by Uzi Eilam
With the assistance of Wales and the unfailing logic of Micha Cohen we began to lay the groundwork for the central structure of the missile defense system. Cohen showed us that intercepting an enemy ballistic missile required more than simply developing the Arrow missile. It also required advanced warning that an enemy missile had been launched and was travelling toward us. The enemy missile needed to be physically located and tracked, and the Arrow missile needed to be guided to the optimum location for detonating the Arrow warhead and destroying the enemy missile. Our analysis and tests, and the fact that we would clearly not be defending ourselves against one single missile, meant that the system would consist of multiple launchers and a large number of missiles. This also meant that it would also need to incorporate a command and control system.
We had no idea how to detect the launch of enemy missiles from hundreds of kilometers away and tried to obtain the assistance of our friends at SDIO in persuading the American authorities to lift the ban on selling early warning systems, which were considered strategic in nature and highly classified. We tried to develop a system design based on American early warning radar, a less developed form of the strategic radars, and also on an Israeli-developed system that tracked missiles at closer range. Unfortunately, our pleas and the political pressure we exerted were unsuccessful. In the end we decided to continue developing a warning and tracking radar that had been started by Elta of Israel Aerospace Industries. By this time we had established a complete program administration with technical branches and a financial branch.
During the First Gulf War (1991), Iraq launched dozens of long-range al-Hussein missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, creating an unprecedented threat to both countries. There was no real solution for the threat of a warhead-bearing missile with a range of 600 kilometers. The Israeli air force began to arm itself with batteries of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, and additional batteries were rushed over from Europe along with their American operating teams. The Patriot missiles were important in terms of morale, but on a practical level neither our Patriots nor the model used by the Americans was capable of intercepting al-Hussein missiles. Even the US and British air forces, which enjoyed complete control of Iraqi airspace, were unable to take out even a single missile-launching vehicle.
Throughout the war MAFAT maintained a constant presence in the Command Center, and this provided us with access to everything the military knew about where incoming Iraqi missiles had struck. One night, after the sounding of an air-raid siren indicating an incoming missile, my family and I entered the sealed room in our home like the rest of the Israeli population. Three minutes later we heard a thundering explosion, and the officers on duty at the General Staff called to tell me what I had already gathered...issile had landed in my neighborhood of Savyon. My daughter Noa was upset and frightened, and I suggested that we go see what had happened. Hand in hand, we walked through the empty streets of Savyon until we reached the site of impact. The home of our good friends Eli and Rivka sustained a direct hit and was almost completely destroyed. The only undamaged part of the house was the piano room, Then suddenly, from out of the smoky, dusty ruins, we heard music. It was Rivka, whose house had just been destroyed before her very eyes, playing the piano. “Why are you playing?” we asked her, “Why now, of all times?” “Is there anything better to do at a time like this?” she said. The real damage from the missiles was the economic loss that stemmed from the temporary destabilization of the Israeli economy, as well as the sense of anxiety experienced by many Israelis.
It quickly became clear that the Patriots, designed to intercept aircraft, could not intercept long-range missiles. Raytheon Company, which developed and produced the Patriot system, had a public relations department that did impressive work. During the war, it hosted President George H. W. Bush and received international recognition when the American president praised the success of the American Patriot defense system in intercepting the Iraqi missiles launched against Israel and Saudi Arabia. When we visited Raytheon many months after the First Gulf war, we were still walking on eggshells and were unable to tell the whole truth about the failure of the Patriots.
The unilateral missile attack provided us with pieces of al-Hussein missiles that broke apart when they entered the atmosphere and landed in Israel. Some of the missiles were almost whole and were collected and stored on a military base in central Israel for the country’s top experts — Rafael, IAI, IMI, Micha Cohen’s consulting firm, and MAFAT — to analyze. Of course, the information obtained was also shared with the Americans.
The First Gulf War served as a powerful motivating force for the personnel of the Homa administration (also known as the Israel Missile Defense Organization, or IMDO) and the Israeli defense industries working on the project. They worked around the clock, often paying no attention to the periodic sirens indicating that Iraqi missiles were about to strike Israel. This momentum was sustained after the war. Many more people, within the IDF as well, began to recognize the severity of the ballistic missile threat and the importance of developing a suitable response.
