The military hopes to harness the start-up nation’s technological prowess for its needs
[Ramle] — This is the stuff security officials dream of:
• A drone that can stream accurate 3D-images at night.
• A van containing antennas capable of locating cellphones and identifying their exact location in a collapsed building.
• Platforms that transmit distinct and directed messages via WhatsApp, sms texting, email and phone with block-by-block accuracy, even transmitting via smart watches onto the wrists of citizens.
They may not have to dream for long. Immediately following Israel’s National Emergency Week, at which a new Home Front Command (HFC) was presented to the cabinet, the Israeli army (IDF) hosted its first-ever Exhibition of Systems and Technologies for Homeland Security and Civil Defense, or, in other words, a festival for technologies the IDF hopes to promote and use.
The IDF is not alone in hoping to be able to harness the nation’s technological prowess.
Visiting Tel Aviv this week, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, and former CEO of its parent company Google, said that Israel, with a population of only eight million, takes up a disproportionately large space on the global high-tech map.
“For a relatively small country, Israel has a super role in technological innovation,” he told an audience at Google’s sparkling Tel Aviv offices.
“I can’t think of a place where you could see this diversity and collection of initiatives aside from Silicon Valley,” he said at a meeting with Google employees, adding, “that’s a pretty strong statement.”
Google has long been aware of the Israeli innovation market, in terms both of entrepreneurial prowess and long-term planning. In 2013, Google acquired Waze, a hugely popular real-time traffic application, for more than $1 billion.
Mentioning Israel’s small population and limited and isolated local market, Schmidt said that where once “it seemed like many of the initiatives were not fully thought out,” he was now “beginning to see companies that are on their way to being worth a billion dollars.”
Driving the immediacy of the Home Front Command’s interest in the new technology is the growing pressure on the security echelon emanating from the rapidly-mounting threat surrounding the tiny state.
A recent report prepared for the Israeli cabinet based on defense establishment assessments drew attention first to the possibility of a simultaneous two-front conflict with Hizbullah, the Lebanon-based Shiite Iranian proxy in the north and the Hamas Palestinian faction in the south; second, to the use of large quantities of high trajectory weapons including scattered attacks against population centers; third, to the massive use of precision-guided missiles in salvos against critical civilian and military strategic targets throughout the country alongside cyber-attacks; and fourth, to offensive attacks against civilian communities on land (including the use of offensive tunnels), in the air (including the use of drones) and by sea (which could include attempts to invade areas near the coast.)
In an article published Wednesday by Meir Elran, Yonatan Shaham and Alex Altshuler, scholars at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, the “gaps between the threat scenario and the existing comprehensive response” in Israel’s Home Front preparedness was assessed to be only “mediocre plus.”
Speaking with The Media Line, Brig. Gen. Dedy Simhi, the Home Front Command’s chief-of-staff, vigorously disputed this assessment. “Saying anything other than that Israel’s preparedness is absolutely top and excellent is completely wrong,” he asserted. “Israeli preparedness is excellent.”
The forty companies exhibiting at the HFC’s central Israel base at Ramle, were given an opportunity to highlight their “ability to offer us technologies necessary for our operational needs,” Col. Itzik Gai, the head of the HFC Department of Planning and Procedure, told The Media Line.
“We invited them here because we hope to make our own needs clear and end up with new knowledge and new products that are not yet on the shelves,” he said.
Simhi, who is leaving his post at the end of the month, said that in the case of this unusual exhibition, “the IDF and the HFC are not customers. We have to change that idea. We are partners.”
He emphasized the need to “synchronize data among numerous authorities” when disaster strikes and said that “the state of Israel already has a state-of-the-art alert system that is selective, reliable and answers to the needs of the public.”
The technologies mentioned above already exist and drew crowds of interested competitors at the show, but many more, including a battery of devices offering multi-platform messaging and virtual or augmented reality exercises for military or rescue personnel, are in the advanced stage of development.
“We understand that we don’t possess all the technology that is being developed in Israel, and this is a way of bringing it in,” Gai said, alluding to this unusual collaborative effort between the Israeli military, and the academic and high-tech sectors.
Mentioning an Israeli technological and social advantage, Simhi said, “Here, we have 8 million sensors. Every citizen with a cellphone is a sensor. Citizens have apps in which they take a picture and I have the information, in real time. I have 8 million observers. Every citizen who goes to a shopping center is a walking warning system.”