Tell Me 'Cuando, Cuando, Cuando'

The timing of the pager attack in Lebanon

William Edward Dighton The Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek (1852)

My knowledge of electronics comes chiefly from the occasional refurbishing of older laptops. Thus, I have yet to determine whether the recent pager attack in Lebanon depended upon the physical insertion of purpose-built explosives, the use of malware to over-stimulate lithium batteries, or some combination of the two.

If the authors of opération Bipeurs managed to intercept several thousand pagers destined for Hezbollah long enough to replace original components with itty bitty bombs, that fact alone explains the timing of the enterprise. The secret squirrels who did the sidetracking, and the boffins who did the swapping, exploited a narrow window of opportunity, one that would close as soon as Hezbollah’s Idendantur took delivery of the devices in question.

Once the electronic changelings went into service, moreover, it would not be long before one of them found its way to a repair shop, where a tech would discover, by keen observation or premature explosion, that someone had tampered with the mother board under his microscope. Thus, as each passing day increased the odds of such a ‘Hunter Biden event’, the modification of the pagers provided Mr. Netanyahu with a weapon marked ‘use it soon or lose it forever’.¹

If, however, the entirety of the conversion took place within the realm of software, then the fellow with his finger on the button would have enjoyed a much wider range of options. That is, he could explode the pocket-sized manglers of wedding tackle at any time between the moment of issue and the day, a decade or more in the future, when they would go the way of the Commodore 64.

In the first scenario, the timing the pager attacks belongs to the bailiwick of technology. In the second, it lies largely in the domains of tactics, operations, strategy, and policy. (In a place as small as the Levant, these realms overlap, often to the point where it often makes sense to deal with all four of them as a single field of endeavor.)

A number of thoughtful observers have characterized opération Bipeurs as an attempt to disrupt an attack, or, at the very least, a large scale bombardment, that Hezbollah had begun to organize. Spoiling attacks, after all, have long enjoyed a place of honor in the Israeli playbook. (Was it not Moshe Dayan who called them ‘anticipatory counterattacks’?)

This possibility leads me to wonder if the simultaneous detonation of so many old-timey electronic devices served to disrupt Hezbollah in a less specific way. That is, whether or not the wave of wee explosions caught the target organization on the verge of a large-scale attack, it served to disturb its routine, disorder its functions, and derange its administration. (Where would I be without my thesaurus?)

Neither of these two possibilities excludes the other. Indeed, I can imagine some Israeli SCIFnik saying something like ‘if they were planning something, we stopped it. If they weren’t, we threw a massive spanner into their works’.² In much the same way, the attacks served the political purpose, pursued by some in the Israeli camp, of integrating the siege of Gaza into a much wider war, preferably one that includes some sort of direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.³

While I know little about either the motivations or the short-term effects of the pager attack, I can safely predict that, in the years to come, Hezbollah will be well supplied with men who, having lost wives, children, or the means to obtain them, will have replaced their will to live with a burning desire for revenge. Thus, whatever else happens, Hezbollah will find it much easier to recruit suicide bombers.

For Further Reading:

Moral Response to Mental Maneuver

Making the Most of The Tactical Notebook

1. After writing the previous paragraph, I wonder if the explosive devices retrofitted into the pagers were time bombs. That is, rather than being designed to explode upon receipt of a radio signal, they had been preset to explode at a given hour on a preselected day.

2. A ‘sensitive compartmentalized information facility’ (SCIF) provides people of the hush-hush persuasion with a place to speak freely.

3. So far, neither America nor the Islamic Republic have taken the bait. That does not mean, however, that partisans of the accelerationist school will stop trying.