The Iron Dome’s drone flaw – and how to fix it

Sensors could be solution as forces worry that drone ‘swarms’ could overwhelm Israel’s urban centres

Israeli soldiers hadn’t even finished their dinner when they heard a “crazy boom” at their training base in northern Israel.
“The iron door bent. We didn’t know what happened, and suddenly something pierced through the ceiling. We didn’t hear anything before, just the huge blast. No sirens went off,” a soldier inside the Golani Brigade training base told Ynet news.
The boom was caused by a Hezbollah-launched drone that evaded Israeli fighter jets and struck the base in Binyamina, just south of Haifa. Four soldiers were killed in the attack, with 60 more injured.
The Israeli army’s preliminary investigation into the attack revealed that the Lebanese terror group launched two Sayyad 107 drones from the Mediterranean into Israeli airspace shortly before 7pm local time.
One drone was detected and intercepted near the coastal city of Nahariya, but the other evaded Israeli tracking by lowering its altitude, before hitting the elite Golani brigade training base in Binyamina, northern Israel.
Tables were largely left intact, but pools of blood permeated the dining room, hallways and kitchen.
It was the deadliest drone attack launched against Israel since Oct 7. But it was by no means the first.
Israel has been attacked by hundreds of drones in the last year, mainly by Hezbollah in Lebanon, but also from Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Earlier this month, two soldiers were killed in the Golan Heights when a drone from Iraq hit their base.
On July 19, the Houthi rebels sent a large drone from Yemen all the way to Tel Aviv without detection. The drone smashed into an apartment building, killing an Israeli civilian.
While most of the focus has been on Hezbollah’s huge collection of precision-guided missiles, Israel has found that much smaller and less aggressive drones are posing just as big of a challenge, if not bigger.
In the past 12 months, hundreds of drones from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran have infiltrated Israeli territory on a daily basis, often without setting alarms.
The drones have crashed into apartment buildings, highways, kindergartens, and military installations.
Some experts fear that the rise in these attacks have exposed a possible flaw in the Iron Dome: it wasn’t designed to deal with drones.
The Iron Dome consists of a series of batteries that use radars to detect short-range rockets, missiles and drones.
But the prevalence of cheap drones, as also seen in the war in Ukraine, has been causing problems for Israel owing to their ability to evade the Iron Dome.
The drones are often flown through Israel’s northern mountains and valleys at “a very low altitude”, according to Amnon Sofrin, the former head of Mossad’s intelligence directorate.
That the drones are flown at low altitude means they are often under the Iron Dome’s radar, making it “very difficult” for the Israeli military to shoot them down, as played out in Binyamina on Sunday and Yemen in July.
James Patton Rogers, a drone expert and executive director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, suggested this reflected a “broad neglect of air defence for over a generation”, which non-state actors like Hezbollah have sought to capitalise on.
“They fly [drones] slowly and reduce their electronic output to reduce their radar signature and chance of detection, and have increasingly used materials like carbon fibre that are harder to detect,” he added.  
The fact that Hezbollah was able to fire an undetected drone and strike an Israeli air base, killing several soldiers, raises serious security questions for Israel.
Defence chiefs face the prospect of further drone “swarms” that could overwhelm urban centres.
Onn Fenig, who runs a defence software company, says he is working on a solution to the drone issue.
“A 1000-pound drone can take out a three million-pound tank. We have seen this in action in Ukraine and this is what the IDF should assume it will face in Lebanon, if and when a ground entry happens,” he warned in an interview with The Telegraph.
His software works by using AI-powered sensors that could be placed all across Israel and algorithms to detect drones flying low in the sky.
The information would be automatically channelled to the IDF who could shoot the drones down with traditional weaponry or targeted air defence systems.
He said the IDF is working with R2 in “various contexts and locations to detect drones” but is yet to incorporate its new software.
In the meantime, the Pentagon confirmed it would send a missile battery to bolster Israel’s defences in anticipation of a further barrage from Iran.
Asked on Sunday why he had taken the decision, Mr Biden replied: “To defend Israel.”
The decision was taken after Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, piercing its Iron Dome defence system in some places.