BMD Focus: Israel and Sky Guard -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army and Air Force have made clear they aren’t interested in developing new speed-of-light, directed energy defenses against very-short-range ballistic missile threats, but a powerful new constituency for the idea is organizing itself in Israel.

Such defenses are certainly feasible, and significant development has already been done on creating them in the United States. The problem is that it isn’t remotely cost effective yet to do so. The prototype systems being developed are extremely expensive, large and difficult to move and deploy.

By contrast, it is extremely cheap and convenient to manufacture the almost homemade, short-range Qassam rockets with which Hamas in Gaza continually bombard the Israeli border town in Sderot, or to mass manufacture the BM 21 Grad, or Katyusha, Multiple Launch Rocket mortars deployed by Hezbollah, the Shiite Party of God, in Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah fired 4,000 of them against Northern Israel in the brief July 2006 mini-war, and while casualties were very low, the strategic and psychological effect of the weapons was very great.

Now Israel’s newly formed Israel Missile Defense Association has set its sights on developing a defense against the Katyushas as quickly as possible. The IMDA is a non-partisan, non-profit lobbying organization. But no one in Israel doubts that behind it stands the formidable presence of retired Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, former prime minister and chief of staff, and Israel’s most powerful minister of defense since his close friend and mentor, the late Yitzhak Rabin.

Barak is determined to regain the premiership he briefly held in 1999-2001, and he wants to use revitalizing and dramatically boosting Israel’s ballistic missile defenses to achieve that end. Israel’s BMD systems to protect it against the threat of intermediate-range ballistic missiles and short-range ones fired from Iran and Syria are already about as good as they can be, which makes them the best in the world. But Barak also wants to create defenses against very-short-range ballistic missiles. That‘s where the speed-of-light energy weapons come in.

The problem is that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, under pressure from Congress because of the enormous costs of its programs, has been streamlining and focusing in recent years to concentrate its resources on the most promising and practical weapons that can be deployed either now or in the near future against major nuclear or strategic threats. Close U.S. cooperation with Israel on the Arrow and Patriot programs has greatly benefited both countries. But the most difficult and extensive item -- and also the most crucial -- in the U.S. BMD arsenal is the Ground-based Mid-course Interceptors mainly deployed around Fort Greeley, Alaska.

In recent years the MDA and its major defense contractors have made excellent progress in redressing previous Department of Defense policy mistakes enacted during the six-year regime of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Henry “Trey” Obering III and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, the GBIO program has chalked up successful intercepts and an impressively improved record of basic engineering reliability.

But pouring resources into laser, or directed-energy system to safeguard, not against a handful of high-flying ICBMs, but against thousands of small short-range artillery-type rocket projectiles does not fit into this strategy. It would mark a return to the speculative, visionary, long-term, cutting-edge technology programs that sucked up so much money and gave BMD such a bad name for many years. Neither the U.S. Army nor the U.S. Air Force, eager to protect the major strategic programs that Congress is still funding, want to touch anything like that.

Now the new Israeli IMDA is challenging that consensus.

--

(Next: Israel learns from U.S. defense lobbyists)