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Exclusive: Anti-missile system to be selected soon

It may be too late for Sderot and northern Israel residents, but a Defense Ministry committee of experts is expected to finally present its recommendations regarding a rocket and missile interception system this month

The Syrians have learned something in the past year. According to the latest estimations, Damascus has decided to adopt Hizbullah's strategy against Israel, one of its main parts being the bombardment of the Israeli home front with dozens of rockets which are cheap, easy to operate and convenient to hide.

 

Based on past experience, it is also reasonable to assume that such rockets will sooner or later reach Hizbullah instead of the old-fashioned Iranian Zelzal and Fajr rockets which Israel destroyed in the second Lebanon war.

 

This is the bad news. The good news is that the Israeli defense establishment is also not stagnating. After 4,000 rockets that landed in northern Israel last summer and approximately 1,000 Qassams which hit Sderot and the western Negev last year, a technological solution is finally starting to develop.

 

A professional Defense Ministry committee, which is holding extremely secret discussions, is nowadays completing the examination of at least five innovative and promising projects of systems for the interception of medium and short-range rockets and missiles.

 

In two or three weeks, the scientists and Israel Defense Forces officers who took part in the committee are expected to submit their conclusions to Defense Ministry Director-General Major-General (res.) Gaby Ashkenazi and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.

 

The defense minister and the prime minister will later be presented with the alternative, or the two alternatives, and if they are approved, an initial development will begin.

 

But it is too early to rejoice. The development and equipping of these projects will cost hundreds of thousands of US dollars. If everything advances properly, it should take two to four years before we see actual outcomes.

 

But the defense establishment is in no rush. The defense minister and the Defense Ministry director-general, who started the development process of an anti-rocket system, did not include this strategic project in the 2007 defense budget.

 

Maybe Uncle Sam will help

This failure is difficult to understand, although veteran defense establishment members hint that there was no failure here. This is a simple trick, they say, explaining that at the beginning of February, when the minister, the chief of staff and the director-general receive the professional committee's recommendations, they will come to the government and to the prime minister and will demand a special budget for the development of the answer to the rockets, and "we'll see who dares to turn them down."

 

The Israeli government may then also turn to Washington and ask Uncle Sam to take part in the expenses.

 

However, not many in the IDF share this optimistic estimation. A senior officer openly said this week that he is afraid the tens of millions of dollars required for the initial development of the anti-rocket project this year would be taken from the IDF's alertness and preparedness budget.

 

Such a step, he said, would harm the army's implementation of its working plan aimed at refitting it and fixing the war failures. This is another government budgetary plan, the price of which will be eventually paid by all of us sooner or later.

 

If and when the money is found, however, this may be the beginning of the end of the most severe and long failure in the history of the Israeli defense establishment. This is the same establishment which until the second Lebanon war and the recent Qassam barrages on Sderot did not succeed in understanding the full strategic meaning of the rocket threat on the State of Israel's home front.

 

Israel began dealing with this threat in the end of the 1960s, when Katyusha rockets fired by the Palestinians from Lebanon began disturbing the lives of Kiryat Shmona and Galilee panhandle residents.

 

Since then and to this day, the terror and guerilla organizations operating against Israel continue to hit the Israeli home front and cause physical, moral and mental damages. These accumulated damages bear a strategic affect: Civilians living in constant fear and threatening to abandon communities; a constant danger of hitting refineries, plants producing hazardous chemical substances, electric power stations and the hundreds of thousands of people living near them.

 

The rockets are what pushed the Israeli government to the first Lebanon War in the 1980s, to Operation Grapes of Wrath and Operation Accountability in the 1990s, and the recent armed raids in the Gaza Strip.

 

These military initiatives, which mostly took place in the heart of a non-fighting Arab civil population, not only did not benefit the State of Israel, but caused immense damage in the diplomatic arena.

 

The rockets also limited the State of Israel's diplomatic and military freedom of operation. Because of the rockets, for instance, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was forced to abandon his realignment plan. The rocket barrages in the second Lebanon war and the Qassams fired at Sderot made it clear to him that evacuating the West Bank could turn it into a Qassam base which will threaten Ben Gurion Airport and central Israel.

 

Nautilus disappointing

All this did not escape the attention of senior defense establishment officials, who started looking for a technological solution for the rockets at the beginning of the 1990s. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even signed an agreement with former US President Bill Clinton for a joint US-Israeli development of a rocket interception system based on laser technology, called Nautilus.

