UK's Armed Forces urged to restrict smartphone use in wake of pager attack
The triggering of hundreds of pagers to kill or maim members of the militant group Hezbollah has raised concerns about the UK's own military supply chain and the use of smartphones.
The minds behind the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon took the concept of a surgical strike to a whole new level.
They created a new kind of warfare where personal devices became hidden grenades in the hands and pockets of their users, with someone else – or something else – pulling the pin.
How and when the devices were either doctored, copied or distributed is not known.
The militant group has blamed Israel although Israeli officials have so far declined to comment.
But experts say this attack is a warning to our Armed Forces and allies to double down on supply line security – something Hezbollah militants and their command structure seemingly failed to do.
Major General (Retired) Chip Chapman, a former head of the MOD's Counter Terrorist Unit, told BFBS Forces News: "Smartphones are a very intimate form of surveillance.
"Therefore, in operational security terms, they [Hezbollah] took the view that going to a more analogue system would preserve their op sec.
"The flaw was they didn't look inside them because a pager can't explode, of course. A pager is just a pager until you add something to it.
"So it does show that you need to look at the architecture of your supply chain if you are to be truly secure."
Lessons to be learned
Maj Gen Chapman said lessons could be learned regarding the rules around personal devices in Britain's Armed Forces.
He said: "We have now a generation which have grown up with smartphones – the tethered generation.
"It gives us another warning that there are vulnerabilities within all these systems.
"Now the vulnerability of the smartphones with people is more to do with the targeting you can do with exfiltrating the data.
"So one of the things I'd like to see is a ruthless enforcement on both exercise and operations of the 'no smartphone or devices policy'.
"Because just a small number or cluster of smartphones in an area can give you a feel of the concentration of a unit and therefore an enemy could exploit that to target you.
"At a strategic level, we absolutely need to understand who is supplying our supply chain of our procurement strategy and that there is no hardware in that that could be exploited by an adversary."
Healey confident in kit
But Defence Secretary John Healey said he was confident in the kit the Armed Forces are equipped with.
He told BFBS Forces News: "Really what has been going on is still emerging – unique circumstances in Lebanon.
"Above all, my concern as Defence Secretary is the risk of escalation to a wider conflict and the repercussions it has for people in the region and beyond."
Military communications are evolving all the time, with ultra-secure systems like Trinity coming online, which uses a series of deployable nodes to create a self-contained battlefield network.
But in a digital age, where everyone wants individual connectivity, there are huge challenges and implications for operational security.
Warfare is itself a mother of invention and both sides of a battle are endlessly searching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses where they're least expected.
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