Of drones and the iron dome
The psychological price of waging war by airborne proxy
Twice on Friday, Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defence system was deployed over Tel Aviv, using radar to track missiles before intercepting them mid-air, reducing them to shrapnel.
As a reminder of the threat from Hamas and a reassurance of Israel’s military advantage, it was a practical success and a propaganda victory.
Likewise, Hamas this week published a photo of one of its drones, carrying sleek bombs, despite looking as if it had been soldered together out of scrap metal (it is reportedly a version of an Iranian-made Ababil-1). Its very appearance boosted Palestinian morale before it was even launched.
With rough edges, foreign explosives and an air of fatalistic despair, it looked like Gaza itself.
Here was a pilotless drone, the controversial icon of Western intervention in the Muslim world, launched by Hamas into Israel, to extend its range across almost the entire country. One was shot down, but even if no drones reach their target, they have already somehow succeeded, encouraging Hamas supporters and threatening populated areas beyond rocket range in Israel, such as Tel Aviv.
Before it flared Thursday into war on the ground, the Gazan conflict was fought most openly in the sky. Neither Hamas rockets nor Israeli defence systems determine its shape, as the ground invasion proves, but at many times this has seemed like a series of battles waged with airborne technology, almost like modern military kite fighting.
There are psychological dangers in this view, both on the level of individual stress and the national resolve to pursue peace.
As Alex Bierman, a sociologist at the University of Calgary, describes it, an irony of the Iron Dome system is it is 90% successful at protecting civilians physically, but does little to help them mentally.
“In cases of rocket attack, people will still need to take cover,” he said. “More importantly, people will still feel this sense of individual powerlessness. They will understand that there is a threat of attack from rockets.
“There may be an Iron Dome system, which may or may not protect them, but they are individually unable to exercise any sense of control. In some ways, then, Iron Dome may protect life and limb, of course, but at the same time may increase a sense of fatalism, which, in turn, can increase psychological distress.”
Research suggests people with less experience of war have a greater tendency to perceive or recall life-threatening experi- ences, said Prof. Bierman, who has studied the effects of war zone stress on civilian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to this theory, the psychological threat is worse, or more salient, for someone who lives in Tel Aviv, for whom being in the line of fire is a novel experience, than it is for someone in Sderot, just outside Gaza, who has dealt with rockets for years.
In this way, the psychological risk becomes the inverse of the physical risk.
Drones, with their greater range, alter that dynamic by exposing more people to the same risk. One Hamas drone was downed this week by a Patriot missile near Ashkelon. Hamas said it targeted the defence ministry in Tel Aviv. A recent report of the Council on Foreign Relations called drones “the perfect vehicle for delivering biological and chemical agents.”
Sarah Kreps, an expert on drone proliferation at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said the drone launch scored “psychological points” against Israel and gave Hamas a “small victory,” even if the weapons were fakes, the Los Angeles Times reported.
It could also have been a proxy test by Iran.
“I imagine Iran would like to take one of their drones out for
Iron Dome has altered the calculus
of Israel’s political echelons
a test spin and get themselves some real-world combat experience,” said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. “They’d like to know how fast the Israelis could take it down. Well, they just learned something.”
After the last Gaza war in 2008-09, research on Israelis’ mental health found symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and other disorders varied depending how close people were to the attacks or, roughly, how plausible the physical threat was.
“What that generally suggests is that, in addition to an actual experience of trauma, the threat of an attack can also be traumatic,” said Prof. Bierman.
This is known as an “ambient” threat, the idea “threat is in the air.” For both Israelis and Gazans, this is literally true and relevant to personal psychology, military strategy and national politics.
As a former senior Israeli official told The Economist magazine this week, “Iron Dome has altered the calculus of Israel’s political echelons in ways they have yet to understand. It allows Israel to resist internal public and military pressure for a quick end to the conflict, and keep bombing Gaza.”
Yoav Fromer, who teaches politics and history at Tel Aviv University, compared the Hamas rocket attacks to a parable by Franz Kafka: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
This ritualistic aspect — in which a broad existential tension repeatedly intrudes on daily life in the same way — engenders what he calls “a mixture of fatalistic apathy and a self-assurance that no harm will come to them.”
“What looks like a tactical miracle may, accidentally, help engender a grave strategic blunder,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
“Technology can mislead us by providing a false sense of security. But it cannot — and must not — become a substitute for effective diplomacy.”
This is what Iron Dome does psychologically — reduces the war to a manageable ritual of threat and protection. The tigers cannot be tamed, but they are accepted because their destruction can be anticipated and contained.
Prof. Bierman compared the psychology to post-9/11. Research showed even when stress symptoms related to the attacks were held constant, fears of additional terrorist attacks were related to increases in psychological distress. This was more than classic PTSD, resulting in elevated anxiety, depression and anger, which can appear many months after the initial trauma.
“It’s just this sense that there’s this threat in the air, in the atmosphere, in the world around us,” he said. “It can still be extremely distressing.”