Iron Dome launch

WASHINGTON: Israeli armsmaker Rafael has been slow to provide critical data on how well its Iron Dome defends against cruise missiles and whether it can plug into existing US missile defenses, top Army officials said here today.

screencap of Army video

Bruce Jette

“The Israelis have been very good in working with us — for the most part,” the Army’s acquisition chief, Bruce Jette, told reporters at the annual McAleese defense conference. “We have come to some places where it becomes a little difficult to get the right data.”

“They have espoused, and to some degree demonstrated, the ability to deal with some cruise missiles,” Jette said of the Israelis. “The problem is we have to deal with all cruise missiles, and we don’t think we’ve gotten there yet.”

“Could they modify it to make it be able to perform that way? Maybe,” Jette said. “Could we see it happening in all terrain? Maybe. In all electromagnetic spectrum situations [i.e. against radar and radio jamming]? Maybe.”

“All these things add up,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of things to test before we say, ‘yes, we’ve got the answer.’”

Congress compelled a reluctant Army to buy two batteries of the vaunted Israeli system – developed in large part with US funds – as an interim defense after the Army’s own Indirect Fire Protection Capability (IFPC) program ran into trouble. The Army has since rebooted IFPC, which will include both anti-missile missiles and high-powered lasers, and the service remains publicly skeptical about Iron Dome. But today was the first time we’ve heard senior officials explain why in such unsparing detail.

“For the IFPC requirement, we’ve got to be able to fight the cruise missile threat,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters at the conference this morning. “Iron Dome brings more capability than we have in our missile defense [force] today, but it doesn’t meet the full requirement.”

Ryan McCarthy

“One of the things we need to work out is getting more data from the manufacturer. [It’s] proprietary from their standpoint, but if we don’t get it, we don’t know if we can make adjustments,” McCarthy explained. “If we get more of the data, we can make better decisions about if we had to re-engineer certain aspects of the weapon system [so] that it could actually prosecute cruise missiles.”

Show Me The Data

“Iron Dome’s a good system,” Jette said. “It’s designed really well to do what it does –  which is [counter] rockets, artillery, and mortars, in a particular configuration, in a particular environment.” [Some studies would disagree with Jette about Iron Dome’s effectiveness, even against rockets]

“We have some different parametrics we have to pay attention to,” Jette said. “We have to operate in an extremely contested environment… If others have not already gotten there and can show us they can operate in those environments, then it causes us pause.”

In other words (our words, not Jette’s): It’s one thing to set up static positions to defend the land area of Israel – slightly larger than New Jersey, counting disputed territories – against unguided rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah, plus the possibility of an Iranian-made knockoff of an old Chinese or Russian cruise missile. It’s another thing to deploy anywhere in the world with the US Army, from the Norwegian Arctic to the South China Sea, from Kuwaiti deserts to Afghan mountains, against adversaries with high-power jammers to blind your radars and supersonic cruise missiles to outmaneuver your interceptors.

Northrop Grumman photo

The mobile command post for the Army’s new IBCS air and missile defense network.

Interim & Partial Solutions

How could the Army not have figured this out already, one reporter asked, when the decision to buy Iron Dome was made over a year ago?

“Over a year?” McCarthy replied. “It was in the NDAA [the National Defense Authorization Act] a year ago — and then we had to go get them on contract and buy them. [There’s] more work to do with the manufacturer before you’re in a position to know what changes you’d make in the test regime.”

“It’s not like we’ve had them on hand,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve even made them yet.”

Even when the Israelis deliver the two Iron Dome batteries to the Army, that doesn’t commit the Army to buying more. “We leave our options open in the IFPC study that we delivered to the Hill a couple of weeks ago,” McCarthy said.

“Remember these were interim systems, interim solutions,” Jette said of Iron Dome. “They were not necessarily meant to be the final solution. That doesn’t mean they can’t contribute to being the final solution.”

Northrop Grumman graphic

A simplified (yes, really) overview of the Army’s IBCS command-and-control network for air and missile defense.

Maybe parts of Iron Dome can evolve into parts of the Army’s future Indirect Fire Protection Capability, Jette suggested. “We knew up-front part of our testing with Iron Dome would be to how can we break the pieces apart,” he said. “We’re going to give Iron Dome an opportunity to be a participant in that approach to producing an IFPC module.”

But figuring out how to integrate elements of Iron Dome – currently a self-contained system with its own missile, launchers, radars, and command posts – with US Army systems is going to require even more highly technical data.

“We already have a missile command center. IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System] is already firing all of our missiles; we need it to be able to fire their missiles,” Jette said. “How do we communicate with the radar? How can our radar work with their missiles? These types of things are all pieces we need to sort out.”