Thursday, August 24, 2006

Important, Very, Analysis of Military Performance

Ben Moores is a defence analyst with a specialisation in European defence electronics and Iranian military capability and the following is the outline of his attempt to assess the Israeli Defence Forces' performance in round 1 of the recent war, based on a variety of published sources.


IAF Performance

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has come in for considerable criticism during the conflict. UAV Applications

This conflict was the first to have both sides make use of offensive UAVs. UCAV, (specifically IAI's Herons), were seen to be repeatedly engaging targets with Spike and Hellfire missiles.

Air Defence Performance

The Rocket Campaign

Ground Operations

Naval Operations

Conclusions

In conclusion Hezbollah have proven themselves to be a professional, dedicated and organised force, whose prime position, equipment and personnel seems to have been squandered for two captives. The Israeli military also seems to have been misused for two of the three weeks of the conflict. The air force attracted much negative publicity for expending large amounts of ordinance for little apparent gain. The regular army forces were initially committed to attacks against superior forces that were dug in- for no apparent strategic gain.

There are a number of technical military questions that have come out of this conflict. The failure of Hezbollah in the air war asks questions about the quality of Iranian air defence capability. The Israeli army needs to sit down and examine exactly how it lost so many tanks and will presumably speed up and increase the size of the current program for armour self protection suite that is being fought between Rafael with Trophy and IMI with Iron Fist. IFF has shown itself to be of vital importance with an Israeli warship, 10 Israeli soldiers and an AH-64D all apparently lost due to poor IFF (the bill for this alone would pay for an IFF program) Another interesting question is why, with Hezbollah using Iranian Electronic Industries 1950s era analogue VHF radios why Tadiran Jammers were not able to break down Hezbollah command and control. Finally, a review of the MTHEL and ballistic missile defence programs needs to be made as none of them were able to influence the outcome of this conflict, a significant expense for no apparent gain.



Read it all here.

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