Israel Matzav

What are they thinking? IDF to store - not deploy - Iron Dome

My first thought on reading this headline was that the IDF (and the government) is afraid we Israelis will find out too soon that Iron Dome is not all it's cracked up to be. That's something I have suspected all along (also at great length here). Now, the IDF is implicitly confirming the suspicions by storing - rather than deploying - Iron Dome.

After months of deliberations, the IDF has decided to store the Iron Dome anti-rocket system at an air force base in the center of the country and to deploy it only in cases of extreme rocket fire from either the Gaza Strip or southern Lebanon, senior military sources said on Sunday.

The decision was made ahead of the planned announcement that Iron Dome had reached “initial operational capability,” initially scheduled for this month.

On Sunday, top IDF officers told The Jerusalem Post that the initial operational capability would be postponed until the first quarter of 2011. The delay, the officers stressed, was not due to technical malfunctions but rather to the intricate process of training IDF officers and soldiers to use the complicated weapons system.

“This system is unbelievable,” one officer said. “It is, however, sometimes a complicated process to take in such a system and to turn it operational and into a fully functioning weapons system.”

Unbelievable indeed. I sure hope Hamas and Hezbullah know that they're not allowed to shoot any rockets until the first quarter of 2011 when we can get the thing set up. And I sure hope that Israelis get 100% protection, and not the 80% or 90% that we're more likely to get.

When I was a young lawyer, before computers did these things for us, we used to take black felt-tip pens and mark changes to documents (it was called 'blacklining'). It was usually the job of the most junior associate on any given transaction. I can remember during my first year out of law school being warned by a 7th year associate that "blacklining is either perfect or it's useless." I think the same can be said of missile defense systems. If it's less than perfect, you cannot live a normal life. You're constantly running for bomb shelters. Ask the people in Sderot.

Labels: anti-missile systems, Hamas, Hezbullah, Iron Dome, Phalanx

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:22 PM