Israel may lose out on Phalanx-Gatlings to shoot down Qassams

WASHINGTON, May 6 (UPI) -- Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has finally bitten the bullet and announced that he is going to order Raytheon's Vulcan Phalanx super machine gun and radar system as a defense against very-short-range rockets threatening Israel from Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. But he may have left it too late.

Barak could and should have ordered the Raytheon Vulcan Phalanxes with its 20mm Gatling super-gun during the more than two years that he was defense minister while the strongly pro-Israel Bush administration was in power; he would have had them by now. A sympathetic White House would have made sure the request was fast-tracked through the huge U.S. military procurement process. The guns fire 3,000 shells per minute and cost $25 million each.

However, now the very different Obama administration is in office, and new U.S. President Barack Obama appears headed for a head-on confrontation with Israel over his demand for a quick agreement with the Palestinians in the peace process and his refusal to approve any unilateral Israeli airstrikes against Iran's threatening nuclear development program. New Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Obama in the White House on May 17 to discuss coordinating U.S. and Israeli policies on both those issues. Political insiders in Washington and Jerusalem agree that the meeting is not expected to be a relaxed or happy one.

Netanyahu and Barak, his old commander in Israel's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit nearly 40 years ago, are both used to a world where for decades every U.S. administration has been eager to supply Israel's high-tech strategic wish lists as quickly as it possibly can.

The only time since 1980 that there has been any significant strain in U.S.-Israeli relations was when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir infuriated President George Herbert Walker Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, by continuing to build and expand settlements on the West Bank and trying to get Congress to approve $10 billion, not in additional loans but in loan guarantees, at the same time. Bush successfully blocked the loan guarantees. Before that, Bush and his predecessor, President Ronald Reagan, were very supportive of Israel's security agenda and military needs, and so were Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican President George W. Bush after them.

That is still the case. But if Netanyahu and Barak approve Israeli airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, Obama could retaliate by freezing or just slowing down the sale of weapons systems and important technology to Israel. For all the fame and successful export sales of the Israeli arms industry, U.S. cooperation in research and development, and in production, remains the critical resource that allows a tiny country of 6 million people to remain a world player in weapons development and exports.

Had Barak ordered the Vulcan Phalanx two and a half years ago, he would probably have received some of them by now. But Obama is now determined to expand the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Also, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is heating up again in anticipation of the massive troop-level reductions Obama has promised.

The Vulcan Phalanx has proved itself repeatedly in combat in Iraq, so in these difficult times the U.S. Army very sensibly wants as many of them as it can get. Because Barak dithered for so many years, Israel is now at the back of the queue.

Respected Israeli analyst Yossi Melman, who has provided unequaled cutting-edge coverage of the controversy, wrote in Haaretz last month that Barak's decision "should have been made more than two years ago. This is a lifesaving system that is proving itself in the American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq."

If it were not for Melman and Haaretz, the Israeli public would have been kept in the dark for years about the potential availability of the Vulcan Phalanx and the problems surrounding Israel's own long-delayed and still troubled Rafael Iron Dome interceptor system against very-short-range missiles. In the U.S. media, the issue has only been consistently covered by United Press International.

Melman reported in Haaretz last month that Barak and his Defense Ministry have already appealed in vain both to the U.S. Department of Defense and to Raytheon Co. to purchase the Vulcan Phalanx system. But the demand for the system is so great that current orders are committed to the U.S. armed forces for years to come.

Haaretz reported that Barak plans to visit Washington next month and then go over the heads of the Pentagon and Raytheon by making his case directly to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

However, Barak, who repeatedly showed in his 1999-2001 stint as Israeli prime minister that he had a tin ear for politics and diplomacy, will be visiting the U.S. capital just a couple of weeks after his boss Netanyahu. If Netanyahu doesn't play ball with Obama on the peace process and Iran, then Gates is unlikely to go out of his way to secure the Raytheon Phalanx system, including its Gatling guns, for Israel.