 

Approximately USD 400 million were invested in the system so far. It was even experimented and succeeded in intercepting Katyusha rockets and mortar shells.

 

Three years ago, however, the Americans lost interest. Nautilus was big, heavy and expensive. It was hard to move it on the ground, and even more so to fly it to fighting areas overseas, as the US Army demanded.


Nautilus system. Only on paper (Photo: PR)

 

Israel's enthusiasm also cooled down when it found out that the laser beam loses a great part of its efficiency in wintry and dusty weather and due to the billions of dollars which would have been invested in the equipping of dozens of systems required to defend the northern and southern communities in Israel.

 

Once Nautilus was abandoned, the defense establishment issued a public appeal to the defense industries in Israel and the US to submit proposals for rocket interception systems.

 

The industries met the challenge and submitted proposals for anti-missile systems, which were all rejected due to the Israeli defense establishment's conception up to six months ago: The rockets, officials said for years, are in fact "foolish flying pipes" which do not cause the same number of casualties like suicide bombings, for example. Their damage is also quite little. Therefore, there is no point in investing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the development of an intercepting missile in order to "kill" a Qassam or a Katyusha which only cost several tens of dollars.

 

This conception, which belittles the threat of the short-range rockets, also penetrated the army. Although the chief of staff presented the threat to the government in the discussion which preceded the second Lebanon war, he did not bother to suggest an answer to the problem.

 

Only after two weeks of war, which was the longest war Israel took part in since 1949 as there was no answer to the hundreds of rockets launched by Hizbullah every day, the army and the defense establishment finally understood that this was a strategic threat which was only the second most severe threat after the Iranian nuclear threat on Israel. Regular cost benefit budgetary considerations do not apply to such a threat.

 

Conscious change

It should be said that Defense Minister Amir Peretz acknowledged the importance of the issue even before the second Lebanon war. As a resident of the Qassam-stricken Sderot, he personally experienced the threat of the "foolish pipes" and understood its human and political meaning.

 

Therefore, immediately after he took the defense minister's chair, he held an urgent discussion and instructed the defense establishment to view the issue as a top priority. From a historic point of view, however, it should also be noted the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did it before him, including a slamming his fist on the table, several months before he went into coma.


Foolish flying pipe? (Photo: Almog Sugavker) 

 

This fist is what probably generated in May 2006 the SRBM project for the interception of medium-range missiles – not Katyushas or Qassams, but heavier missiles, those that the State of Israel was hit by for the first time during the Lebanon war.

 

In order to implement an initial developments of the project, which was entirely on paper, the Defense Ministry signed an agreement with the RAFAEL Armament Development Authority and the US arms manufacturer Raytheon. The Pentagon is part of this project and the US Congress allotted USD 10 million to the project even before the second Lebanon war.

 

During the war, the Congress earmarked additional funds to develop the project following a decision made by the Administration for the Development of Weapons and the Technological Industry, which is part of the Defense Ministry.

 

Even before the war it was decided to separate between the search for an answer to the heavy medium-range rockets (between 40 to 250 kilometers – between 24.84 to 155.25 miles) and an answer to the "light" short-range rockets (between 5 to 50-70 kilometers – between 3.105 to 31.05-43.47 miles).

 

When the second Lebanon war ended, the defense establishment already had a project that guaranteed an answer to the heavy medium-range rockets. But then a conscious change took place in the defense establishment, and the issue of the short-range missiles, the Katyushas and the Qassams, became the top priority.

 

Israel's defense industry, as well as the American arms manufacturers, noticed the change and its economic potential and rushed to provide an abundance of proposals for the development of short-range-missile interception systems.

 

As things look now, the State of Israel may finally be protected from rockets in three to four years, or maybe even less, under one condition – that the defense establishment and the Israeli government stop their budget games and business plans and earmark the required funds to the chosen projects.

 

At first, funds will be needed for an initial development which will last till the end of 2007, and if all goes well, for the completed development, the experiments and the equipping.

 

And we should all be aware of the fact that once Israel has a good response to rockets, even the missile threat and the Iranian nuclear threat will be much less dangerous.

 

In second part: Types of threats and proposed solutions

 


פרסום ראשון: 01.13.07, 14:28
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