Top-notch intelligence

In recent years, Israel's operation intelligence has been undergoing a revolution that could transform the way Israeli military forces operate in the field • In the next war, troops will know exactly what they face in each sector.

Yoav Limor

Shaping the nature of the next war. An intelligence briefing | Photo credit: Ziv Koren

Very quietly, far from the public eye, Israel's operational intelligence has been undergoing a dramatic process in recent years that could change one of the best-known truths about war completely: the one stating that the battlefield is the kingdom of uncertainty.

This process, which is being revealed here for the first time, could lift a significant portion of the fog that accompanies every force that goes out to fight. Although question marks will remain, they will be accompanied by many more solid facts, the most important of them information about the location of the enemy and the various threats. No longer will commanding officers go out to fight with general information, 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.

This revolution, which will be called "operational intelligence" here, is mainly the result of the failure that accompanied the intelligence that was provided to the fighting forces during the Second Lebanon War. This took the form not only of meager information that was gathered about a few hundred incriminating targets, which were all destroyed during the first two days of the war, but also tactical intelligence that remained in the safes of the army's Intelligence Directorate and was not given to the units that were fighting on the ground in real time. "In the Second Lebanon War, we realized that we were not functioning sufficiently as the army's intelligence officers," said Brig. Gen. Eli Ben-Meir, the army's chief intelligence officer. "We were good intelligence officers for the political echelon, but far less good for the army itself. The battalion commander isn't interested in what [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah is thinking, but in where the enemy is located."

The result was prolonged marching in place for the field units in southern Lebanon on the one hand, and encountering blood-drenched battles on the other. Precise intelligence would have prevented or certainly made a dramatic change in the bloody fighting in Wadi Saluki, during which Merkava tanks fell into an ambush of anti-tank rockets that took many soldiers' lives. "That could never happen today," says Col. Yehuda Fuchs, commander of the Nahal Brigade, which was one of the first to implement the new approach. "If I got almost zero intelligence so far, now I have a wealth of information that allows me to make the maximum use of my troops."

This process has two main stages -- before the battle and during it. The former includes the methodical transfer of all the information gathered on a day-to-day basis, in a Sisyphean effort and through an abundance of intelligence methods, to the commanding officers in the field. All the intelligence is shared with the division and brigade commanders, who can then match their operational plans with the information that is relevant to each area, with an emphasis on Lebanon and Gaza -- the two sectors where it is most likely that the army will have to fight. By way of illustration, and under restrictions that are well understood, we can say that 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. "Once, I would raise my binoculars over a village and see homes. Today I know about the variety of personnel concentrations inside the village," Fuchs says. "That enables me not only to plan better, but also to make better decisions in real time."

Awareness and technology

This information is not decentralized for all the forces, but rather kept only by the senior commanders. The lower-ranking commanders (battalion and company commanders) receive it only in general form so that they may make their plans without risking the intelligence that was gathered. They are given the full information only when they go out to battle, when they receive the precise data about the specific sector where they will be fighting. "This reduces the unknown about the battlefield significantly and allows the troops to be prepared for the specific threats that they face," says Ben-Meir.

The second stage of this process takes place during the fighting. As part of it, the force that is fighting is supposed to receive, online, relevant information about the enemy and the threats in the sector. For example, this will enable a brigade commander to ask to zoom in on the entrance to a village or a particular building so make sure that it contains no threats, and receive answers from intelligence sources within a short time. At the same time, all the information that is gathered in real time by all means of intelligence will be routed to him so that he can increase the force's effectiveness significantly while neutralizing as many of the threats as possible and avoiding harm to Israeli soldiers and innocent people on the other side.

These processes sound so obvious that one must wonder why they had to wait until now to be used. The answer is twofold: awareness and technology. It took the army years to free itself from outdated perceptions about intelligence (which was always seen as the one that was supposed to serve those in charge rather than the troops) and about the battlefield (that those who controlled it were the troops on both sides who fought fce to face, and intelligence was only a supporting player there).

The fact that Maj. Gen. Avi Kochavi, the current head of the army's Intelligence Directorate, came from the field units definitely helped to move the process forward. As the commander of the Paratroopers Brigade during Operation Defensive Shield, Kochavi walked among the walls of the casbah to reduce the unknown, about which he had been told that "between 200 and 2,000 terrorists" were there. The operational intelligence approach that he now leads will create a much clearer situation for those who inherit it. The second answer, technology, is even more significant. The passing of intelligence to the field, certainly during wartime, was clumsy and often impossible. New computer and command and control systems allow an abundance of information in real time from many sources. In general (under information security restrictions), they can be used to transfer any bit of information that is gathered by any source to any screen of any commanding officer anywhere -- on a fighter jet, in a tank or at the top of a hill in the field. When this information is entered into the intelligence systems that are being used to manage the battle, the result is a coherent picture in which the commander has all the information about our own troops and about the enemy. In this way, the company commander can receive on his laptop, in the field, information and updates that join the information with which he went out to battle, and the force will have a color printer that it can use to print out a current aerial photograph of the village -- with all the threats -- which will keep the unknown to a minimum.

