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An
Israeli missile from the Iron Dome defense system is launched to
intercept and destroy incoming rocket fire from Gaza in Tel Aviv on Nov.
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No tour of Middle East conflict zones could be complete
without a stop at Sderot, an Israeli town of 24,000 that stands uncomfortably
close to the Gaza Strip. The rain of rockets out of the Palestinian enclave has
made Sderot famous for two things: the thickness of its roofs (even bus stops
have reinforced concrete tops); and the collection of crumpled missiles arrayed
in racks behind the police station. As a visiting VIP in 2008, U.S. Senator
Barack Obama dutifully inspected what the machine shops of Islamic Jihad and
Hamas fashioned from lengths of pipe and scrap metal. Low-tech doesn’t begin to
cover it.
It’s a long way up the Mediterranean coast from Sderot to
Haifa, and even farther to the showroom of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
Ltd., the weapons-development branch of Israel’s military-industrial complex.
Hi-tech doesn’t begin to cover it. Rafael developed the first precision-guided
munitions — the precursor to the American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions
that replaced “dumb bombs” — and scores of other battlefield innovations, from
IED detectors to floating drones. But the company’s most acclaimed invention is
the one now President Obama will inspect moments after arriving in Israel on
Wednesday: Iron Dome.
It is a missile-interception system that has performed
what Israelis regard as a miracle, draining a good bit of the fear out of the wail
of an air-raid siren. During the last Gaza conflict, which lasted a week in
November, Iron Dome knocked out of the sky a reported 84% of the missiles it
aimed at — that is, the ones headed toward population centers. The rockets
headed for open space its computers simply let fall. Rafael executives are
understandably proud of Iron Dome, which after a few months on the job is
performing at the level of a system that’s had seven years to work out the
kinks. But they appear even prouder of the unlikely philosophy behind it. To
make the most-tested, if not the most effective antimissile system in military
history, Israeli engineers took a page from the Gaza militants they aimed to
frustrate. The secret to Iron Dome is that it’s cheap.
(MORE: Iron Dome’s Lessons for the U.S.)
Consider the problem of volume. Since 2005, Gaza
militants have fired more than 4,000 of their homemade rockets into Israel.
Most cost a few hundred dollars each. Interceptors typically cost a few hundred
thousand. “The main question that everyone asks is, ‘You’re firing a very
costly missile against something very cheap,’” says Joseph “Yossi” Horowitz, a
retired air-force colonel who markets air-and-missile defense systems at
Rafael. “So our main mission was to reduce the cost.”
The economizing would be across the board, but the
biggest savings were realized by reducing the size of the missile’s eyes — by
far the most expensive component. An interceptor missile locks onto its target
by following directions from the radar in its nose cone, typically packed with
radio-frequency sensors of extravagant unit cost. An interceptor carried by a
fighter jet has to be very smart, because it’s expected to find a missile being
fired in its direction before it’s even in sight, one that could come from any
direction. The nose-cone radar of an AIM/AMRAAM has so many RFs, or
radio-frequency nodes, that it runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But a homemade missile coming out of Gaza is simply
ballistic: it goes up and comes down. Rafael realized its launch and trajectory
can be detected by ground radar, which would then transmit that information to
the Iron Dome interceptor launched into the area of the sky where it’s headed.
Only when the two missiles come near one another does the interceptor’s own
radar come alive, guiding it to the incoming Qassam or GRAD and colliding with
its own nose — where the warhead is positioned — in midair. It’s a delicate
business, what with each missile traveling at 700 m per second.
“I can bring the interceptor in an accurate way, near the
target, which means I can use the radar, the ‘seeker’ for a very short time,”
says Horowitz. The shorter the time, the fewer the RF sensors required. “Saves
money,” he says. How much? “Two digits: from hundreds of thousands of dollars
to several thousand dollars.”
(MORE: ‘Iron Dome’ Protects Israel From Gaza’s Missiles:
Will That Embolden It to Strike Iran?)
