hayom) Yoav Limor - Israel's operational intelligence has been undergoing a dramatic process in recent years. No longer will commanding officers go out to fight relying on shreds of intelligence and what they see through their binoculars. The next war will be based more significantly upon intelligence, and will allow each force to know what it faces in every sector. A commander who must fight in a particular village in southern Lebanon, for example, will receive more than maps and current aerial photographs (rather than ones that were last updated some years before, as happened in 2006), in color. He will also be given pinpoint intelligence about the enemy and the various threats in the sector - and also about the civilian population concentrations so that he may avoid harming civilians as much as possible. New technology allows an abundance of information in real time from many sources. In general, it can be used to transfer any bit of information that is gathered by any source to any screen of any commanding officer anywhere. The result is a coherent picture in which the commander has all the information about our own troops and about the enemy. The company commander can receive on his laptop, in the field, information and updates, and the force will have a color printout of a current aerial photograph of the village - with all the threats. Since technical malfunctions or cyber attacks could disrupt plans, the troops are drilled carefully in "intelligence blindness" to prevent commanders from developing a dangerous addiction to the intelligence.
2014-04-22 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive