I'm John Bachelor with Bill Rajel, my colleague and co-host of FDD, and David Doad reporting to us from FD on Lebanon.

A read from Lazar Berman's column in the Times of Israel.

Years after drone warfare transformed other battlefields, the IDF seems caught off guard by Hezbollah's effective use of first-person and fiber optic UAVs, leaving troops in southern Lebanon exposed it again. Bill, you have a question.

David, the article notes or states that Israel is caught off guard by this and should have learned from past campaigns, conflicts with drones and uses Azerbaijan or Armenia.

But aren't we looking at a different animal here, the use of FPV drones, first-person-viewed drones?

Isn't this a completely different animal that is much more difficult with militaries to deal with?

The Russians and the Ukrainians still haven't solved the problems of FPD drones.

I don't think anyone's solved it.

So look, drone warfare is becoming kind of the warfare of the future.

And, you know, it's, you know, the Israelis are at, you know, in some ways,

at the forefront of that. They are at the cutting edge of that. They have a whole fleet of drones

that, you know, have different purposes. And they export them and even in the Azerbaijan and

Armenia conflict, right? They're a,

they're a peace supplier to Azerbaijan, much to the chagrin of the Armenians. But when it

comes to the FPVs, like you said, this is something that has still not, there's no answer to it.

I mean, here's the way these actors operate.

We see the Ukrainians operating this way with the Russians.

If you can't match your foe conventionally and you don't have the budget, like the Ukrainians

don't and like Hezbollah doesn't, to, you know, the IDF has spent decades becoming this technological superpower.

And it very much relies a lot on high technology, on advanced technology in warfare.

Hezbollah obviously doesn't have the R&D capabilities. It doesn't have the money to match that.

So what do you do? You develop a method that kind of flies under the radar, right?

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