The Berlin wall had been torn down and the Warsaw Pact had crumbled along with the Soviet Union, and it was clear to the Americans that the Russians had thrown in the towel in the technological struggle for control of space. SDIO searched desperately for a foundation for its continued existence. By that time the Americans already knew about the failure of the Patriot system, and new ideas were emerging such as an upgraded model of the Patriot missile and the completely new THAAD missile (acronym for “Theatre,” and subsequently “Terminal, High Altitude Area Defense.”) A pulse of activity could again be felt in the veins of the Missile Defense Agency. We regarded this as a welcome development because of the exchange of ideas and the almost equal sense of partnership between the Homa Program and the American regional defense programs. The new THAAD missile was planned to be lighter and more compact, and for this reason the Americans thought it would operate on a hit to kill basis with no need for an explosive warhead. The radar that was supposed to track the enemy missile and guide the intercepting missile to a direct hit with extreme precision was also supposed to be light and compact. For the Americans it was important to be able to easily fly the defense system to any part of the world in which they or their allies were in need, so the system was designed to fit into a C-130 Hercules aircraft that could land on short airstrips and straight stretches of hard ground. We were interested in the challenges the Americans presented to their defense industry, but we also knew that we were not in a position to undertake such ambitious plans. So we retained the principle of a directional warhead that would detonate tens of meters from the enemy missile. We didn’t have to develop a light, compact missile, and the new Arrow missile, an advanced version of the Arrow I, was also quite heavy and could not be rapidly distributed by plane into an operational array.
The radio frequency used by the warning and guidance radar was also selected based on considerations of time and budget. We decided to develop a radar system we referred to as Green Pine that operated at the L-band, an ability that had been developed by Elta during its work on the radar for the Lavi fighter plane. At that time the Lavi program had already been grounded, but like other high budget projects, it had left the defense industry with a legacy of many new skills including radar technologies. We deliberated over the type of radar required and decided to base development on L-band radar models that Elta had already developed and could immediately begin producing. We still had a long way to go before development of the full radar system but from the start Elta was able to assemble a few dozen models. They placed the experimental radar system on the roof of an Elta building and used to it to track everything that flew through the sky, from civilian and military aircraft to missiles launched from the air force testing area. Tadiran was selected to lead development of the command and control mechanism, the third component of the Homa system, as a primary contractor. Tadiran had significant experience in develo
ping command and control communications systems for field forces, and it justifiably won the tender to head up development of the Homa control system.
The overall concept of the system had not yet been developed. Micha Cohen’s people at Wales prepared many studies on the subject and we also had increasingly clear data about the feasibility of all three components of the system. Although the development process was at its height, it had still not generated an overall concept. As it turned out, the concept would not evolve naturally but was to be born under stress. It all began during a relatively routine trip to Washington for a meeting with SDIO officials at the Pentagon, during which we were scheduled to present the progress of the project. The situation was somewhat different during the trip in question, because this time we were attempting to convince our friends at SDIO to support our request for increased funding for system development and additional Arrow batteries. I was joined for the meetings in Washington by Uzi Rubin and a small team of Homa personnel, as well as Moshe Kochanovski, director of the defense ministry delegation in New York, and by Major General Giora Rom, our defense attaché in Washington. When Rubin and I arrived in Washington, Rom told us that he had managed to schedule us meetings with Defense Secretary William Perry at the Pentagon, with the Deputy Secretary of State at the State Department and with Martin Indyk of the National Security Council at the White House, who would later serve as the US ambassador to Israel.
We suddenly found ourselves in an unexpected situation without a fully developed and authorized operating conception for the full Homa system. It would be a folly to pass up an opportunity to present Israel’s complete anti-missile defense system concept to the Americans and to significantly shorten the process of gaining support and acquiring budgets. But not only had we not finished developing the concept at home and won approval at the ministerial level and from the General Staff, we did not even have a presentation to show our plans. We had 24 hours before the first meeting in the office of the Secretary of Defense. Working with Homa administration Director Uzi Rubin and his people, and with the help of the military attaché’s personnel at the embassy, we worked late into the night on slides that would effectively convey the information we knew we needed to present. By the time we arrived for our meeting at the Pentagon we were able to effectively present the deployment of missile and radar batteries in Israel, the defensive arcs that covered all parts of the country, and the estimated number of radar sites, missile launchers, missiles, and control systems required to adequately defend the entire territory of Israel.
Defense Attaché Rom and I had a private meeting with William Perry. I had met Perry when he was serving as undersecretary of defense for research and development in the US Defense Department in 1974 when I ran the Israeli R&D Unit and we were analyzing the technological lessons of the recent confrontation between Soviet and Western weaponry. When the three of us entered the meeting room where Rubin and his people were waiting with senior SDIO personnel, Perry was pleasantly surprised to see Rubin and shook his hand cordially. During the 1980s, before he returned to the Pentagon to fill a senior post in the administration, Perry headed a strategic studies institute at Stanford University. In 1989, Rubin spent a sabbatical year at Stanford, where he impressed his American colleagues with his global understanding of strategic missiles and the possibility of intercepting them.
Our presentations before this high-level forum were successful, and we could see the enthusiasm in the eyes of our colleagues at SDIO when Perry voiced his approval of the system’s conception and issued instructions to support it. The meeting at the State Department was less difficult for us, as we were able to build on our initial presentation at the Pentagon. At the White House we met with Martin Indyk, deputy chairman of the National Security Council, who greatly impressed us with his intelligent approach and his support. The only suitable room they had for our presentation was the inner sanctum of the classified meeting room. There were technical glitches of the NSC presentation system and the air conditioners were not working. Our welcome to the White House during that visit was a warm one in more ways than one.
We returned home from this visit quite worried. Uzi Rubin asked me how we would tell the director general and the defense minister that we had already developed an overall missile defense concept and presented it to the Americans without their authorization. I was able to calm his nerves, but not my own, and as soon as we arrived I requested a meeting with director general Ivry to update him. The report covered a wide variety of issues, including the unexpected need to present the logic behind the Homa defense concept that emerged during our visit. Without such an explanation, we maintained, there would have been no basis for American support of the continued funding of the project. The director general accepted our report without any problem and instructed us to be ready to present the same report to the defense minister. And so it came to pass that the strategic conception underlying the Homa missile defense system was born. It was a strange process with a rushed outcome that stemmed from in-depth consideration of the system components and the issues related to the array required to defend Israeli territory. Although we were relieved that we did not have to change the concept we knew deep down that the defense ministry could not introduce changes once it had already been accepted by the Americans. Today, I am still convinced that evolution of this concept, unusual as it was, was based on solid, rational consideration of the three components of the Homa system, as well as on the strategic system analyses we carried out with the assistance of Micha Cohen and the Wales firm.
Professor Edward Teller, the Miracle Laser, and the Nautilus Project
The idea of using high-powered lasers against Katyusha rockets which constituted the foundation of Project Nautilus was linked to Professor Edward Teller. Senior Israeli physicist Yuval Neeman had close ties with the scientific community in the US, including a personal relationship with Prof. Teller. In the early 1980s, Teller visited Israel, and Neeman asked us to organize a meeting of researchers of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission for Teller to address. The hall was filled to capacity before Teller took the stage, and during our short conversation in my office before his lecture I was completely captivated by this tall man, with his thundering voice and mischievous eyes. In the lecture hall, Teller easily mesmerized the audience for the entire hour, and could have easily continued speaking for a few more, had he wanted to.
We hosted Teller at our home for dinner, and my wife Naomi was tense and worried about whether the Hungarian professor would like her goulash. The Israeli paprika passed the test, and Teller awarded Naomi’s Hungarian kitchen three stars.
By Teller’s next visit to Israel I was already the director of MAFAT, and I was pleased when Neeman told me that the professor had asked to meet with me. He was staying in a spacious suite at the Tel Aviv Hilton, and I came to meet him at noon, as scheduled. We sat in the conversation area of his spacious suite, and my eyes were fixed on an enormous bowl filled with fruit, overflowing with yellowish-greenish bunches of grapes. Teller invited me to join him in this healthy feast and we began discussing missile defense. “I know that you are developing a missile to intercept ballistic missiles launched at Israel,” he began, “but that’s only one defensive layer against the threat.” “Uzi,” he continued, “What do you think about the idea of adding a second layer of missile defense? I suggest you consider integrating a high-powered laser for shorter distances.” He then proceeded to tell me that a high-powered laser facility had been activated at the US military testing area at White Sands, New Mexico, and that the laser had already proven effective in intercepting air-bound objects during testing. “You can ask the Pentagon to lend you the laser,” he said. “It’s called Miracle, and you can use it to run tests in the arid, dusty conditions typical of Israel and the climatic conditions of the Middle East.” As he spoke, I thought about how appropriate the name of the laser was for us Israelis, who hoped for new miracles on a daily basis.
After years
of support for the development of a missile defense system Teller enjoyed a special status at the Pentagon and the White House, and I knew we could rely on his support in a time of need. During my next visit to the US we asked to visit to White Sands US military testing area. Testing areas in the United States are highly classified, and obtaining permission to visit involves a complex bureaucratic process. Moreover, entry into a testing area does not necessarily ensure entry into the facilities they contain, and stern sentries are stationed at every turn to make sure that the rules are followed. This time, however, the process was quick and smooth, perhaps due to the fact that we were the guests of SDIO, and perhaps due to Teller’s recommendation.
White Sands had become an enormous laboratory for the critical stages of missile development by the US military. This work required the construction of large, complex radar systems to gather data about each launch. Over the years the developers built up the capacity to operate a high-powered laser guided by advanced radar systems which proved to American military engineers that it was possible to disable and shoot down unmanned air targets.
Intensely curious, we arrived at the base and received a royal welcome and a comprehensive overview of base operations that had clearly been tailored to our security clearance. We were taken to the site of the high-powered laser in the afternoon. The weather was extremely hot and dry, and we felt right at home like at the Rafael testing area in the Negev desert. We had no idea what to expect, and when we approached the area we saw a group of huge buildings. We watched films of tests and concluded that the system, which could identify targets flying by at high speed and track them by radar until the decision was made to fire the laser, had great potential. The range of laser beams depended on the weather. When there was no dust, fog, or water vapor in the air the range could reach up to 10 kilometers. However, it was clear that not even the magic of Professor Teller could convince the Americans to lend us the system, and we knew we had no chance of bringing this technology to Israel.