By Yaakov Lappin
The ongoing attempt by Hezbollah and its patron Iran to build an arsenal of precision guided missiles (PGMs) in Lebanon and in Syria represents the most challenging conventional military threat to Israel’s security.
With an accuracy of within 10 meters, PGMs give Hezbollah the ability to strike strategically sensitive targets such as power plants, government buildings, military targets, commercial centers, and other potential targets. In essence, this firepower capability gives anyone who possesses it, including a non-state terror army like Hezbollah, its own version of an air force with precise bombing abilities.
In any future full-scale conflict with Hezbollah, Israeli multi-tier air defenses would, despite their high-end capabilities, be unable to provide complete protection. The combination of physical damage to life and property in a sensitive site and the boost this would give to future Hezbollah ‘victory’ narratives represents a top priority challenge to Israeli national security.
Iranian-Hezbollah efforts to set up a PGM arsenal go back several years. According to the Israel Defense Forces, in 2013, under the cover of the Syrian civil war, Iran attempted to smuggle fully assembled precision missiles from Iran to Syria. The missiles were intended for the use of Hezbollah. A series of airstrikes, attributed by the international media to Israel, thwarted those efforts.
This shadow campaign, dubbed the ‘campaign between wars’ by the Israeli defense establishment, continued in high gear in 2014 and 2015, as Hezbollah entrenched itself more deeply in Syria.
In 2016, after the campaign between wars apparently thwarted Iranian-Hezbollah efforts, Tehran adopted a new approach, based on the idea of producing PGMs on Lebanese soil, as well as converting unguided rockets already located in Lebanon into PGMs.
In order to achieve this goal, the Islamic Republic began transferring to Lebanon precision components from Iran, and rockets from the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (known by its French acronym, CERS), an Assad regime agency that develops weapons together with Iran and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s job was to assemble the ‘puzzle pieces’ together into PGMs, and to this end, it began setting up PGM conversion centers across Lebanon, including in Beirut.
The IDF says the entire program is being managed by senior officers in the Iranian overseas Quds Force. The program is ‘nourished’ through three lines of trafficking, which were planned out by the late Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani: Via cargo flights from Iran, truck convoys, and ships.
Due to what the IDF described in a video as “various efforts,” Iran and Hezbollah struggled to manufacture PGMs or convert ‘dumb missiles’ into guided ones.
In 2019, Iran and Hezbollah again attempted to intensify these efforts, leading Israel to issue multiple warnings to Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah over the grave potential consequences of his actions.
While Nasrallah is theoretically able to convince the Iranians to ‘turn the volume down’ on the PGM project if he were to feel this was necessary, it still remains unclear to what extent Nasrallah has internalized these warnings. This, despite the fact that Hezbollah is extremely busy dealing with - and trying to exploit - Lebanon’s snowballing economic, political, and humanitarian crises.
The crumbling Lebanese state is incapable of stopping these efforts despite the enormous threat they pose to its own security.
Israel continued to expose PGM sites in Lebanon in 2020. In September of that year, for example, it listed several PGM conversion sites in the heart of Beirut, leading Nasrallah to deny the information. He then invited reporters on a dubious tour of the sites in question.
In July this year, the IDF’s Northern Command assessed that Hezbollah possesses between 130,000 to 150,000 rockets and missiles at various ranges. Hebrew media reports noted that Israel is more disturbed by the PGM project than the size of Hezbollah’s arsenal.
It is also worth noting that Hezbollah possesses a number of guided anti-ship cruise missiles, which should also be considered as PGMs. These same cruise missiles could be used to hit targets on the Israeli coastline, such as naval bases.
“The assessment in the defense establishment is that there is no need to conduct a preventative or early strike at this time, since Hezbollah does not pose an existential threat,” Kan reported on July 16. According to the assessments, Hezbollah is not interested in initiating a war in the near future against Israel.
But Hezbollah and Iran are interested in building up the PGM arsenal in Lebanon, and this creates ongoing dilemmas for Israel. From 2013 until now, Israel has apparently decided to respond to the challenge by relying on the campaign between wars.
A reported Israeli airstrike in the area of Al-Safira, southeast of Aleppo, Syria, as well as on civilian and military airports in the area, on July 19 of this year, appeared to be the latest Israeli preventative move against the PGM program.
According to the Israeli Alma Research and Education Center, which maps out threats on the northern front, Al-Safria has a branch of the CERS agency.
“We also know that under Iranian auspices, among other things, the precision missile project is involved there,” Alma observed following the reported airstrike. The center assessed that the strikes on Al-Safira were “intended to disrupt and harm attempts to advance the missile accuracy project,” marking what appears to be the latest development in the high stakes shadow war to prevent the radical Shi’ite axis from building Hezbollah’s ‘air force.’
It seems therefore that Israel is continuing to prioritize its activities against the PGM program, but limiting its activities to Syria, based on the common understanding that any Israeli preventative strike in Lebanon would lead to a rapid escalation with Hezbollah.
In addition, it is impossible to view Hezbollah’s PGM program in isolation from the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s objective to become a nuclear-armed state, or a threshold nuclear state that is on the cusp of nuclear breakout, is designed to provide a nuclear umbrella over its proxies in the Middle East (in addition to creating immunity for the Iranian regime).
Under that scenario, Hezbollah would be able to threaten sensitive targets using PGMs, and enjoy the backing of a nuclear-armed ‘mothership’ state. This combination of threats would surely boost the confidence of the Iranian-Shi’ite axis, and could embolden it to launch future attacks and provocations against Israel as part of a gamble that Israeli decision makers would be deterred from responding with the appropriate level of force.
This scenario contains within it intolerable future costs, meaning that Israel must prevent it from materializing today.
If the campaign between the wars is sufficiently effective at prevention, then this is welcome news, but if it proves to be insufficient, taking preventative action that could incur a high cost today is preferable to sitting on the fence and watching the PGM threat overshadow Israel’s future.
Yaakov Lappin is an Israel-based military affairs correspondent and analyst. He provides insight and analysis for a number of media outlets, including Jane's Defense Weekly, a leading global military affairs magazine, and JNS.org, a news agency with wide distribution among Jewish communities in the U.S. Read full bio here.