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How Israel's Missile Defense System Is Being Used to Defend Europe

(Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security) Dr. Uzi Rubin - The Arrow 3 missile defense system is the most powerful and longest-range member of the Arrow Weapon System family. It is built to defend Israel against the most lethal Iranian ballistic missiles, with the capability to lock on, intercept, and destroy incoming missiles while still deep in outer space. Israel's Arrow 2 system can intercept ballistic missiles fired from Iran but its interception altitudes were inside the Earth's atmosphere, where the blast and radiation from a nuclear explosion could still cause severe damage on the ground. The Arrow 3 addresses this by destroying nuclear missiles on their way to Israel when they were still in outer space. Arrow 3's first successful interception test took place in 2015 and the first production missiles were delivered to the Israel Air Force in 2017. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Germany became practically disarmed. But its largely complacent worldview was shattered by Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, resulting in a veritable U-turn in German national security policy, with missile defense high on Germany's rearmament priority list. Germany selected Arrow 3 over the U.S.-made Lockheed Martin THAAD. In response to the perception of the growing threat from Russia, in July 2022 Germany announced the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI) to create a European air and missile defense system. 19 European nations have joined the initiative. The three-layer system will be based on the German-made Iris T short-range system, the mid-range U.S.-supplied Patriot system, and the Israel-supplied Arrow 3 system providing the upper layer. The writer was founding director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, which managed the Arrow program.
2023-09-21 00:00:00
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