"How Israel Cuts Sensor-to-shooter Time"

That's the title of a very interesting article on the Ares blog of Aviation Week. Here's a brief extract.

With its long experience in operating a wide variety of platforms and sensors in combat, Israel now considers the need to fuse information into a coherent, real-time intelligence picture as one of its biggest tasks.

In the cyber-realm — which now has an extensive overlap with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) — Israeli researchers realize that most information is already available, but the challenge is to detect it in real time and immediately translate it into action.

. . .

The rapid spread of computers and mobile communications in the Middle East, reflected in the recent revolutions, has opened a world of opportunities for Israeli intelligence agencies. “Just imagine how much I can learn about you just by going through your laptop or smartphone,” says Amos Yadlin, former chief of Aman. “This could be compared to the emergence of airpower in the beginning of the 20th century, adding a new dimension of warfare.”

Recognizing that potential, Israeli industries have also diverted significant investments to developing cybertools, with Elbit Systems emerging as a leading integrator, alongside software developers such as Verint and Ness Technologies. “Gathering the information is becoming less and less a challenge,” an industry source tells Aviation Week. “It’s always there and looking at any event in retrospect; you always find you had the relevant intelligence before, but you were not aware of it. What gives you the edge is the ability to locate the relevant information from within the trillions of bytes you’re gathering in real time.”

Elbit is trying to meet this challenge with its Wise Intelligence Technology (WiT) system, which is designed to collect human, signals, imagery and open-source intelligence and translate it into a common format. Relying on that single database, WiT processes, analyses and disseminates the data as a coherent intel product.

. . .

Leading this brand of analysis is Shin-Bet, Israel’s security agency, which began targeting individual terrorists from the air in 2001. The need to triple-verify the identity of a target convinced the agency to bring together, for the first time, signals analysts and human intelligence operators to view a common unmanned aircraft system (UAS) video feed.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) then realized that the same method could be effective against rockets and anti-tank teams located in urban areas in Lebanon and Gaza. Because the IDF operates in known arenas, it established several unified fusion centers that are capable of receiving information from all sensors and controlling any available weaponry. Their effectiveness was demonstrated during Israel’s “Cast Lead” operation in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, where the average exposure time of a Palestinian rocket team was 90 sec. During this short time, several ISR centers, operating from the brigade level and up, were able to detect a suspected target, confirm it as hostile and direct munitions against it.

“It was completely irrelevant what munitions were used or whether they were fired from the air, ground or sea,” a brigade commander who participated in the operation tells Aviation Week. “With constant surveillance in the air and persistent intelligence gathering from all other sources, we were able to translate any intelligence into action in less than a minute in some cases.”

There's much more at the link. Bold print is my emphasis. It's very interesting and highly recommended reading.

That's a heck of an operational advantage, when you think about it. Take the case of those terrorist rocket teams. They would have known about each other, and how Israel was reacting to them. Now, put yourself in the position of a member of one of those teams. If you know that, from the moment you leave cover to aim and fire your rocket, you've got less than 90 seconds to live . . . isn't that likely to put you off your aim, just a wee bit? Martyrdom complex or not?





Peter