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Modern tech and old-school spycraft are redefining war
Deception, infiltration and spycraft have played a major role in warfare at least since the ancient Greeks gifted a wooden horse to the citizens of Troy.
In more recent times, such operations rarely had a strategic effect, but the spectacular operations of Israeli intelligence against Hezbollah in Lebanon last fall and of Ukraine against Russia's strategic bomber fleet last weekend have brought them back to the forefront of conflict in the 21st century.
Both showed how technological advances—such as drones, communications networks and smaller but more powerful batteries and explosives—can potentially alter the course of a war when they are coupled with superior tradecraft.
'Technology today allows you many new possibilities: There is a larger surface where you can actually detect places where your enemy is vulnerable due to the fact that you can bypass a lot of physical barriers that in the past you couldn't bypass," said Eyal Tsir Cohen, a former senior division director of Israel's Mossad intelligence service.
Yet, he added, many of the same technologies can also empower one's opponents. 'It always works both ways—it depends on which side is more sophisticated in exploiting the vulnerabilities of the other side," Cohen said. 'You need good people to work with technology—technology rides on the shoulders of the human factor and not vice versa."
Ultimately, success in this rapidly changing world depends on the ability to anticipate the new opportunities—something that big powers such as Russia and perhaps the U.S., can be slow to understand as the very nature of warfare evolves.
'The failure of thinking through the insecurities of the supply chain on the part of Hezbollah and the astounding failure by Russia—those were failures of imagination," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. The new way of war redresses the balance of power in favor of weaker actors, he added: 'If you can punch above your weight while also having limited costs and blowback to yourself, it can level the playing field."
Israel's multistage operation to intercept and booby-trap pagers used by Hezbollah, then the militia commanders' walkie-talkies, followed up by targeted strikes that killed leader Hassan Nasrallah last September and wiped out most of the organization's leadership, reshaped—at least temporarily—the balance of power in the entire Middle East.
In that campaign, the result of a yearslong effort to infiltrate Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors, Israel didn't just dramatically weaken the U.S.-designated terrorist group, its most formidable immediate foe that has lost its stranglehold over Lebanon's government. Israel also helped create conditions for the downfall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria two months later and the overall shrinking of Iran's regional power.
The Ukrainian operation on June 1 to target five Russian airfields that house Moscow's strategic bomber fleet was also the result of a lengthy intelligence operation deep behind enemy lines. The simultaneous attack, launched by drones hidden in prefabricated homes moving on trucks, showed that even the farthest parts of Russia are within Ukraine's reach—and that Ukrainian intelligence is able to operate throughout Russia's surveillance-intensive police state. Four of the five airfields—including one just north of Mongolia—were hit. The fifth drone launcher malfunctioned.
Ukraine struck more than 20 aircraft and destroyed at least 12, according to drone footage released by Ukrainian intelligence from the four bases and independent satellite photos. The attack has seriously eroded Russia's ability to launch cruise missiles across Ukraine—one of Moscow's most important advantages in this war.
Russia owned some 112 Tu-22 and Tu-95 strategic bombers before Sunday's attack. It is no longer able to manufacture the bombers and as little as half of the fleet was operational. Unlike the Israeli pager operation, which caused a number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, Ukraine didn't strike any Russian civilians in the airfield attack, dubbed Operation Spiderweb.
Before the wide-scale killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's overtures to Russia soured many Ukrainians' opinion of Israel, Ukrainian officials openly spoke of their admiration for the daring and the inventiveness of the Israeli intelligence. During a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov made sure to display a book about the Mossad atop his desk.
'Back in the 1970s, when Israel faced an existential threat and was surrounded by much more powerful enemies that plotted its elimination, it survived through asymmetric warfare. Ukraine, too, has to think asymmetrically—it's our only chance to survive," said Ukraine's former defense minister, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who currently advises the Ukrainian government.
Using innovative naval drone tactics, Ukraine had already severely curtailed the ability of the Russian Black Sea Fleet to operate, turning expensive warships into a liability rather than asset for Moscow, he said. If Ukraine similarly disables Russia's strategic aviation, it would be 'an enormous achievement," he added.
Despite Sunday's losses, Russia retains the capacity to lob cruise missiles at Ukraine from its strategic bombers and it fired a salvo on Friday morning, hitting Kyiv and several other cities. In another drone attack Friday, Ukraine also blew up the fuel facility at the Engels airfield, one of the main bases of the Russian strategic bomber fleet, and hit the Bryansk airfield.
Israel's pager operation against Hezbollah caused a strategic pivot only because it was followed up by additional successes in the following days and weeks, said Nadav Pollak, an Israeli intelligence veteran and a lecturer at Reichman University. 'If there wasn't a cumulative aspect and effect, we wouldn't think of it as strategically successful. One thing needs to happen after another—and if Ukraine continues to hit strategic assets, eventually they will have a cumulative effect as well," he said.
No matter how daring, operations behind enemy lines don't necessarily lead to a war-altering outcome. Italian divers, after all, sank or damaged four British ships by riding torpedoes and attaching explosives to the vessels in Alexandria harbor in 1941—but still failed to prevent an Allied victory in North Africa.
Creating paranoia and chaos within enemy ranks is often as useful as the actual physical damage. The Israeli strikes against Hezbollah and the assassination of the leader of Hamas in a government guesthouse in Iran made its enemies spend considerable resources on revising plans and procedures and on hunting for possible moles while trying to figure out to what extent they have been compromised, intelligence officials say.
The same goes for President Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Ukrainian intelligence was able to mount a complicated operation likely involving a considerable number of agents—who operated under the nose of the FSB security service.
In the past, Putin has spoken proudly that his own father was assigned to a 'demolition battalion" of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, at one point dropping into a forest behind enemy lines to blow up a Nazi munition depot. Before joining the KGB, Putin grew up on the spy thrillers produced by the Soviet spy service that dramatized Moscow's sabotage operations against the Third Reich. 'What amazed me most of all is how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not," Putin later said in his autobiography.
Now, the tables have turned. 'Ukraine is behind enemy lines, using asymmetric warfare to strike back at a nuclear-armed enemy," said Dan Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow. 'The symbolism is potent because Putin is an intel officer himself and yet he's suffering numerous intel failures."
Operation Spiderweb is already reverberating through NATO allies who are studying the innovations Ukraine deployed—including the use of artificial intelligence to help guide the drones to their targets. The operation has shown how Ukraine, with less manpower to draw from, can use a technological edge to increase the potency of its intelligence operations. It turned a Russian advantage—its vastness—into a weakness, by simultaneously striking targets thousands of miles apart.
'In the past, you would have special forces in a small submarine maybe, getting close to a bridge, and planting some explosives," said Tomáš Kopečný, a Czech governmental envoy for Ukraine. 'Now you have drones doing all that. It's the technologization of these operations."
'Every military is learning from this," he said, referring to Operation Spiderweb. 'If you had asked me point-blank, I would have not come up with this."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at Drew Hinshaw at and Joe Parkinson at
