Fast Draw – The Israeli UAV Wars

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The dirty war between the Israeli UAV manufacturers, especially IAI and Elbit Systems, keeps damaging Israel.

The latest incident concerns a Polish Defense Ministry contract for the acquisition of medium unmanned aerial vehicles. The Polish Deputy Defense Minister supposedly preferred Elbit’s Hermes 450 UAV over IAI’s Heron 1. The deputy minister was forced to resign after it was discovered that he promoted Elbit as an “exclusive supplier”, even though the competition with IAI was still ongoing.

So it was the deputy minister that paid the price, but right now the main casualty is the reputation of the entire Israeli defense industry. There have been too many shady incidents lately. The Defense Ministry, despite it’s various oversight divisions, can’t keep things in order.

In the past there have been several cases where the war between IAI and Elbit over UAV sales caused millions of dollars’ worth of damages. The most severe incident was connected to a large deal about to be finalized in Colombia. The war between the two companies became, according to some sources, extremely vicious, and eventually none of them got the contract – at least in the first stages of the deal. Only after another round Elbit won the contract, but, of course, by that time the situation affected the total worth of the deal itself. Defense Ministry personnel were forced to leave to Colombia urgently in order to prevent any collateral damage from the battle between the two companies.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The tensions between the two resulted in some ridiculous situations. Two IAI workers, while hiking in the Golan Heights, observed an Elbit UAV test flight and recorded it. This “terrible” act was discovered and only served to add fuel to the fire. IAI was forced to apologize, even though anyone in the area could have recorded the test flight as well. When there’s tension every little, insignificant incident may prove incendiary.

And so the dirty war went on and on, even as many countries already started to produce their own, relatively advanced UAV systems. “Why should a potential client get involved? More and more clients go directly to an American or European manufacturer and Israel loses as a state”, this according to a top defense establishment figure.

Israel is still a leading UAV manufacturer, but more and more countries begin developing their own systems and the competition keeps growing. Things will get worse when China starts offering relatively cheap UAVs for sale. Instead of cooperating Israeli UAV manufacturers continue to fight each other. If this continues the resulting damage will be worse than ever.