• Israel’s powerful air defenses are increasingly threatened by low-flying drones.

• Two retired Israeli generals say it needs new defenses against this “low sky”.

• Israel pioneered targeting air defenses with drones in a stunning victory four decades ago.

Israel’s air and missile defense systems are arguably the best in the world, having proven this year that they can shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles and rockets fired by Hamas. Its Iron Dome is the symbol of this success and is just one of them many systems. But while these can protect Israeli cities, they have an increasingly glaring problem – they cannot protect against low-flying drones, warn two retired Israeli brigadier generals.

“We must defend our air defenses,” Eran Ortal and Ran Kochav wrote in one blog for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Defense at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Israel.

Ortal and Kochav fear that enemy drones could knock out the air defense systems they mentioned Iron Domewhich allows ballistic missiles, manned aircraft and artillery rockets to hit Israel without being intercepted. “The Israeli Air Force continues to rule the skies, but under the noses of the advanced fighter jets, a new layer of air has been created.”

The authors call this the “low sky” layer. “The enemy has found a loophole here. The Air Force (and within that the Air Defense Corps) must defend against the combined and coordinated threats of missiles, unmanned aircraft systems and rockets.”

Over the past year, Israel’s air and missile systems have achieved remarkable success against a range of projectiles launched by Iran, Hamas and other Iranian proxies, including ballistic missilescruise missiles, artillery rockets and grenades. For example, Israel – with the help of the US, UK and other nations – reportedly caught 99% of about 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and large attack drones fired by Iran in April 2024.

However, Israel has been fighting small exploding drones launched by Hezbollahthe Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. More than a hundred Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded by these UAVs, incl 67 who were injured when a drone hit a building in northern Israel in October. Still, the situation is far from the Ukraine war, where hordes of small drones have rendered battlefield maneuver almost impossible.

Still, Ortal and Kochav worry that Israeli air defenses were designed in the pre-drone era, when the threat to Israel came from aircraft and ballistic missiles, a criticism that also applies to Western and Russian-made systems. “This array was built over the years under the premise of Israeli air superiority. The air defense itself was not meant to be hunted.”

“The enemy can penetrate deep into Israel and engage the air defense system in one file while other aircraft take advantage of the diversion and penetrate in another, more covert file. It can identify targets and strike immediately using armed or suicide UAS. Above above all, it seeks to locate, compromise and destroy key elements of the air defense system itself.”

Israel relies on a multi-layered long-range defense system Arrow Catcher targeting of ballistic missiles above the Earth’s atmosphere, the medium range David’s Loop dealing with ballistic and cruise missiles about 10 miles high, and the short-range Iron Dome intercepts cruise missiles, short-range rockets, and low-altitude artillery and grenade launchers. It all depends production and reloading missiles sufficient for the threat.

The problem is that these three systems cannot protect each other. “The degree of mutual aid and protection between the layers is relatively limited,” Ortal and Kochav wrote. To optimize the allocation of a limited supply of interceptor missiles, “each tier was designed to handle a specific type of missile or rocket. Iron Dome cannot really assist Arrow batteries or support their mission. This limitation is equally true among the other tiers .”

Nor are Israel’s air defenses built for survivability, such as creating lure robot batteries and radar to protect the real or frequently moving systems. “The degree of mobility, protection and stealth of the Israeli air defense system is insufficient. Unlike similar systems in the world, our air defense system was not built with synchronization as a critical objective.”

Their solution? The creation of a fourth layer focused on point protection of the radar, missile launchers and troops that drive them against rockets and drones that have penetrated the first three layers. Anti-aircraft must be camouflaged and should be mobile enough to change positions before the enemy can target them.

Ironically, Israel itself was one of the pioneers to use drones to suppress air defenses. Backed by heavy losses from Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel used drones during the 1982 Lebanon War. Using unmanned aerial vehicles that mimicked manned aircraft, Israel lured Syrian anti-aircraft radars to come online so they could be destroyed by anti -radiation missiles. The Israeli Air Force destroyed 29 out of 30 anti-aircraft missile batteries in the Bekaa Valley without loss and downed more than 60 Syrian aircraft.

Israel’s air force became so dominant that ground forces scrapped their tactical anti-aircraft weapons (although the IDF recently reactivated M61 Vulcan gatling gun for anti-UAV defense on the northern border). At the same time, the IDF’s Air Defense Corps switched focus from air defense to missile defense.

“The working assumption was, and remains to this day, that the Israel Air Force rules the skies,” Ortal and Kochav wrote. “The task of the Air Force is therefore to focus on missiles and rockets. This assumption is no longer valid.”

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine and other publications. He holds an MA in Political Science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Chirp and LinkedIn.

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