The savings mount up. Most guided missiles are made of
so-called exotic materials, complex polymers designed to prevent the rocket
from expanding or contracting as it travels through different altitudes. Again,
not necessary for Iron Dome, which ascends only a few thousand feet. “Here we
did it with aluminum,” Horowitz says. “Went across the street. Got some pipe.”
The result is visible in this extraordinary YouTube video
from a wedding in Beersheba, an Israeli city of 200,000. The incoming missiles
are not visible in the night sky until the ascending Iron Dome interceptors
find and destroy them — again and again and again. “We can do more, but in this
video we do 12,” says Horowitz, a reserve colonel in the Israeli military’s
air-defense section. “You are not looking for the best of the best. You are
looking for some optimization.”
At about $50 million per battery — the launchers with 20
missiles each, ground radar and command-and-control center, led by an officer
equipped with an abort button — Iron Dome still costs plenty, especially since
Israel estimates it would need at least 13 of them to protect the entire
country. It currently has five. But the U.S. Congress voted about $300 million
to help close the gap, which is why the Israel Defense Forces will truck a
battery to Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday to be photographed behind the
American President.
That no previous antimissile system has performed so
impressively might raise awkward questions about the norms of defense
procurement in other nations. (For David’s Sling, the Israeli version of the
Patriot 3, the U.S. intermediate-range interceptor that costs about $5 million
per interceptor, Rafael is partnering with Raytheon, an American firm, and
still aims do the job for one-quarter of the cost.) But for Israelis, the more
pressing question is how to define success.
(MORE: Psychological Warfare with Missiles: Why Tel Aviv
Matters)
Back to the Beersheba wedding. The revelry appears to
carry on oblivious to the wail of air-raid sirens competing with the DJ (that
song in the background is “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5). If Israelis no longer
scramble to shelters, then Iron Dome really has changed the dynamic. It’s not
yet at that point; schools still close when the rockets fly, and parents stay
home from work. But Rafael’s head of research and development, who began work
on Iron Dome even before the government thought to ask for it, tells TIME that
its overarching accomplishment is that it can break the pernicious cycle of
escalation that can lead to things like invasions. The batteries can liberate
Israel’s elected leaders from the public pressure that comes with mass
casualties. “The big success of Iron Dome is not how many missiles we
intercept,” says Roni Potasman, the executive vice president for R&D. “The
main success is what happened in the decisionmaking civilian population
environment. The quiet time. Clausewitz used to say the mission of the military
is to provide the time for the decisionmakers to decide. Now, if out of 500
missiles, 10 of them get by and cause casualties, a school or kindergarten,
then this is a whole different story.”
The more stubborn problem is that, even though Iron Dome
knocked down 400 of the rockets fired out of Gaza in the last round of
fighting, Hamas acts as though it prevailed in the conflict. What’s more, polls
show 80% of Palestinians think so too, while only 1 in 4 Israelis think their
side prevailed. Israeli warplanes killed scores of senior militants and
destroyed hundreds of missiles and launchers on the ground, including Fajr-5
from Iran. But Hamas and Islamic Jihad still launched their own version of the
Fajr, dubbed the M-75, toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — unsettling Israelis who
had previously considered themselves out of range and had not heard an air-raid
siren since the Gulf War.
“[Gaza militants] were hit badly, much more than four
years ago, but still I think they perceive it as a success,” says Potasman.
“This is the Middle East. You see one reality, one side is looking at this
reality from one angle; the other side looks from a totally opposite angle.
That’s why we cannot communicate with them on a regular, normal basis, because
you see on reality, and you look at this and you say, ‘Hey, what else can we
do, to kill them? I mean, to kill them softly?’ And they look at this and they
say, ‘Hey, we were able to hit Beersheba and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So our
understanding of the reality and their understanding of the reality is totally
different. It’s not the same book.”
— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Haifa
Karl Vick has been TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief since 2010,
covering Israel,the Palestine territories and nearby sovereignties. He worked
16 years at the Washington Post in Nairobi, Istanbul, Baghdad, Los Angeles and
Rockville, MD.
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