Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz took advantage of his meeting with US President Joe Biden, to ask him for unplanned US assistance, worth $4 billion a year, for developing and accelerating the production of the modern air defense system known as the Iron Beam, security sources in Tel Aviv revealed Thursday.
On Wednesday, the Israeli army showed Biden at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, with footage of drones being intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system already in place, and the Iron Beam system, which uses laser technology.
Gantz was personally explaining about these weapons, including the long-range Arrow, medium-range David’s Sling, short-range Iron Dome, and the high-powered laser Iron Beam interception system.
But the Israeli Minister mainly focused on the Iron Beam model, saying that it came to be a complement and not a substitute for the Iron Dome, at a lower cost and with clear efficiency.
Gantz said that the element of time is very important in this matter. “If the required hundreds of millions (of shekels) are allocated to the final development stages and the trial stage, we will make great progress at the experiment level and we will be capable of introducing the system in the war field within a few years,” he said.
Israel’s ground-based laser air defense system, named Iron Beam, which is being developed with the Rafael weapons manufacturer, is not meant to replace the Iron Dome or Israel’s other air defense systems, but to supplement and complement them, shooting down smaller projectiles and leaving larger ones for the more robust missile-based batteries, according to the ministry’s research and development team, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yaniv Rotem.
“Since development began, the high-power laser has proven more powerful than the ministry’s team initially aimed for,” Rotem said, adding that one of its main advantages is that it is cheap and would not run out of ammunition.
However, he said laser beams have serious limitations, like not being able to shoot through clouds.
Therefore, Rotem uncovered that the Defense Ministry plans to mount the system on aircraft, which would help get around this limitation by putting the system above the clouds, though that is still a few more years off.
