JERUSALEM — As Israeli troops are increasingly targeted by small, first-person-view (FPV) drones in Lebanon, the Israeli government has called on the nation’s defense industry to quickly provide troops with effective defenses.
The problem of FPV drones, often controlled through fiber-optic cables and therefore virtually jam-proof, has grown so large that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly called an urgent meeting Wednesday to discuss solutions.
“The drone threat has become one of the most urgent operational challenges faced by maneuvering and defensive forces today,” Michal Mor, CEO of Israeli defense firm Smart Shooter, told Breaking Defense. “These drones are accessible, inexpensive, highly maneuverable, and increasingly difficult to defeat, especially as fiber-optic-guided drones enter the battlefield and prove immune to electronic jamming.”
FPV drones, and often grisly videos showcasing their lethality, have become ubiquitous in the battlefields of Ukraine, but former senior Israeli defense official Menahem Landau said they’re relatively new to the Middle East, where he says Hezbollah has made use of them against the Israel Defense Force.
This “new capability,” he told Breaking Defense, “is cheap, and they train the right people to use this quite easily.” Landau previously headed the Israel Ministry of Defense’s UAV and Drones Branch and is now with the firm Caveret Group.
The Alma Research and Education Center, which covers security threats to northern Israel, published a report on May 11 noting that since the beginning of Israel’s recent ground offensive in Lebanon, “over 80 [FPV] explosive drones have been launched at IDF forces in recent weeks, of which about 15 hit and killed 4 soldiers and a civilian, and caused injuries to dozens of soldiers.”
The attacks by FPV drones on IDF positions have been published by Hezbollah and circulated on social media, including a video of an alleged attack on an Iron Dome battery. In the first two weeks of May there have been daily drone incidents, although the IDF does not provide data on which are FPV drones.
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IDF Res. Lt. Col. Sarit Zehavi, Alma’s founder and president, said that, according to its recent report, about 20 percent of drones strike their intended targets. They are tactical, rather than strategic tools, she said — for now.
“The problem will become strategic if Hezbollah can launch a few 10s [i.e swarms of dozens] of these at the same time; we saw that happen in Ukraine,” she told Breaking Defense.
To protect against the threat, Landau said Israel will need a “full range of capabilities, such as radar and electro-optic and acoustic [sensors], and electronic warfare, and fuse them in real time at the edge where soldiers are on the front.”
“Sometimes it’s a physical countermeasure such as wires where fiber optic cable falls on ground [and] is tangled and breaks and loses communication. Or you use a kind of net, a cage or go inside an armored vehicle,” he said. The enemy operator has vulnerabilities, Landau notes, because the operator has to be tethered to the drone and focused on its movements.
Like Sarit, he cautioned about the difference between the tactical threat and the larger picture. “Everyone understands that fiber optic drones won’t win the war,” he said. “It’s something you need to be aware of and give soldiers the understanding they can handle the threat.”
As for helping the soldiers, on May 3, Netanyahu said that weeks earlier he had “ordered the establishment of a special project to thwart the drone threat,” noting that the solutions will “take time.”
In the meantime, like Ukrainian companies before them, a handful of Israeli firms are offering their tech.
Mor’s Smart Shooter Smash fire control system, for instance, was captured on video that circulated online, appearing to aid a soldier in taking out an incoming drone with rifle shots. The AI-aided system, mounted on the rifle, is designed to identify and track targets, allowing the soldier to fire when there’s a high chance of hitting.
Smart Shooter pointed out that their systems are already being used “by the IDF and by defense, homeland security, and border security forces worldwide, including in the United States, the UK, Germany, NATO member countries, and additional allied nations.” (The company recently received a $10.7 million follow-up award from the US Army.)
Neri Zin, CEO of Axon Vision, told Breaking Defense his company “recently completed operational demonstrations and evaluation activities of [the company’s] EDGE ClearSky [system] with a leading defense force,” including how it worked against FPV drones. Axon says its ClearSky tech is part of the company’s “EDGE AI family of computer vision solutions, designed to enable rapid detection, identification, and interception of aerial threats directly from armored platforms” using thermal sensing and “AI-driven real-time processing.” Zin declined to name the “leading defense force.”
“When Hezbollah started using these drones, Israel was caught unprepared,” Aviv Shapira, CEO and co-founder of drone-maker Xtend. “A significant portion of existing counter-drone capability is built around detecting or disrupting signals.”
Xtend, instead, uses its own interceptor drones to “detect, pursue and capture a hostile FPV before it reaches its target.” One such system, the company said, is the Scorpio 1000 and it is integrated with ParaZero’s DefendAir net-launching system.
Shapira said together they can track, pursue and then deploy the system to “capture hostile drones while limiting collateral damage.”
However the IDF chooses to defend against the rising tide of FPV drones, it’ll likely be with several, layered defenses.
“The lesson learned is to bring more capabilities to the warriors on the frontline,” Alma’s Zehavi said. “In air defense, nothing provides 100 percent defense.”