Israel Matzav: US publishes details of Arrow 3 missile base Israel wanted kept secret

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

US publishes details of Arrow 3 missile base Israel wanted kept secret

The headline of this story - as reflected in the graphic above - sounds really awful. But after reading the story, I have to wonder how the IDF expected a competitive bidding process to be carried out without at least some group of people gaining access to these plans.

The Obama administration had promised to build Israel a state-of-the-art facility to house a new ballistic-missile defense system, the Arrow 3. As with all Defense Department projects, detailed specifications were made public so that contractors could bid on the $25 million project. The specifications included more than 1,000 pages of details on the facility, ranging from the heating and cooling systems to the thickness of the walls.

"If an enemy of Israel wanted to launch an attack against a facility, this would give him an easy how-to guide. This type of information is closely guarded and its release can jeopardize the entire facility," said an Israeli military official who commented on the publication of the proposal but declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the facility. He declined to say whether plans for the facility have been altered as a result of the disclosure.

"This is more than worrying, it is shocking," he said.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Wesley Miller said he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the Arrow 3 base, but he said the United States routinely published the details of its construction plans on a federal business opportunities website so that contractors could estimate the costs of jobs. He said such postings often might be revised after contracts were approved.

Israeli officials appear to have been well aware of the danger of outsourcing building projects to the United States. In an interview with the Reuters news agency in March, Lt. Col. Peleg Zeevi, the head of the bidding process at Israel’s Defense Ministry, justified Israel’s long history of relying on the United States to help build military installations by saying that Israel needed "a player that has the knowledge, ability and experience."

"We are aware of the security issues that arise in deals with foreign firms, but because we want real competition and expertise, we will create conditions that will allow and encourage their participation," Zeevi said.

It appears, however, that Israeli officials were caught by surprise that details of the facility at Tel Shahar, classified so top secret that Israel’s military won’t officially confirm its location between Jerusalem and Ashdod, would be made so public.

If this is the way the US does public tenders, and if Israel understood that and did not want these details disclosed, why didn't it arrange to approach a small number of trusted US defense contractors privately, with US government approval, to solicit bids without putting these kinds of details into the public domain? Or is the story here that Israel thought that's what it was doing or wanted to do and that the Obama administration thwarted those efforts? If that's the case, it's a serious breach, but that's not what the story appears to be saying....

Or since reporter Sheera Frenkel is based in Israel, is there something more here that didn't make it past the IDF censor?

Hmmm.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: anti-missile systems, Arrow 3, Iranian nuclear threat, military cooperation