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Israel Expanding Missile Defense Capabilities, Defense Official Says
A senior Israeli defense official has said that although Iraq no longer threatens Israel with ballistic missiles, Tel Aviv is continuing to expand its missile defense capabilities and is currently establishing a national missile defense command-and-control facility to process all radar sensing information and to manage the nation’s batteries of Arrow and Patriot missile interceptors, Jane’s Defense Weekly reported this week (see GSN, May 7). “What we need to do is to ensure that our defenses are broad enough, vis-a-vis quantities potentially coming from Syria, sophisticated enough vis-a-vis the very dangerous potential threat from Iran and deep and flexible enough to address a potential threat from Libya,” said Arieh Herzog, director of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization. Herzog said Syria has hundreds of chemically armed Scud missiles that require Israel to acquire a large arsenal of interceptors (see GSN, July 17, 2002). “We must use potentially more than one missile [interceptor] against each of them. Therefore, talking only in terms of countering the quantity of the potential Syrian threat, we require a significant number of Arrow interceptors,” he said. In addition, Iran is developing longer-range missiles (see GSN, July 8) and Libya is seeking to purchase ballistic missiles from North Korea, Herzog said (see GSN, Aug. 15). To counter these threats, Israel also plans to deploy more Green Pine missile tracking radars and to increase their power. Without missile defense funding constraints, Herzog said he would also pursue the deployment of sea-based missile defenses. “I would like a naval component to the program, particularly if the potential Libyan threat were to develop, because the best way to cope with it would be with a naval component. But this is being studied now, and I don’t know if we shall have the available funding to develop [or] acquire it,” he said (Robin Hughes, Jane’s Defense Weekly, Oct 22.)
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