The two terrorists riding a motorcycle a few weeks ago in Southern Lebanon never saw it coming. As they sped along at about 100 kph (62 mph), with their helmets on and the engine roaring, they also could not hear the buzz of the drone blades closing in on them from behind.

Video footage of the incident shows the drone quickly catching up with the motorcycle, then maneuvering to hit it directly and explode. The two terrorists did not stand a chance.

“That elimination of the motorcycle,” said Lt. Col. A., an engineer, “is a great opening shot for our flagship project.”

That flagship project is called “Atalef,” Hebrew for “bat,” the IDF Yiftach Unit’s family of attack drones developed in Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught and since then turned into one of the central weapons of the war in Gaza and Lebanon. The motorcycle hit is just one example of thousands of drone strikes carried out by the IDF’s infantry brigades during the war, a capability that before Oct. 7 existed only in special units.

“Change” is the keyword. In recent weeks, we have become familiar with the lethal potential of Hezbollah’s explosive drones, after the group began using fiber optic-based drones to bypass electronic jamming systems and strike the soft underbelly of IDF troops in Lebanon.

The IDF is feverishly searching for a solution to this problem, but everyone understands that this is only another stage in the battle of inventions that has been underway for two-and-a-half years between the IDF and Hezbollah and Hamas over the drone issue. In this battle, the winner is the side that thinks faster, the side that knows how to learn and change before the enemy has time to respond.

A visit to the Yiftach Unit, as well as to the civilian company SpectralX, which develops camouflage solutions for the IDF and foreign militaries, provides a glimpse into the air-conditioned rooms where the real drone war is being waged: the war of minds.

Closing the gap

The Yiftach Unit was established in 1958 by David Laskov, an engineer and inventor who won the Israel Defense Prize three times. Laskov, who held the title of the world’s oldest soldier, died in 1989, a few months after his discharge from the IDF at the age of 85. He gathered around him a group of talented engineers who worked on military inventions, mainly in the field of rockets.

The use of attack drones on the battlefield began gaining momentum, in every sense, in the Russia-Ukraine war. The Yiftach Unit watched videos uploaded from there to the internet, “but only on Oct. 7 did we understand that there was no broad solution for the IDF in the world of attack drones,” the unit’s current commander, Lt. Col. O. admitted. “And then we were called to the flag.”

To close the gap that had opened in the futuristic battlefield, it was necessary to move fast. About half the unit’s personnel are engineers. Alongside them are production workers, some of them volunteers on the autism spectrum, as well as ultra-Orthodox male and female soldiers working in software and electronics. It is a broad range of manpower.

There is a great dissonance between Yiftach’s aging buildings and what takes place inside them. It is, in effect, a kind of technological hub, a startup company in olive drab, where new weapons are developed and produced for fighters at the front who need them at this very moment.

Here, in the development lab, the idea began to take flight of giving infantry battalions a strike capability that does not depend on assistance from the air force, a tank shell or artillery fire.

“If in the past a company commander had to request support from an attack helicopter, a UAV or artillery, today he has an organic capability for an aerial strike using a drone,” engineer T. put it. “But beyond the independence it gives the force in the field, we understand that there is also a munitions economy, because ultimately the firing of shoulder-launched missiles and tank rounds costs a lot of money, and a cheap solution has to be brought in.”

That solution is a relatively simple FPV (First-person view remote control) drone, made up of a frame, four motors, a flight controller and a battery. It is a cheap, agile tool that weighs 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) but can carry a warhead several times heavier than itself. Beyond its light weight, it is simple to operate, which makes it highly useful on the battlefield.

In videos I watched in the office of the unit commander, A., he showed me how these Bats exploded inside houses in Gaza, on vehicles in Lebanon and more. “Today,” he said, “any force going out to maneuver does not move before taking several Bats with it.”

The first Atalef drones were designed at the Yiftach Unit and are being mass-produced by civilian companies specializing in drones. Soon the IDF will begin producing them itself, in a new drone factory set to open at the Maintenance and Rehabilitation Center, which is also located at Tzrifin. “That is what will bring thousands of drones to the IDF,” A. said enthusiastically.

Seen and unseen

The fluorescent lights at defense startup SpectralX are very different from those at the military Yiftach Unit. They are located in two new, spacious and gleaming buildings in Caesarea’s polished industrial zone. “It didn’t look like this at the beginning,” said Asaf Picciotto, the company’s CEO, with a smile.

Picciotto and his partner, Asaf Miller, set up a company to develop advanced camouflage solutions, also based on cutting-edge technology. “The military knows very well what it wants,” said Miller, the company’s chief technology officer, “but sometimes you have to tell the military what it needs.”

That is exactly the case with SpectralX and the drone field. “For many years, we have been seeing what is happening with drones in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Picciotto said. “After all, this issue of suicide drones is on YouTube. You don’t have to be a great expert to understand what is happening.”

While the IDF focused on the offensive aspect of suicide drones, the company founded by Maglan special forces veterans chose to deal with the defensive and less sexy side of the field.

The result is the Armadillo, a camouflage kit for vehicles that, truth be told, looks rather ridiculous at first glance. But that is precisely the principle on which it works: The kit is fitted onto combat vehicles and fundamentally changes their silhouette using sophisticated camouflage sheets that open at the push of a button. In one second, the sleek military Humvee becomes a strange creature that the human eye struggles to define, certainly through a drone camera.

“Before the war, we had a baptism by fire in an operation by a special unit that operated with vehicles in a distant theater,” revealed Amir Haimovich, the company’s vice president of marketing. “As part of their combat procedure, they came to us, and we tailored a ‘suit’ for their vehicles. It was a success for everyone, and it provided validation that the product was good.

Protecting the protector

Another world in which SpectralX’s camouflage solutions have found expression during the war is the very important, and quite neglected in Israel, field of protecting air defense systems, known in Hebrew military jargon as “defense of air defense.”

Already at the start of the war, Hezbollah attacked all the sensors Israel had placed along the Lebanon border with precision missiles, which were intended for early detection of aerial threats. “Some of the observation systems, the surveillance cameras used by the female lookouts and the sensors of Unit 8200 were hit,” Haimovich said. “Northern Command went blind. They lost contact with the enemy. And why? Because they simply were not camouflaged.”

Hezbollah exploited that blindness to create entry routes into Israeli territory, through which it sent UAVs and later drones to carry out attacks deep in the rear.

One of those UAVs managed to strike the dining hall at the Golani Brigade’s training base, killing four soldiers and wounding about 60. This time as well, only after the war broke out did the IDF understand that it had to camouflage its detection systems along the border.

During the fighting along the northern border, SpectralX personnel descended on the IDF detection systems deployed along the border and camouflaged them in creative and inexpensive ways. “The advantage here is not only operational, but also economic,” Haimovich said. “Each such system is worth millions of dollars, and now we are managing to protect them.”

Originally published by Israel Hayom.