The recent attacks against Hezbollah reveal a significant evolution in the operational methods of intelligence agencies in response to hybrid threats that challenge the traditional boundaries between public and private, national and international. For this reason, a radical reform of the organization of other intelligence services is also needed towards a more integrated and multidisciplinary model
The recent attacks (via pager and radio) on thousands of militants of the terrorist organization Hezbollah indicate essential changes in national security policies – known so far only to insiders.
The substance of this innovation is simple to explain but complex to put into practice. To counter hybrid threats from hostile actors (state and non-state), states need new organizations to plan intelligence operations with equally hybrid characteristics. As underlined by various reports from the Central Intelligence Agency ( here is an example ), the technological revolution has eroded the traditional boundaries between internal and external, public and private, and above all between signals intelligence and human intelligence, traditionally separate sectors, which in current conditions are required an unprecedented strategic and operational convergence.
Here, there are two main aspects. The first is related to the cyber dimension. Many continue to speak simply of a “fifth domain” without considering the intrinsic limits of this term. This definition is indeed useful for those dealing with computer security and telecommunications. Still, it does not capture the most significant impact of the digital revolution, which has profoundly changed the reality in which we live.
Cyberspace is not just a single domain; it is a connective tissue that transversally unites the other domains. It is a sort of “central nervous system” characterized by two fundamental capacities for intelligence activities: it can communicate, connect, process, and memorize myriads of networks, data, information, and objects of all kinds; it can autonomously manage complex processes in the industrial, healthcare, military, etc. fields.
Most contemporary societies are characterized by pervasive digitalization processes that are more or less technologically advanced. These processes present countless physiological functions of great social utility, but at the same time, they involve numerous potential pathologies, not least digital addiction syndromes.
In terms of threats, numerous structural vulnerabilities can be observed today, which have increased with the advent of the so-called generative artificial intelligence. All data (words, images, videos) can be falsified and manipulated much more easily than in the past. Specific software and automation networks can favor sabotage or deception objectives to the advantage of terrorist organizations, criminals, and/or hostile regimes. Obviously, the same means can be used – as the Lebanese case demonstrates – in the opposite direction: deterrence, defense, and national security in democracies.
The second observation is that the Lebanese case results from a very strong convergence between the multiple areas in which intelligence activities are articulated, starting from clandestine operations, creation of front companies, deception actions, and the broad spectrum that includes human intelligence, open-source intelligence, and signals intelligence. It is evident that maximum integration between different departments is necessary within a general reorganization of the intelligence services to carry out an operation like the Lebanese one.
How to get Hezbollah’s top brass to give up smartphones and go back to the pagers and radios used in the 1990s? How to penetrate supplier companies and insert switches or explosives into the devices at some stage in the supply chain? How to create two digital networks, one among thousands of pagers and the next day another among hundreds of radios, to simultaneously hit the maximum number of Hezbollah militants?
The elements that have emerged so far are sufficient to indicate that it is necessary and urgent to create a new organizational model for intelligence agencies, no longer based on a divisional structure, that is, on rigid sectoral compartmentalization by competence.
On the contrary, multidisciplinary organizational units are necessary to realize specific objectives and projects. To ensure the direction of such complex operations, a profound change in the Intelligence’s organizational culture (and structure) is first required.
