Clinton Promises Israel Additonal Aid, Including Nautilus Laser System

by Shawn L. Twing

“Our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable and it will remain so because Israel must have the right to defend itself, by itself.” President Bill Clinton, explaining why it is necessary to give Israel an additional $200 million in U.S. taxpayer money above and beyond the $5.5 billion aid in U.S. grants and loan guarantees already given Israel in 1996.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres hoped to come away from his April visit to the United States with a formal defense treaty, he wasn’t overly disappointed when President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Perry rejected the idea in favor of hundreds of millions of dollars more in military aid to Israel, above the $5.5 billion in military and economic grants and loan guarantees already given annually.

Included in the Clinton-proposed defense package were four important components: Israel’s access to real-time U.S. satellite imagery for early warning of ballistic missile launches; $200 million more in U.S. aid to Israel’s Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile program; an unspecified amount of money for Mark 15 “Phalanx” cannons to protect Israel’s northern border against Katyusha rocket attacks; and at least $50 million for accelerated development of the “Nautilus” laser system, also to be used to destroy Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah into northern Israel.

The agreement outlining the U.S. commitment to these four components was signed at the Pentagon on April 28 by Peres, Clinton and Perry in a thinly veiled attempt to boost Peres’ position in the then-upcoming Israeli elections. On the surface the accord appeared to be yet another example of the Clinton administration’s election-year pandering to Israel’s requests for aid, but it is more complicated than that. While ostensibly a defense agreement, in reality it was a politically motivated agreement that in the end failed to achieve one of its political goals. Evidence suggests that it will fail in its security goals as well.

The problems with the defense treaty are numerous, and difficult if not impossible to overcome. They include poor guidelines for implementing several key components of the agreements, technical limitations on the equipment promised Israel, and a wholly unrealistic assessment of the military capabilities of the hardware to be provided under the accord. These three factors will result in a dramatic waste of U.S. taxpayer money when the estimated $200 million is poured into an agreement doomed to failure from the start.

The accord, ostensibly a defense agreement, in reality was politically motivated.

Israel’s access to real-time intelligence from Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites occurred briefly during Desert Storm, when the United States warned Israel immediately after DSP satellites detected Scud missile launches in Iraq. The present agreement, however, seeks to establish a permanent ground station in Israel for receiving DSP intelligence. The extremely sensitive questions that remain unanswered include who will monitor the station to prevent breaches of U.S. intelligence satellite security, and will Israel be given direct “unfiltered” access to satellite imagery 24 hours a day or will it be “filtered” by U.S. officials and transmitted only in the event of a missile launch? These are the kinds of questions that scuttle agreements. Israel’s extremely poor track record for protecting some of America’s most important national security secrets makes the intelligence community particularly wary about giving Israel unhindered access to raw U.S. intelligence. As one former U.S. intelligence official told the Washington Report: “Allowing Israel total access to sensitive U.S. intelligence will open the lid on a Pandora’s box of problems for the United States.”

Aside from the policy problems associated with the April 28 agreement, the technical limitations of the military hardware to be provided to Israel under the accord present potentially insurmountable problems that will limit their effectiveness in defending northern Israel. Most important in this regard is the nature of the weapons being used against Israel by Hezbollah. The 1960s-era Soviet-built 120-millimeter Katyusha rockets launched by Hezbollah guerrillas into Israel’s “security zone” in Lebanon and, occasionally, into northern Israel present a classic example of technological irony. While the Katyushas have the military effectiveness of a sling shot when compared to Israel’s massive and technologically sophisticated military arsenal, they are all but impossible to defend against because of their small size, which gives Hezbollah impressive mobility in executing attacks.

A Two-Fold Program

The U.S. proposal to defend northern Israel from continued Katyusha attacks is two-fold. Initially the Phalanx cannon will be deployed, eventually to be replaced by the U.S.-made Nautilus laser. In order to understand their limitations it is first necessary to understand these weapons systems.

The Phalanx cannon is a 20-millimeter, six-barrelled gatling cannon that currently is used by the United States Navy and several of its allies, including Israel, as a last-ditch defense against anti-ship missiles. The Phalanx uses a horizon-scanning radar to track incoming missiles, and at the last moment prior to impact, known as the terminal phase of a missile’s flight, the cannon fires a wall of depleted uranium (DU)-tipped bullets designed to tear apart the incoming missile. As a ship-based defense system the Phalanx is extremely effective, but it has several limitations preventing it from being used to shoot down Katyusha rockets.

