Israel’s Intelligence Failure Is a Wake-Up Call for NATO

BRUSSELS—Only a week before Hamas militants breached the Gaza boundary fence, an Israeli one-star general was briefing NATO’s most senior military officer on the nation’s seemingly state-of-the-art defenses. 

Walking through Re’im Camp in southern Israel, Israeli troops briefed Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch chairman of the NATO military committee, on everything they had arrayed along the 32-mile border to stop an invasion: Drones. Cameras. Artificial intelligence. Robots. A tall wall that ran deep into the ground—and seismic sensors to find out if anyone was tunneling under it. 

The Gaza Division of the Israeli Defense Forces had once occupied the 141-square-mile strip of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt. It had trained for a Hamas invasion. It had waited for it. And just days after those same Israeli troops briefed the Dutch admiral at the top of NATO’s military pecking order, they were fighting for their lives.

Bauer appeared aghast by how Hamas had dodged Israel’s monolithic system of surveillance. To prepare the paragliders who ascended Israel’s massive walls, Hamas had to put them out in the open to launch them, he said. And the militant group had to put rocket systems outside to launch those, too. 

For NATO, which is doubling down on artificial intelligence, cyberdefense, and new technology that can connect alliance commanders in Belgium with shooters on the eastern flank border with Russia, the attacks were a wake-up call. 

“There was no warning,” Bauer said in an interview on Thursday in between NATO defense ministerial meetings. “What does it mean if you trust automation or trust capabilities, autonomous systems or AI, or the combination of it all in such a way, and still everybody was surprised?”

None of the more than half-dozen NATO officials and U.S. and European diplomats that Foreign Policy spoke to was jumping to conclusions about how it happened. But the shock of the gruesome images flashing on TV screens all around the building and the failure of intelligence agencies in both the United States and Israel to pick up signs of the attack prompted a collective soul-searching throughout NATO headquarters. 

The war sucked all of the oxygen out of the room during a week in which the alliance was gathered in Brussels to help arm Ukraine and keep Sweden on track for NATO membership. “The focus has shifted,” one Nordic military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said as news channels blaring in the background flashed from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky walking through the alliance’s headquarters to showing wall-to-wall coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas.

And at a time when NATO is trying to help supercharge the trans-Atlantic defense industry to produce more ammunition and smart bombs—and seal itself off from Russian disinformation and cyberattacks—Hamas’s attacks, which breached the Israeli border wall at nearly two dozen points with car bombs and explosive-wielding motorcyclists, left some in the alliance worried about leaning too far in on artificial intelligence. 

“How do we team up the humans and the software to create an augmented effect while not losing control of the situation?” asked a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the alliance. 

NATO is going all-in on advanced technologies, tapping start-ups and the private sector to bolster its abilities in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, sensing, and surveillance. But as the surprise attack on Israel has shown, low-tech solutions can foil even high-tech militaries.

Hamas is using irregular tactics, such as stripping water pipes out of the ground and converting them into rockets, digging tunnels, and buying off-the-shelf drones. “A lot of technology they’re using is not new or groundbreaking,” said the senior NATO official. “It’s what people have in their home kitchen drawer that they buy from Alibaba.” 

It may be too early to learn the lessons from a war that’s less than a week old. But Bauer, the NATO military committee chairman, said that war-fighting organizations will have to own up to their faults. 

“We’re always willing to look at our performance, and the reason for that is because if we fail, there’s a lot of people killed,” said Bauer. “We owe it to the killed and the wounded soldiers and their families to look into what happened. Why did it go wrong? What could have been done better?”