The Clear and Present Danger of Terrorist Drones

Today’s Israel Hayom published a report on IAF Gen. Air Defense chief Maj. Gen. Shachar Shohat citing the threat of terrorist drones, “IAF officer: Israel will face terrorist drones in next war”.  Shohat noted:

Israel fears terrorists in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip will deploy exploding drones in a future war, in addition to their main rocket arsenals, the chief of Israeli air defense said on Monday.

“We will have to cope with dozens of pilotless aerial vehicles on both the northern and southern fronts,” Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Shachar Shohat said at a Tel Aviv security conference organized by the Institute for National Security Studies think tank,

[…]

Uzi Rabin, an Israeli aerospace expert, said Israel’s Iron Dome and Patriot missile interceptors are capable of shooting down most drones. Israel is separately developing the Iron Beam, a laser system for vaporizing short-range mortar bombs and says it also will be able to destroy small drones.

Shohat said the terrorists’ drones would range from radio-controlled model airplanes weighing a few kilograms to large drones with payloads of hundreds of kilograms.

[…]

Shohat told the conference that drones were now part of enemy guerrilla strategies.

Drones flew into Israeli airspace from Lebanon on at least two occasions in 2012 and 2013, apparently on photography missions and bids to probe air defenses. Israeli jets shot them down.

After the 2012 incident, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged sending a drone that flew some 25 miles (40 kilometers) into Israel.

While Gen. Shohat’s comments focused on the use of heavier drones capable of carrying conventional explosives, Dr. Jill Bellamy in a prescient June NER article focused on more plausible use as a possible biowarfare threat,”Hezbollah’s UAV Biological Weapon Capability: A Game Changer?”

Bellamy commented:

Syria’s biological weapons programs run out of the Syrian Scientific Research (SSRC) in Damascus have not been the focus of much media attention. That despite these weapons are far more dangerous and more likely to be deployed. Perhaps less clear is Syria’s close relationship and support of Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s arsenal of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The merging of Syria’s biological weapon program with Hezbollah and/or Iran’s UAV programs could create an international public health emergency more catastrophic than a natural outbreak.

Iran is believed to have supplied Hezbollah with 12 Ababil UAVs.³ The Ababil carries an 88 pound conventional payload, with a range of approximately 150 miles. Given the unique characteristics of UAV’s it is conceivable that Hezbollah, under orders from Iran, and provided with advanced technology could deploy biological weapons utilizing this platform.

As regarding the credibility of the UAV drone threat, Bellamy commented:

Biological and nuclear weapons fall into the highest level of WMD threat, because their effect, for a given low weight, is far greater than for chemical and radiological weapons.⁶ As a consequence, they were given a priority, comparable to that given nuclear weapons.⁷ Hezbollah has acquired almost every type of conventional weapon Iran has ever produced and works closely with Syria. As Hezbollah is considered by some to run their own laboratories in Lebanon, it is likely that Syria has already transferred weaponized biological agents to these labs.

To put the threat Hezbollah’s potential BW program poses and the possible use of their current UAV stockpile as a deployment platform into clearer focus, in 2005, France’s Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, at an Interpol bio-terrorism conference held in Lyon, emphasized that nowadays terrorists are highly likely to use weapons of mass destruction including biological weapons. Given Hezbollah’s possible laboratories, they could easily maintain an advanced BW capability. Hezbollah’s state sponsorship by both Syria and Iran vastly increase their ability to successfully deploy BW using UAV’s.

Note the ominous threat posed by Hezbollah drone equipped with BW payloads:

Should Hezbollah decide to arm their arsenal of Ababil UAV’s¹⁸ or other drones, with biological warfare agents and target Israel, perhaps using a swarm of UAV’s, the likely and unfortunate casualties will be populations in nations who do not possess a bio-defense infrastructure. These are states that do not have the economic means to stockpile vaccines and medical counter-measures, who do not have the laboratory capacity or the health care capacity to conduct mass casualty care. With several BW agents such as smallpox, incubation periods can be lengthy. Some incubation periods would be over three weeks, transmission could occur several kilometers downwind given good meteorological conditions. This means a drone could lay down BW in an unpopulated area. The BW payload, should the drone be destroyed, could go undetected until populations become symptomatic. Lengthy incubation periods mean silent transmission which would come in waves. As A-symptomatic civilians travel to other regions of Israel and internationally.  A war game, called Atlantic Storm, illustrates the existential risk to the global community from BW verses chemical or nuclear weapons.

Perhaps, IAF Gen. Shohat focused his public remarks on the terrorist UAV threat purposefully on aerial platforms equipped with conventional ordnance.  That may deflect attention from probable covert developments by the IDF to combat Hezbollah and other Iran proxies resorting to potentially more catastrophic BW and other non-conventional UAV payload threats to Israel and the World.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review. The featured image is of an Yasir UAV – Iranian copy of Scan Deagle drone courtesy of Enstent. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.