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This episode features Professor Shaul Chorev, head of the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center at the National Center for Blue Economy and Innovation in Haifa. The conversation covers the lessons from naval warfare in the Russia-Ukraine war, with an emphasis on asymmetric warfare, the use of uncrewed vehicles, and the strategic implications for Israel and the Middle East.
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Asymmetric warfare and the importance of choke points
According to Professor Chorev, the war between Russia and Ukraine clearly demonstrates the principles of asymmetric warfare, where a relatively weak side exploits its advantages to inflict significant damage on a stronger side. He identifies similarities between this arena and challenges Israel faces, such as the shadow war against Iran in the Gulf of Aden, during which the Revolutionary Guards attacked merchant ships with UAVs, and the threat from the Houthis in the Red Sea.
The fighting mainly takes place in coastal areas, which allow for attacking naval targets from the shore. The most prominent example is the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva with a Ukrainian Neptune missile fired from the coast. Professor Chorev emphasizes the growing importance of maritime choke points. Just as Turkey controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, the Houthis control the Bab el-Mandeb, and the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz. Control over these points allows for influencing global maritime trade, as seen with the closure of the port of Eilat due to the Houthi threat and the delays in grain exports from the Black Sea.
The limitations of large navies
Boris Gorelik asks if the Israeli Navy suffers from budget neglect, but Professor Chorev believes the problem is not rooted in resources. He notes that even the US Navy, despite its power, failed to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea against the Houthis, neither in the Biden administration’s Operation Prosperity Guardian nor in an operation by the Trump administration. The high cost of intercepting cheap missiles made the campaign economically unviable for the Americans. According to him, the Chinese, who need the shipping lane for their Belt and Road Initiative, apparently preferred to pay protection money to the Houthis rather than deploy their own navy.
The lesson, Professor Chorev argues, is that large navies struggle to cope with this new type of warfare. Ukraine, a country with almost no navy of its own, managed to destroy about a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet using relatively cheap and simple means.
Israel’s lag in the field of uncrewed vehicles
In Professor Chorev’s opinion, Israel’s naval arm is lagging behind the air and ground forces in adopting uncrewed vehicles. He recalls that the navy was a pioneer in the approach of small, fast platforms, like the missile boats in the Yom Kippur War, but today it is not a leader in the field of uncrewed vehicles.
As an example, he brings up the Protector, an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) by Rafael, which proved itself but was abandoned by the navy for irrelevant reasons. Furthermore, the navy chose to equip its Sa’ar 6-class corvettes with a heavy, crewed naval helicopter instead of developing uncrewed platforms. Professor Chorev explains that the barrier is mainly conceptual and doctrinal. Officers in the navy find it hard to accept the idea that an operator on shore would be authorized to open fire from an uncrewed vessel, even though all the technological means exist.
The undersea threat to infrastructure
The conversation then turns to the threat from the undersea domain. Professor Chorev explains that in addition to USVs, a significant threat is developing from uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs). Hamas has already shown the beginnings of such capabilities. The threat is not only to vessels, but to critical infrastructure on the seabed, such as communication cables, gas pipelines, and power cables from offshore wind farms.
He notes that this is hybrid warfare, which is difficult to attribute to a specific state. As examples, he cites the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, an act he attributes to the Ukrainians, and the cutting of communication cables in the Baltic Sea by the Russians. According to him, countries like China are developing underwater vehicles, under the pretext of resource exploration, that could be used to damage strategic infrastructure, for example by cutting Taiwan off from its communication cables.
The future: Integrating crewed and uncrewed vehicles
Professor Chorev describes how the Ukrainians are refining their capabilities, shifting from the use of surface vehicles, which the Russians have learned to defend against, to the use of underwater vehicles that penetrate protected ports and hit strategic targets like submarines and bridges.
He argues that the future lies in an integrated approach of crewed and uncrewed vehicles, or Man-Unmanned Teaming. In this method, a large, crewed platform, such as a submarine or a ship, serves as a mothership and carries smaller, uncrewed vehicles. Thus, the submarine can launch an underwater vehicle on a dangerous mission, like damaging an undersea cable, without endangering itself. According to him, leading navies around the world, foremost among them the US Navy, are already moving in this direction.
The original episode, in Hebrew: המהפכה הימית