BLUF
Operation ‘Guardian of the Walls’ demonstrated Israel’s effective use of cyberwarfare in making a major contribution to preventing Hamas’s military wing from using Gaza to launch missile attacks at Israeli cities.Summary
In this interview Brigadier Nati Cohen a reservist in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) Exercise Division Command, Control, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) section, discusses the importance of Cyberwarfare in the 2021 operation ‘Guardian of the Walls’ (GotW). Cohen makes the following points:
- After the 2006 Second Lebanon War the IDF took on board a key lesson that networking and connectivity were vitally important.
- The objective was to be able to provide intelligence at the tactical level.
- Israel developed the Digital Army Program (DAP} which should be able to link air, sea and ground units.
- The IDF gradually developed and refined a system where all intelligence information was gathered together in one database and operators could take what they required.
- The IDF has transformed itself into a de facto digital army.
- During GotW for the first time Cyberwarfare was used against an enemy force.