Putting this new approach into effect required crossing quite a few restrictions and boundaries. Besides the built-in problem of information security, intelligence first of all had to create the information. That is the heart of the change: in parallel with the strategic intelligence, to collect relevant intelligence as well for the troops in the field; to develop means and recruit sources, run them continuously and create a flow of tactical intelligence. This is a Sisyphean, day-to-day effort that is much less exotic than intelligence about a large arms-smuggling operation or a change in Iran's nuclear program, but extremely important for managing the next war.

The next stage was connecting the systems, first of all within the army's Intelligence Directorate, so that the various units that gathered intelligence could "talk" to one another, on a single platform, and pass uniform, available information to the troops in the field and, beyond that, to the army, whose every branch -- ground, air, sea -- has its own systems for communications and command and control. To enable the complete flow of information, the teleprocessing department was brought in as a full partner in the process (alongside the Intelligence Directorate and the Ground Forces Branch, and the other branches and district commands to a lesser extent), and it is supposed to allow the systems to communicate with each other in a single language.

The final stage is making the information available to the troops in the field in real time, but also in the preparation processes. "The intelligence people come to the commanders in the field and implement learning processes with them in front of specific sectors," Ben-Meir says. "They learn the enemy and the threats together, and they enter all the information that has been collected into the operational plans so that they will be a better match for the reality that awaits the troops in real time in the field." As part of that effort, two "houses of study" have been established -- one in the Galilee Division, which is in charge of Lebanon, and one in the Gaza Division -- where commanding officers go and, together with intelligence officials, update the operational plans according to the intelligence that has been gathered.

Col. Fuchs says that this has led to a dramatic change in the plans of combat and even the training exercises themselves. "We still drill the troops for situations of uncertainty lest they become addicted to the intelligence, and also because we understand that in war, the situation changes and the enemy, too, changes its form and location," he says. "But the operational intelligence allows me to prepare my commanders so that they will know the enemy's approach, logic and background, as well as the rationale that governs the specific village where they are about to fight. Add to that the intelligence that is received, even if it is less than I would want, and they will run the battle much better than in the past."

One example of this, which also comes up in practice maneuvers, is the battle of Bint Jbeil during the Second Lebanon War, in which eight troops of the Golani Brigade were killed. It was obvious to the troops then that the enemy was in the area and that it was operating there to create friction that would expose them, so the troops went from house to house until it was attacked by surprise and hit. Under the new approach, troops operating in Bint Jbeil in the future will be able to get a far clearer picture of the field and the threats, and by using methods in real time -- including through intelligence officials who are stationed in combat units in training and in combat -- will be able to increase their effectiveness.

While officials of the army's Intelligence Directorate refuse to state the degree of intelligence precision that will be given to the troops about each sector, the drills proved that most of the information that will be provided to the troops in advance or in real time is of a high level of precision. Still, officials in both the Intelligence and Ground Forces branches know that the availability of the intelligence in the field during combat depends not only on the nature of the sources but also on the technology. Since 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, which could take the form of helplessness during battle.

Avoiding technology addiction

At the same time, and to reduce dependence on technology, the Intelligence Directorate is preparing an alternate plan for the hour of reckoning. All the intelligence that is accumulated by the various computer systems has a hard replacement that is kept in safes and will be given to the troops when necessary. Division and brigade commanders will receive an entire encyclopedia of their combat sector and the company commander will be given a pocket handbook that is updated periodically that contains aerial photographs of every building and as precise information as possible about the threats in the area. Just this backup requires an investment of millions of shekels per year, and the entire project requires tens of millions. High-ranking officers are assisting the process of internalizing this new approach in the field units, and all the regular army's divisions and brigades have already been made compatible with the operational intelligence approach. Over the coming year, the process will be completed in all the reserve units as well.

Kochavi, who is leading this process, has spoken from the first about how army intelligence must be a "partner." It must not only describe the situation and the enemy, but also influence and participate -- not only at the decision-making level, but also at the tactical level of the troops fighting in the field. At a conference of operational intelligence personnel, which was held last week with the participation of all the brigade and battalion commanders, Kochavi warned against addiction to intelligence, saying that uncertainty would continue to exist in the future. But behind his appropriate and necessary statement urging caution, a new reality is taking shape that could change the face of the next war dramatically.