2023 Israel–Hamas war #4

However, the Palestinians continue to fire rockets and mortars.

That is an issue in war that many don't appreciate is numbers.

Having the recon capacity to find all the enemy positions is unlikely because many will be so well hidden you never find them, but when your forces are outnumbered then you have to be selective because you wont have the fire power to engage every target you see and if you did try then you would run out of ammo and have to withdraw.

In the Ukrainian conflict many didn't understand when the Orcs mounted meat shield attacks and overran Russian positions... well if you have 20 guys with assault rifles manning your position on the front line and 400m away on the tree line 500 men step out and start approaching your position... even if every one of your guys hits their target and shoots and kills their target there are still 480 enemy soldiers coming and they are not stupid... they saw your muzzle flashes and know where you are and so they will start returning fire and deeper in that tree line there will be snipers with zoomed in scopes trying to pick your 20 men off.

So you defensive line of 20 men firing hopefully from covered positions will get their first and second kills most likely, but you can't just lie there and pick them all off, they are going to be shooting back and not just troops, but also snipers and of course support weapons will open up on your position now you have revealed where it is.

The point is that if they keep coming they are going to take that position... even if they are on drugs and are not firing... the guys in the tree line that sent them out will be hitting your positions.

So from your firing line you should have set up a few firing positions so you can fire and move like a sniper would and get a couple of good kills and then you fall back to another position in your next line of defence and when the enemy arrives at your front line you hammer him with artillery.

You see, what is special about artillery is that it is math. You have an ammo type which has this explosion pattern and this level of accuracy... in a target box this size it would take this number of shells all landing in a concentrated barrage to fill this area with enough fragments to wound everyone at least once.

That is what an artillery battery can do that small arms fire can't.

Of course there are machine guns and auto grenade launchers but they chew through the ammo which is very heavy in large volumes.

For the Israelis looking at video of thousands of targets but not having thousands of artillery batteries to engage those targets they can just watch and work out which enemy target seems to be the most effective and dangerous and take that out first.

Sometimes it makes more sense to keep watching and work out where their ammo and weapons and fuel are stored and hitting those places because the high concentration of flammable materials makes them an easy target.

A huge building full of artillery ammo can be set off with a hand grenade sized munition on a drone.

A huge building with 1,000 enemy tanks is going to take a lot more munitions to destroy it and even then most of the vehicles will likely be drivable.

In the case of this war, the Isareli have a greater number of soldiers than the Palestinian Resistance groups.

What I meant was that Israel has the resources... satellites, spy planes, drones, observation posts etc etc to watch vast areas, but their problem is that while they have lots of people watching, what they wont have is an equal or greater number of platforms with weapons ready to fire to attack all these targets when they see them, so while they might watch a group of Hamas break cover and fire an RPG at a Merkava tank there is no time to do anything... they can't warn the tank crew, they can't engage the RPG crew... all they can do is notify that a tank has been hit and that crew needing treatment might be on their way.

They might see the building the RPG crew operated from but it is incredibly unlikely that they would remain in that building and keep hitting Israeli tanks so when they get around to create a mission to stop the RPG attacks then that building might be hit but that RPG crew is probably long gone and firing at another tank from a different building.

It is the reason the US put weapons on their drones because the gap between when the drone spotted a target and when another platform could be organised to attack it could be 20 minutes, so most of the time the threat was gone.

Of course putting missiles on drones made them more expensive and slower and reduced their range and endurance, so I think what the Russians seem to be doing makes rather more sense... operating recon drones which are unarmed, but with suicide drones nearby able to be launched when needed to arrive on target fairly quickly and be directed with visuals from the recon drone to hit the target.

That recent attack where obviously a recon drone spotted three Ukrainian helicopters that had landed on a road to get rearmed and refuelled... the closest system that could reach appears to be a rocket with cluster munitions with airburst HE Frag rounds which were fired before they could disperse. It seems one of the helicopters was not disabled and was able to fly away, but the two helicopters that were damaged were hit with drones or missiles... probably 5 or 10 minutes later, but the recon drone kept watch and saw where one of the trucks drove to so that building was hit as well...

The location of the incident is unknown as far as I know... it might have been deep in Orc territory.

It is one thing to have lots of drones flying around the place, it is another to have weapon systems that can reach such targets and take them out.

Of course with helicopters it makes sense to destroy them, and artillery vehicles would also be a priority target, but sometimes in the case of ground vehicles watching them and seeing where they go to rearm and refuel means you can get the vehicle and their ammo and fuel supply too... it is all about choices.

If the enemy are stupid enough to rearm more than one artillery vehicle at an ammo dump at a time then that would justify an Iskander strike with a cluster munition  warhead to take out the vehicles and make the ammo burn...

The enemy are never as stupid as you hope, but sometimes they make mistakes.

It seems to me that the enemies of Israel have taken into account all their capabilities, but also their limitations, and are fighting rather smarter than ever before.

These people are dismissed as terrorists, which is ironic because it has been the Israeli government terrorising their enemies in the region for as long as they have existed as a country, but they are not trying to instil terror, they are trying to inflict a military defeat... the west and Israel are so used to simple goals... destroy the enemy government and then make them pump oil on your terms to suit your interests... or bomb them till they do.

There was a time when an armoured force with air power support turns any enemy into a weak lightly armed terrorist force, but with modern anti armour weapons and of course drones and in this case tunnels and mines and traps and tricks it is no longer the one sided video game the west likes to play.

And the real problem is that they are so used to using force and leverage and negotiating from a position of strength that they don't know how to actually negotiate... even in Europe they are expecting to dictate terms if Russia end up winning... and their winning seems the most likely result.

The west and Israel have the same problem because they have built this all up as self defence ... a fight for survival... something you can't possibly be allowed to lose... politically or militarily... they have no where to go in a loss... their propaganda machine is going to struggle with this.

How long before the west starts saying the problem is Putin and if someone just gets rid of Putin then we can talk.

Is there scope for this in Israel?

There is no Putin figure AFAIK that they could blame for all the problems and assassinate and then claim the people they are now negotiating with are moderate terrorists that they can negotiate a lasting peace with... but they have already assassinated all their enemy leaders haven't they?