Technology

Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

It's a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

And yes, it's terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it's interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

It's also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I'm sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.

To take this to it's logical extreme, how do you feel about assassination attempts on high ranking Nazi officials? They're non combatants, after all.

And I'm sure Islamic State and the Taliban have non-combatant elements too.

I don't mind Israel defending against militant groups that fire rockets into Israel. I do mind them carpet-bombing civilian populations. This pager-thing seems to have the hallmarks of an operation that manages to cripple Hezbollah with a minimal loss of life and even fairly low civilian casualties. I much prefer Israel do this over the alternatives.