naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
This is interesting, and it's nice to have confirmation (?kinda? I'm not sure how much to trust this guy) of some suspected details, or at least someone else suspecting them, but a lot of these raise further questions than they answer.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations. The threat of drone-delivered explosives has been present in the public info since 2017, and commercially-available data links are notoriously fragile not just to attacks but even to stuff like nearby lightning strikes.
You can't harden these things against every possible attack, but you can have enough physically separate systems that anything breaking too many of them is an obvious attack, and at least some of these tools can treat an unnatural down state from a natural one, (and some, like flares, can be a signal only available when nothing is an option). Which sounds like ass-covering, but the counterfactual environment where you had a hundred IDF soldiers on a wall against a thousand-plus Hamas soldiers with a lot of explosives still sounds like an environment where you need to call for backup, and cellular is the obvious and simple and wrong answer there, too.
Which doesn't speak to the broader point, but leaves me concerned about how precise the rest of the analysis is.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations.
This is largely my thinking too. The original wireless communications setup is cost effective for hundreds of kilometers of perimeter, but centralised failure points like towers are too vulnerable. Buried cable is more expensive, but resistant to jamming or drone/rpg attacks. There needs to be much more redundancy in communications.
The other major issue is probably the majority of guards running for bunkers under the rocket attack, seemingly without means to shelter in place or to monitor the perimeter. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and presume CCTV monitors in the bunkers, but the monitors are useless if cameras were taken out and they can't physically observe the fenceline.
Regarding KISS, I think the author is conflating multiple overlaying and interconnected barriers (as in Defense in Depth) with the systems reliance on the comms tower. He's right that there shouldn't be a single point of failure for the majority of the systems in place (which seemed to be the case). There should be redundancy and the use of multiple technologies and procedures carried out by humans. Flares, Radio, heck even periscopes from the bunkers could all have been useful as failsafes. These multiple systems should ideally function independently, and by doing so become a nightmare to overcome in an assault.
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Notes -
This is interesting, and it's nice to have confirmation (?kinda? I'm not sure how much to trust this guy) of some suspected details, or at least someone else suspecting them, but a lot of these raise further questions than they answer.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations. The threat of drone-delivered explosives has been present in the public info since 2017, and commercially-available data links are notoriously fragile not just to attacks but even to stuff like nearby lightning strikes.
You can't harden these things against every possible attack, but you can have enough physically separate systems that anything breaking too many of them is an obvious attack, and at least some of these tools can treat an unnatural down state from a natural one, (and some, like flares, can be a signal only available when nothing is an option). Which sounds like ass-covering, but the counterfactual environment where you had a hundred IDF soldiers on a wall against a thousand-plus Hamas soldiers with a lot of explosives still sounds like an environment where you need to call for backup, and cellular is the obvious and simple and wrong answer there, too.
Which doesn't speak to the broader point, but leaves me concerned about how precise the rest of the analysis is.
This is largely my thinking too. The original wireless communications setup is cost effective for hundreds of kilometers of perimeter, but centralised failure points like towers are too vulnerable. Buried cable is more expensive, but resistant to jamming or drone/rpg attacks. There needs to be much more redundancy in communications.
The other major issue is probably the majority of guards running for bunkers under the rocket attack, seemingly without means to shelter in place or to monitor the perimeter. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and presume CCTV monitors in the bunkers, but the monitors are useless if cameras were taken out and they can't physically observe the fenceline.
Regarding KISS, I think the author is conflating multiple overlaying and interconnected barriers (as in Defense in Depth) with the systems reliance on the comms tower. He's right that there shouldn't be a single point of failure for the majority of the systems in place (which seemed to be the case). There should be redundancy and the use of multiple technologies and procedures carried out by humans. Flares, Radio, heck even periscopes from the bunkers could all have been useful as failsafes. These multiple systems should ideally function independently, and by doing so become a nightmare to overcome in an assault.
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