Israel Is in Total War; Targeted Attacks Work as a Warning_ Expert

Joining us now to discuss is William Dunn, a U.S. Marine veteran, the president of Strategic Resilience Group and the author of Gunfighter's Rule. Bill, welcome. Good to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. For sure. Now, we're all searching in the dark here regarding these exploding devices, how it all works, how it happened. What evidence do you see so far that could potentially shed some light on the origin of these exploding devices? Obviously, the whole system was developed by an agency or country that had very in-depth knowledge of their threat and of their enemy. They somehow infiltrated the supply chain to get these explosives into these systems. So, very sophisticated, very sophisticated mission, and then very sophisticated execution. Now, we know that explosives were implanted into the devices. Do you have any sense of how they exploded and all at the same time? Yeah, I suspect they were all exploded simultaneously by using a radio frequency or actually calling those pagers at the same time. Once again, a very sophisticated operation. The other possibility would be sending out a very specific electronic signal that went to every single pager simultaneously. Very sophisticated in that, to hit them all at the same time, because if you hit a few of them early, then the other folks would have just got rid of those pagers. So, it was all tied together. And do you expect to see more of these waves of attack or the start of a bigger offensive soon? We heard of Israel saying that it thinks that we're entering a new phase of the war. I think that Israel right now is in total war, and Hezbollah and some of the other agencies are in the limited war. So, I think the probability of a follow-on attack is going to happen probably from both sides. It makes perfect sense for, you know, if this was Israel, it makes perfect sense for Israel to take out the entire communication system and capability of their enemy. If I was a Hezbollah individual, you cannot trust a cell phone, you can't trust a pager, you can no longer trust a walkie-talkie. So, it's going to very much hamper how they pass information to each other. And that will give an edge to any, you know, whether it's going to be some sort of attack from Israel, it'll give them an edge because the communications has ostensibly been shut down for Hezbollah. And in the U.S., the FBI says it's intercepted a Chinese state-sponsored hacking operation that targeted 200,000 devices here. In your mind, should we be concerned about similar types of attacks here in the U.S. in the event of, say, intensified relations between China and the U.S.? I'm not certain that we would see cell phones and pagers exploding in the U.S. Is it possible? Yes. Anything would be possible. If you have a cell phone, somebody could put an explosive charge in it, same as a pager, same as a walkie-talkie. I don't see that happening to us. Is it possible? Yes. I remember back in around 1982 when somebody went in, specifically in Chicago, and put cyanide in the Tylenol bottles. That completely changed the way manufacturers now use the supply chain. And as you can see, we have all those caps on every single piece of medicine that we have now. So I think this would be a change on how these systems are now shipped and protected. But I don't see that happening in the U.S. What's more probable would be electronic attack, i.e., pulling data out of our cell phones and other systems, which they're already doing. In a similar way, to try to take down the communication system, is that what you're saying? Perhaps a similar effect, but without the direct loss of life. Yeah, it could be possible. Our systems in the U.S. are pretty hardened. I just don't see an adversary trying to take out communications across the entire United States, unless we're going into a massive conflict. And then all bets would be off. Now, back to Israel. An analyst told me that the exploding devices in Lebanon could serve as a warning to other potential adversaries of Israel, considering that Israel is suspected of being behind this potential attack. What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, Israel's in total war. They're fighting for their mere existence. And anyone that's going to threaten them, they are going to fight back, period. So if I was any other threat to Israel, and I had pagers and cell phones, they're probably not using those. The potential is there. This is taking months, if not years, to plan. There's no way of knowing what other threat entities now possess pagers or cell phones or walkie talkies that have been tainted with these weapons. So ostensibly shutting down their communications as well. So what's the biggest mystery here in your mind? Because we're just learning that these devices potentially had been sold 10 years ago. How could all of this happen? This is an opinion. What I suspect happened is someone knew when a shipment was being moved. They either replaced the existing shipment with these modified systems, which are now weapons. And then just the receivers had no idea of knowing that the original shipment had been changed. That's probably how I would do it, is I'd grab the box of walkie talkies, put my own box in there in place that had been weaponized, and then send them off. The users have no idea. They get them, they pass them out, and then we know the results. I also suspect someone somewhere on the inside had had to know a little bit about this. It's possible that folks inside Lebanon want this war to end on the Hezbollah side, and maybe they supported that. It's just a theory. All right. Okay. Great to speak with you, William. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you, and you have a wonderful day. Thank you.