“Maybe we should ask the Americans to bring in some Pac-3 batteries while we finish development.” It was not a question by the prime minister. He was instructing his defense minister.
“Yes, sir. We will pursue those discussions.”
Now Ben Raibani added commentary. “I hope the Patriot actually works when we need it to this time.” The Patriot missile had undergone its baptism of fire during the first Gulf War in 1991 and there was still anger among many IDF senior officers at its lack of ability to destroy the missiles fired at Israel by Saddam Hussein.
Avner had been in this same discussion a hundred times in the two decades since that war. Both he and Raibani knew that detailed analysis by the IDF had shown that the Scud missiles being fired by Iraq were breaking apart during reentry into the atmosphere above Tel Aviv and Haifa. The result was that the Patriot radar at the time could not distinguish between the inbound warhead and the other various pieces of broken up missile. The Patriots were hitting pieces of missile, just not the warheads. When the Patriot missile was intercepting the inbound warhead, subsequent analysis had shown that the closing speed between the two was much higher than the Patriot’s programming anticipated. Simple software programming revisions after the war had corrected that problem, and new seeker systems had been developed since then at great expense to allow the missile to better distinguish its desired target.
Avner gave Raibani the type of look he had given Gresch earlier. “Ben, you know what happened. For God’s sake, we have almost twenty years of development since then.” He stared at the old general, imploring him to stick to asking good questions. “Can I move on?” Raibani simply nodded as he turned his head and glanced at Cohen, wondering if he had also irritated his prime minister. Cohen never returned the gaze.
Avner calmed down and now started waving his pen around. All the men present knew this meant that he was focused and ready to get back on message. He continued. “We now have three Arrow 2 batteries deployed. One battery protects Tel Aviv, one battery protects Haifa, and we have completed operational deployment of a battery protecting Dimona. The last deployment is the direct result of intelligence developed by Mossad and Aman over the past couple of years regarding Persian targeting. We are working to fund another battery for deployment outside Jerusalem. The first two batteries now have a full complement of eight six-tube launchers. The newly deployed Dimona battery has four launchers. That leaves us with a total of one hundred twenty missiles currently available.
“We are systematically upgrading older missiles to block 3 status. We are also working jointly with the U.S. to network all of our batteries and add the American X-band radar system into the network. That radar gives us an added four to six minutes of warning time on anything headed our way from Persia.”
Ben Raibani shook his head. “The Americans installed that radar in the Negev two years ago. I thought we have been networked with them since then. What am I missing?”
“Well, Ben, we have been networked in the sense that we have direct communication between the American operators and Air Defense Command in Tel Aviv. But we have yet to create a directly linked network.”
“May I ask why?”
Once again the prime minister felt compelled to come to the aid of Avner. Only this time the reason was that the answer involved politics, not military realities. “The answer, Ben,” said Cohen, “is the same as why the Americans are operating the radar without any Israeli personnel on site. They are using the radar for a lot more than just giving us early warning capability. They don’t want us to know exactly what that system is picking up.”
“What are they doing, spying on us?” Raibani assumed a tone of surprise.
Cohen laughed. “Please, Ben. You are way too old and wise to act like that. Who knows what they are doing? Frankly, I don’t care. I am happy to have that system here and have American soldiers on our soil as a tripwire.”
Raibani was not satisfied. “I don’t think having an American listening post on our soil spying on us, not too far from Dimona I might add, makes a lot of sense.”
Cohen was exasperated. This decision was argued over long ago and the issue was moot. Yavi Aitan stepped in now to support his prime minister. “General Raibani, I have to say that while this radar is very powerful, the fact is that there is nothing I can think of that the Americans can use it for relative to Israel that they don’t already have the capability to do and have had for a long time. There is an American Aegis class cruiser or destroyer on station in the Mediterranean within two hundred kilometers of our coast every hour of every day. There are American AWACS planes over Turkey, Iraq or Saudi Arabia all the time. They have satellites in stationary and low earth orbit that scoop up everything going on in Israel and the rest of the Middle East. This radar station is just another redundant system added on top of a long list of redundancy. And if you want to talk about spying on us, I can assure you that there’s just about no communications that take place in Israel that travel over the airwaves or over the internet that aren’t picked up by the NSA. So, with all due respect, it is silly to point to this one radar system as a problem.”
Raibani leaned back in his chair, his body visibly deflating. For the first time in one of these meetings he felt like the old dinosaur being made a fool by the young whiz kid.
Aitan continued. “The reason for the delay in integrating directly into our Arrow network is twofold. First, they have been working on software that will send us what we want and need, which is early warning of missile launches, without sending us whatever it is they don’t want us to see — which could be as simple as them not wanting us to see what their aircraft are doing over Iraq or the Persian Gulf. But the second reason is on us. As General Avner knows, we have not yet networked our Arrow batteries. The Americans have used that as an excuse, but we should be successfully networked soon.”
Aitan paused for a second and had a new thought. “I want everyone to understand that if you are assuming that we can somehow launch aircraft on a long-range mission and do that without the Americans knowing almost immediately, you are making a bad assumption. We cannot attack Iran without U.S. involvement at least on a passive basis. American fighter planes are all over the airspace between here and there. I don’t think I can imagine a worse scenario than IAF planes and U.S. planes getting into a mistaken dogfight over Iraq or Kuwait or the Gulf. So when we do pull the trigger, it will have to start with a phone call to U.S. Central Command in Qatar.” The officers in the room understood this. Raibani took this as a further rebuke, but in his dejected mood he held his fire.
Danny Stein, the minister of industry, trade and labor, had been increasingly asserting his intellect as these Kitchen Cabinet meetings progressed. He was about to earn more respect. “Excuse me General Avner.” Stein was not yet comfortable addressing the three senior members of this group by their first name. “I am having a hard time with the economics of our missile defense systems. By our own estimate, Hezbollah has over forty-five thousand missiles and Hamas has thousands of missiles in Gaza. Almost all of these missiles are relatively inexpensive, ranging from homemade Qassams to old Katyusha rockets, which I understand can be purchased on the arms markets for only a few hundred dollars each. Against this, we have deployed a small number of Arrow missiles, which cost about eleven million shekels per missile, and by the end of next year we will have, let’s call it, one thousand Iron Dome missiles. I know these will cost about two hundred thousand shekels per missile. These numbers make no sense to me. We will either go bankrupt building missiles or we will simply be overwhelmed. If I were the head of Hezbollah, I would simply launch thousands of Katyushas until Israel has used up its defensive missiles. Am I wrong about this?”