What Israel’s Rear-Area Wars Can Teach South Korea

South Korea is now faced with a problem that Israel has been grappling with: how to prevent adversaries from transforming the rear area into another frontline.

Strictly speaking, the analogy contains limitations. While Israel has primarily confronted Iran-backed non-state actors such as Hezbollah, South Korea is at loggerheads with a nuclear-armed power that possesses considerable conventional forces, ballistic missiles, and strong special operations capabilities. Nonetheless, the comparison remains useful. In a future conflict, Pyongyang could conduct provocations with the most effective combination of missile attacks, drone saturation, sabotage, cyber operations, and infiltration using nuclear escalation as leverage.

North Korea’s participation in the Russo-Ukrainian war makes the challenge even more serious. Pyongyang is increasingly being exposed to a battlefield in which drones are not used as standalone weapons but as part of a larger system that links reconnaissance, artillery, infantry, electronic warfare, and precision-guided munitions (PGMs). This means that North Korea would likely integrate its accumulated lessons from the European frontlines into its longstanding strategy for paralyzing South Korea’s rear.

Therefore, the central question for Seoul is not how to protect every air base, port, command center, and logistics facility. Rather, it is how to ensure that the loss of any one of them does not cripple the functions on which the war effort depends.

Israel confronted a similar issue after the 2006 Lebanon War. Hezbollah developed tunnels that crossed the border in order to facilitate penetration into northern Israel during a larger conflict, which potentially enabled infiltration by land to be conducted concurrently with rocket fire and skirmishes along the border.

Israel did not wait for another war to discover how serious the threat had become. It developed specialized intelligence and detection capabilities and, in 2018, commenced Operation Northern Shield to identify the tunnels and neutralize them. Amidst the confusion of war, Israel attempted to destroy an operational option before Hezbollah could exploit it.

The same logic was applied to Israel’s broader Campaign Between the Wars, or Mabam, which sought to limit Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria and disrupt weapons transfers to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)