Esther's Sling (10 page)

“We’re listening,” said Eli Cohen.

“The reasons they are unlikely to ever do anything with GPS other than reduce the accuracy from several meters to, say, a hundred meter circular error or so, are many. First, there are so many civilian uses, including aviation, that rely on GPS. Second, there are other systems now available, including the Russian Glonass and commercial systems like Galileo. Glonass is in poor shape right now, but the Russians have budgeted the funds to launch new satellites to return the system to a true global system. Even the Indians have a regional system under development. Just like we do, most modern military GPS receivers can use other networks to check and triangulate against the GPS signals.”

In addition to the prime minister, General Avner was learning more about
GPS than he had known. As minister of defense of Israel, he was embarrassed. “Where are the Iranians on this?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, General, they have already embraced this new technology, which is not very sophisticated. The signals are out there and if the receiver has a good internal clock, it is relatively easy to determine which signals are being intentionally degraded, especially if the receiver is moving slowly.”

“What does ‘moving slowly’ mean?” Avner asked.

“In the world of three-dimensional global positioning, slow is an airplane or a bomb in its early phase of
free-fall. But a ballistic missile is not slow and despite the existence of multiple space-based positioning signals, the speed of a ballistic missile works against accurate positioning and makes it more than worthwhile to ensure that the Americans degrade the GPS signal, which I am sure they will do when the time comes.”

“Thank you, Yavi,” the minister of defense
replied.

“There is more that everyone here should understand
,” Aitan continued. “Differential equations can also go a long way to allowing a user to reverse the effects of GPS degradation and return to a high level of accuracy. This is as simple as having a signal being broadcast from a transmitter with a known location on earth. This transmitter is comparing what it is being told by the GPS signals it picks up to its known position and then broadcasting corrective information that is used by another mobile receiver. If you have several of these corrective transmitters broadcasting, you can achieve very high accuracy. We anticipate that Hezbollah and even the Iranians will attempt to use this enhancement if they launch GPS guided weapons at us.”

“What are we doing to defeat this?” The question came from Cohen, who realized that Avner had the same question but was too embarrassed to ask. On his notepad, Zvi Avner made a note to himself to dig into this
matter after the meeting.

“We have jamming and spoofing equipment along the Lebanese border and around every major target
,” Aitan answered. “More importantly, we will have an EC-130 airborne with high powered jamming and spoofing equipment as well as receivers designed to locate any differential beacons. The IAF would then attack the beacons. Now, if Hezbollah attacks us by surprise, these last couple of steps are tough to get into place quickly. But in the case of Esther, I am sure we will be prepared.” Aitan relaxed and leaned back in his chair, yielding the floor.

Eli Cohen was willing to apologize to his minister of foreign affairs, even if Avner wasn’t. Cohen looked at Avi Gresch. “It’s okay, Avi. This isn’t common knowledge.” Cohen looked at Avner and gave him the type of scolding look that a parent gives to a teenage
r who is too opinionated at the dinner table. “Zvi, will you take care of establishing the right communication channels with the Americans please. Obviously we need to be sure all of this is properly coordinated for Esther.” Zvi Avner nodded and wrote down a reminder on the notepad in front of him. Cohen turned to Aitan. “Have you covered what you need?” Cohen laughed. “Maybe I should phrase it ‘what we need.’”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Zvi, since you were finally getting animated, please continue.”

“Thank you, Prime Minister.” Avner was eager to get back to a topic over which he had mastery. “I have a couple of things to review before we discuss the primary issue for us today. The first item is related to our last discussion on the M-600, as well as all of the other missiles we are facing these days. We are moving towards operational deployment of Iron Dome. During January we successfully tested the system against multiple targets simultaneously. It intercepted three inbound rockets as designed and we now have a unit fully trained for initial deployment. I expect
to be operational by year end.

“Rafael is already gearing up missile production and we are lobbying the Americans for emergency funding for more batteries. Each battery will have three twenty tube launchers and initially two reloads on hand for each launcher. So we will have one hundred eighty missiles available for each battery. If we get the funding from the U.S., I expect that we will field five batte
ries per year in 2011 and 2012.

“Iron Dome is our tactical or point defense system. Arrow 2 is our strategic anti-ballistic missile system and continues to undergo improvements and upgrades. But I am not satisfied with the current range of Arrow 2, so we are working on a longer range intercept missile.
We are working with Boeing to develop Arrow 3, which will give us much higher effective altitude capability, including the ability to kill low earth orbit satellites. That said, I have a high degree of confidence that the latest Arrow 2 block 3 version will be capable of intercepting any Persian Shahab-3 missiles fired at us. And of course we have the six Patriot missile batteries in place. All of the Patriots are now upgraded to GEM-T standards and we have a total of 384 missiles on hand. Discussions are underway to bring more Patriot batteries into the country. We also continue development of David’s Sling, which will far exceed the Patriot in range. Although for this group only, some of the recent testing has shown us that issues exist.”

“Give me an honest timetable.”
Cohen requested.

Zvi Avner
did not want to be on the record regarding this matter. Sophisticated systems which are highly dependent on software development, are never glitch free and never come in on time – and Avner felt that everyone else in this room should understand that reality. “If you are pressing me for a guess, I think the missile is a year behind schedule. I don’t think we can count on deployment before late 2011.”

“We will already have dealt with Iran by then,”
Cohen responded.

“We have Arrow 2 in position to handle the primary Persian threats. If you want
, we can negotiate to obtain Patriot Pac-3 batteries until David’s Sling is ready.”

“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 in
structing 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?”