When on the morning of October 7th, Hamas launched a coordinated and devastating terrorist operation against Israel, the country was celebrating Shabbat, and its defense forces were caught totally unaware and unprepared for a swift response. How the much-celebrated Israeli intelligence may have missed such an attack – needing huge resources, coordination, planning?
The question is puzzling people beyond the experts community, and while certainties about that may be established only afterwards, intelligence theory and history may provide some first, plausible, explanations.
The historical parallel with the last big trauma of intelligence failure – the 1973 unforeseen attack starting the Yom Kippur War – sounds even more compelling, as Saturday’s Hamas attack to Israel happened exactly on the 50th anniversary of those events.
But while some factors are “classics” of intelligence failure, that can be traced to the Yom Kippur precedent and to other such historical instances, recent times introduced a novelty. A new scope of intelligence vulnerabilities which is the massive employment of AI.
The causes behind the tactical surprise achieved by Hamas are substantially three.
Hubris.
Hubris strikes when a state and its’ security apparatus are extremely successful. When everyone has wonderful things to say about you, you start to believe them. Due to Israel seeing off the Arab states in 1848, 1956, and 1973, they believe their own press. The problem is that Hamas and Gaza are a vastly different issue than the Arab states. Israel thought that walling Gaza off and getting rocket/missile defense was sufficient to contain Hamas. Of course, Hamas saw this as a challenge and worked with their IRGC/Quds Force handlers in Iran to solve their challenge. Every few years Hamas will have built up enough munitions and trained enough replacements to be able to mount an operation. The Israelis smack them down and Hamas goes back to nurturing their grievances and rebuilding an offensive capability. The three differences this time is that 1) Hamas got even more rockets/missiles than before and 2) the international situation is more unstable, and 3) internal factions rive the Israeli population and government.
Internal divisions
Internal factionalization is inherent in heterogenous democracies like the U.S. and Israel, however currently more of an issue. The political process is that of prioritizing approaches/policies and apportioning resources; heterogenous states are more difficult because each “in group” seeks to prioritize their policies and resources as compared to the other groups. Russia,China,North Korea, and Iran are pressing on the democracies that seek to contain them, including the U.S. and Israel. The current situation combines both external efforts to generate internal frictions (led by Russian information confrontation operations) together with hard core right wing and left wings politicians seeking to put forth their own agenda. One example is the current efforts by the Netanyahu government to disempower the Israeli Supreme Court. This effort has driven a major wedge into Israeli society. This could be perceived by adversaries such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their sponsor Iran, as an opportunity.
Overreliance on Artificial Intelligence
The massive employment of AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning that characterizes Israel defense system may have constituted a blinding factor. First, because the enormous amount of data that is collected, necessarily needs an AI operated analysis to process them. This results in a process that can only partially be supervised by human brains, which would be in turn overwhelmed by this “data dumping.” Secondly, as in the case of “Iron Dome,” the air defense system operating since 2011 in Israel – that has in the last attack failed at intercepting a number of initial strikes against the country – Israeli defense systems have been carefully studied by Hamas since the 11 days war of 2021, the last instance of big scale confrontation.
Old New Mistakes
In the case of the 2021 11-days war - dubbed as the first AI enabled conflict of history – it followed a five-year Israeli effort to overhaul and upgrade its defense capabilities, combining changes in the field of organization, doctrine, tools. Hamas, or any attacker, would not know how to hit Israel defense capabilities.
But after the much publicized successes of the “AI war” of 2021, Hamas - likely properly helped by the IRGC - has done its homework, understanding how to deceive the artificial intelligence collection system, and consequently manipulating it into flawed analysis. Not “going dark,” as the system would be alerted by such an abrupt change but feeding the “panopticon” with tons of misleading business-as-usual information, which would not alert about any intentions of attack.
After the traumatic Yom Kippur War intelligence failure, Israel got rid of its previous approach deriving from a “postulate” - the “concept” that the enemy would never start a conflict engendering a stark destructive response from Israel – that made its analyst overlook the several warnings collected about imminent attack.
Here, the question is upside down. Massive collection and analysis may have not been handled properly for the very reason they were just too much.
Therefore, overconfidence, overreliance, and underestimation of the enemy’s capabilities are the old new mistakes in the much reputable, new generation, defense system of Israel.
Adding to it to that the probable focus on threats from the West Bank, rather than Gaza; the conflictual internal situation in the country; and not least the moment of religious celebration – that’s how it has been possible one of the much celebrated intelligence of the world to be caught by surprise.
Claudia Palazzo is a Post-Soviet area analyst and Ph.D. candidate in Intelligence Studies.
G. Alexander (Alex) Crowther is a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
