Can Israeli-Ukrainian cooperation solve the drone threat?

追加: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Two people have been lately wounded today after a Hezbollah drone launched from Lebanon struck near the border.

[00:00:06]This is just the latest in a growing series of attacks involving so-called fiber optic drones, which are far harder to stop because they can't be disrupted by traditional electronic jamming systems. Israeli officials now say that the government is allocating roughly 700 million dollars to confront this threat after these drones reportedly killed three soldiers and a civilian in recent weeks. The IDF has already begun deploying protective wire mesh to troops on the ground, but officials acknowledge there is still no full solution raising concerns that Hezbollah may be gaining an increasingly dangerous tactical edge in drone warfare.

[00:00:47]I'd like to turn now to our guests in the studio. We have our security analyst Yaakov Lappin still with us and our international affairs analyst Dan Perry.

[00:00:55]So, Yaakov, first I just want to talk to you specifically about these fiber optic drones and what makes it so difficult to actually stop compared to the drone threats that we've seen against Israel in the past coming from Lebanon. Well, as you said in your prelude, they can't be jammed. So, that makes it much harder to stop them because when you're talking about quadcopters that have these small electrical motors, the detection is always difficult whether they're hooked up to a fiber optic cable or not. But in the past, you could jam them. Now that they're hooked up to the cable, they're immune to that kind of jamming and also their operators, the location of their operators are basically impossible to trace using let's call it signal tracing.

[00:01:35]>> Wow. So, what does that mean? It means that there has to be an accelerated search for solutions. Now, there are solutions. Israeli defense companies have developed solutions and startups have developed solutions and I think we're going to start seeing those solutions on the battlefield in a matter of weeks / months at the very most. They include interceptor drones, the drones that uh the IDF would operate that could crash into or fire on these drones. Uh they include computerized uh gun sights that can be installed in a in a squad.

[00:02:04]Uh you could have uh you know, one or two soldiers with a computerized gun sight, and it's impossible to miss once the target is is visible. And uh you could also have lasers or machine guns uh that are hooked up to sensors. Now, the sensors are also very important.

[00:02:16]These drones cannot be picked up on radar. Essentially, they're too small.

[00:02:20]So, you can have optical sensors or acoustic sensors. Those also are uh in existence. But, it's all about rushing this process, getting it out into the battlefield, and making it operational.

[00:02:30]It's a race against time. I want to turn to you, Dan, and talk about, you know, whether or not we're going to see Israel perhaps turning to Ukraine for assistance in combating these issues.

[00:02:39]You know, obviously, that has not happened uh as a result of relations with Russia, but could that now change? I think it could uh because uh even though, as Yaakov says, there many countermeasures that you can take, some aspects of it are very difficult uh to defend against. We can expect these drones to get more and more sophisticated and more and more difficult to detect, uh more and more difficult to defend against, cheaper and cheaper. Uh it's part of this basic asymmetric warfare uh where jihadist groups, non-state actors, state actors that um are otherwise limited can create a tremendous offensive ability with a very little investment. Um I mean, Israel's new security doctrine basically speaks of preventing uh the enemy from having the means.

[00:03:27]Right. When the means are very cheap to achieve, that is a major, major problem.

[00:03:31]Now, Israel's advantage, of course, is it's one of the world's leading technological superpowers, and it is one of the high-tech laboratories of the entire planet. So, you can assume that Israel via startups, via government investment, via its fairly large um defense tech companies that have been around for decades will come up with answers, but it nonetheless is a very difficult prospect to consider that in addition to missiles of various ranges and in addition to the land invasion that Hamas carried out so sadly successfully on October 7th, you now have the possibility of drones that are going to become miniature, maybe like flies at some point. There was a Black Mirror episode that way, and I think we're about 5 years away from that. Ukraine, by dint of necessity, is on the leading edge of this. And Ukraine, of course, has the, you know, one of three major Jewish heads of government in the world, and I think he'd like to be a friend of Israel, but Israel's kept them at arms length because of a potentially unwise reluctance to upset Russia too much. And what did it get Israel? Russia's allied with Iran. So, I can see, especially given that Zelenskyy just did a Middle East tour and went to almost every relevant country but Israel, that fixing that, in addition to the $700 million investment, will be on the table.

[00:04:54]All right. Well, we're going to have to wait and see.