Sunday, November 20, 2011

WSJ: 'Hezbollah electronically disabling Israeli drones?'

"... No one can recall the last time that an Israeli drone malfunctioned over Lebanon and crashed, and there were no reports of antiaircraft fire. The Israelis have said nothing. Neither has Hezbollah... The peacekeeping force is now abuzz with speculation that Hezbollah may have found a way of electronically disabling drones.
It is food for thought as tensions escalate once more between the West and Iran, Hezbollah's ideological patron, over the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions... Iran has delivered its own warnings. Brig. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of the country's armed forces, was quoted saying that "the smallest action by Israel [against Iran] and we will see its destruction." He added that plans for retaliation were already in place.
Many analysts believe that those plans could include directing Hezbollah to unleash its military might against Israel, pummeling it with thousands of long-range rockets, placing the Jewish state's heartland on the frontline for the first time since 1948.
Hezbollah and Israel last came to blows in July 2006, when the Lebanese militants fought the Israeli army to a surprise standstill in the valleys and hills of south Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's charismatic leader, proclaimed a "divine victory" against Israel ...
But the quiet has not stopped the two sides from making feverish preparations for another encounter, one that neither Hezbollah nor Israel wants but that both believe is probably inevitable.
The rate of recruitment into Hezbollah's ranks has soared. New recruits are bused to secret training camps in the Bekaa Valley, where they endure lengthy marches over the craggy limestone mountains carrying backpacks weighed down with rocks. They learn fieldcraft and weapons handling, and some go on to receive advanced training in Iran...
Hezbollah never divulges details of its ever-improving military capabilities, but reports claim that the organization has amassed as many as 50,000 rockets, including guided missiles that can strike targets in Tel Aviv. Hezbollah fighters have repeatedly hinted that they are being trained to slip across the border into Israel in the next war, a development to which Sheikh Nasrallah himself referred for the first time in a speech earlier this year...
Hezbollah officials remain coy on the organization's likely reaction to an attack on Iran. Much would depend on the scale of the strike and the political situation in the Middle East. Sheikh Nasrallah recently said that neither the U.S. nor Israel is in a position to launch a fresh war in the Middle East, describing media speculation about a possible attack on Iran as "intimidation."
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's cadres concentrate on their relentless training and military planning, with a single-minded focus on the next conflict with Israel.
"Let them attack Iran. It will be great," said a young, stocky Hezbollah fighter named Khodr. "It will mean that Israel is finished."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The test bed for disabling the drones is in Somalia. They have been more drones crashed or disappeared in Somalia then anywhere else!