First, the Phalanx is designed to defend an area roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. When a team of Pentagon defense experts traveled to Israel shortly after the signing of the agreement to examine the possibilities of fielding the Phalanx system, they immediately concluded that it would not be an effective defense because of the sheer number that would be required to protect Israel’s long northern border. Even Israel’s top defense analyst, Dr. Dore Gold of the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, who now serves as an adviser to Prime Minister-elect Binyamin Netanyahu, argued that it would take thousands of the Phalanx cannons to protect the border, a deployment that is far from economically or militarily feasible.

A second limitation on fielding the Phalanx system in northern Israel is in the design of its radar tracking system. The principle mission of the cannon is to shoot down sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles, and its horizon-scanning radar is designed for that kind of low-flying threat. Katyushas are not complicated cruise missiles. They are crude rockets that use a solid propellant to carry an explosive warhead in a parabola much like mortar and artillery shells. The design of the Phalanx radar system is not suited for this type of threat.

For the foreseeable future the Nautilus laser also will be ineffective in shooting down Katyusha rockets. Israeli and American public relations specialists have made reference several times to a February test of the Nautilus laser, when it successfully destroyed a Katyusha rocket in flight. This in an extremely misleading interpretation of the test outcomes that has seriously distorted public understanding of the current capabilities of the Nautilus system. The February test did involve the destruction of a Katyusha, but the laser system did not track and intercept an incoming rocket as has been suggested by press reports about the Nautilus laser system.

The sole purpose of the test was to determine if the focused energy of a laser could incinerate a rocket in flight. The Katyusha was flown in front of the Nautilus’ mid-infrared advanced chemical laser (MIRACL) and was incinerated. All that was demonstrated by the test was that lasers do have the capability to destroy rockets and missiles in flight.

What remains to be worked out is how the Nautilus can be fielded in a militarily useful configuration and, most importantly, what technology it will employ to track and intercept incoming rockets and/or missiles. Without the corresponding development of a tracking system for the MIRACL laser that will allow Nautilus to track incoming targets, its effectiveness in rocket and missile defense is nonexistent. This is not to say that a functional tracking system won't be developed in the future, but the Clinton administration’s proposed 1998 deployment of the Nautilus to Israel is nothing short of fantasy.

The Clinton administration’s decision to add $200 million more to fund the Arrow Deployability Program, an extension of the almost exclusively U.S.-funded Israeli Arrow and ACES (Arrow Continuing Experiments) ballistic missile defense programs, had been announced months prior to the signing of the April defense accord. (For a complete report on the Arrow, ACES and ADP programs and their enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers, see the October/November 1995 Washington Report, p. 12.) The accord provides Israel with $40 million per year for the next five years from the budget of the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). This Pentagon funding is in addition to the $1.8 billion annual military grant to Israel from foreign aid funds.

President Clinton’s unconditional support for Israel’s Arrow program is in striking contrast to his almost total lack of support for an American missile defense program designed to protect the United States from long-range ballistic missile attack. Speaking before graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT on May 22, Clinton warned congressional Republicans that advancing the national missile defense program would waste billions of taxpayer dollars attempting to prevent a threat that is “more than a decade away.”

What Clinton did not mention was that the threat he downplayed in the May 22 speech—the proliferation of long-range ballistic missiles in the so-called Third World—is the same threat his administration uses to justify U.S. funding for Israel’s Arrow missile. Yet even the Central Intelligence Agency estimates that a threat from “rogue states” of the kind that might target Israel, like Libya or Iran, or might supply missiles to these countries, like North Korea, is more than 15 years away.

Clinton also warned the graduates that fielding a national missile defense system today could waste money because current anti-missile technology “could be obsolete tomorrow.” Israel’s Arrow missile, however, is a relatively low-technology system, especially when compared to the U.S.-built Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) point defense system and the U.S. Army’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, both of which have struggled for financial support during Clinton’s tenure in office. If President Clinton really believes that the technological obsolescence of missile defense systems is a reason not to pursue them aggressively, the first U.S-funded program that should be cut is the Arrow missile.

The Clinton administration’s decision not to enter into a formal defense treaty with Israel, one that is rumored to have included a classified U.S. recognition of Israel’s right to maintain its nuclear weapons facilities in Dimona, could have been a watershed in U.S.-Israeli defense relations. Instead of the moderation in U.S. policy suggested initially when it became clear that the United States would not enter into the pact, an almost equally disastrous accord was offered in its place. This agreement will give Israel an additional $200 million in U.S. taxpayer money for programs that can’t possibly accomplish their intended goals. To make matters worse, it will take money away from U.S. Defense Department programs that are desperately needed to protect American soldiers safeguarding America’s national security interests abroad.