The Israeli army has carried out the largest battle simulation against the Lebanese organisation Hezbollah, YnetNews reported yesterday.
Revealing an army report, the news website said the exercise was “carried out at the battle laboratory of the Land Forces Weapons Department located in Tel Hashomer base outside of Tel Aviv.”
Unlike other smaller drills, the website said, “this exercise was carried out at the brigade level, and included soldiers from the Golani Brigade, the IDF 7th Tank Brigade, a tactical drone unit, IDF combat engineers and more – all under florescent lighting and in air conditioned offices.”
It also noted that “some of the weapons systems, which were tested, are unable to be tested in live fire drills either due to budgetary issues or because their safety has not been proven yet.”
“The majority of the new fighting systems being tested out in these simulators are still works in progress, and are top secret. However, one of the systems which are allowed to be written about is the ‘Spark’, which is a next generation anti-tank missile.”
YnetNews also said that several other brand new weapons were tested such as GPS guided mortar, a command and control ground forces system, which enables ground forces to coordinate directly with air force pilots in the air, and small observation balloons expected to be used by all ground forces soon.
“The development of these new weapons takes a lot of time and money and is full of risks,” a high ranking ground forces commander responsible for developing the advanced weapons told the website.
He added: “Our goal is to minimise these risks from the beginning. This is what we did when we began to develop the ‘wind screen’ system and Mars multi-sensor detection system.”
During the simulations, the soldiers were trained to capture villages controlled by Hezbollah, “but via giant plasma screens, keyboards, joysticks, virtual reality goggles and various other simulators.”
The newspaper described the drills “like a giant war videogame, with over 150 soldiers online, around the clock, for two days.”