Global Interest in Israel's Air-Launched Ballistic Missiles

This handout picture released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2024, shows an Israeli fighter jet departing a hangar at an undisclosed location in Israel. (Photo by AFP)
This handout picture released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2024, shows an Israeli fighter jet departing a hangar at an undisclosed location in Israel. (Photo by AFP)
TT

Global Interest in Israel's Air-Launched Ballistic Missiles

This handout picture released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2024, shows an Israeli fighter jet departing a hangar at an undisclosed location in Israel. (Photo by AFP)
This handout picture released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2024, shows an Israeli fighter jet departing a hangar at an undisclosed location in Israel. (Photo by AFP)

Israel's effective use of air-launched ballistic missiles in its airstrikes against Iran is expected to pique interest elsewhere in acquiring the weapons, which most major powers have avoided in favor of cruise missiles and glide bombs.
The Israeli Army said its Oct. 26 raid knocked out Iranian missile factories and air defenses in three waves of strikes.
Researchers said that based on satellite imagery, targets included buildings once used in Iran's nuclear program, according to Reuters.
Tehran defends such targets with “a huge variety” of anti-aircraft systems, said Justin Bronk, an airpower and technology expert at London's Royal United Services Institute.
Cruise missiles are easier targets for dense, integrated air defenses than ballistic missiles are.
But ballistic missiles are often fired from known launch points, and most cannot change course in flight.
Experts say high-speed, highly accurate air-launched ballistic missiles such as the Israel Aerospace Industries Rampage get around problems facing ground-based ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles - weapons that use small wings to fly great distances and maintain altitude.
“The main advantage of an ALBM over an ALCM is speed to penetrate defenses,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.
“The downside - accuracy - looks to have been largely solved,” he said.
Ground-launched ballistic missiles - which Iran used to attack Israel twice this year, and which both Ukraine and Russia have used since Russia's invasion in 2022 - are common in the arsenals of many countries. So, too, are cruise missiles.
Because ALBMs are carried by aircraft, their launch points are flexible, helping strike planners.
“The advantage is that being air-launched, they can come from any direction, complicating the task of defending against them,” said Uzi Rubin, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, one of the architects of Israel's missile defenses.
The weapons are not invulnerable to air defenses. In Ukraine, Lockheed Martin Patriot PAC-3 missiles have repeatedly intercepted Russia's Khinzhals.
Many countries, including the United States and Britain, experimented with ALBMs during the Cold War. Only Israel, Russia and China are known to field the weapons now.
The US tested a hypersonic ALBM, the Lockheed Martin AGM-183, but it received no funding for the 2025 fiscal year.
Because it has a large arsenal of cruise missiles and other types of long-range strike weapons, Washington has otherwise shown little interest in ALBMs.
A US Air Force official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ALBMs are not used in Air Force operations.
Raytheon's SM-6, an air-defense missile that has been repurposed for air-to-air and surface-to-surface missions, also has been tested as an air-launched anti-ship weapon, said a senior US defense technical analyst, who declined to be identified because the matter is sensitive.
In tests the missile was able to strike a small target on land representing the center of mass of a destroyer, the analyst said. Publicly, the SM-6 is not meant for air-to-ground strikes.
Because ALBMs are essentially a combination of guidance, warheads and rocket motors, many countries that have precision weapons already have the capability to pursue them, a defense industry executive said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“This is a clever way of taking a common set of technologies and components and turning it into a very interesting new weapon that gives them far more capability, and therefore options, at a reasonable price,” the executive said.

 



Anxious and Divided, Americans Vote ‘For the Future of This Nation’

 Voters cast their ballots at the Park Slope Armory YCMA in New York on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP)
Voters cast their ballots at the Park Slope Armory YCMA in New York on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP)
TT

Anxious and Divided, Americans Vote ‘For the Future of This Nation’

 Voters cast their ballots at the Park Slope Armory YCMA in New York on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP)
Voters cast their ballots at the Park Slope Armory YCMA in New York on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP)

Waiting outside polling stations across the country, American voters were a vision of orderly calm and quiet nerves.

The solemn nature of the voting process provided a contrast to the hyper-charged campaign cycle, marked by two assassination attempts on Donald Trump.

"I was thinking about the future of this nation, and frankly the free world," Brockett Within, a 65-year-old New Yorker, told AFP as he cast his vote Tuesday at a polling station in the East Village.

In Georgia, one of seven swing states that will decide the outcome of the vote, 27-year-old beauty queen Ludwidg Louizaire said she was aware of the stakes for the nation.

"I think we all can agree that no matter what happens today, history will be made," said the winner of the Miss Georgia competition this year.

"The main issue for me is the continuation of our democracy," Ken Thompson, a 66-year-old mason told AFP, at Edison Elementary school in Erie, Pennsylvania.

- 'America first' -

Around the country, voters confided in AFP about the issues that had tipped their decisions, often echoing the main talking-points of the campaign from immigration, abortion rights to the economy.

"We don't need another four more years of high inflation, gas prices, lying," Darlene Taylor, 56, told AFP in Erie, a bellwether county in Pennsylvania which is the biggest and most prized of the swing states.

Wearing a homemade T-shirt bearing the names of Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, she said her main issue was to "close the border" to migrants.

"America comes first, and (Kamala) Harris is not going to support that," added Taylor, who said she lived on disability benefits.

Liz Orlova, a 22-year-old in New York, said that abortion rights had been "at the forefront of my mind" as she voted in the East Village.

US Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump helped overturn the federal right to abortion in 2022 -- an issue Harris has pledged to tackle if elected.

"It's super messed up that across the country that particular right is being taken away from people," said Orlova.

- 'Way more people' -

Turn-out is expected to be crucial in Tuesday's vote. Democrats tend to do well among more educated and wealthier voters who cast ballots regularly, while Trump has courted more marginalized citizens who often opt out.

Both are hoping to turn out young voters in their support.

The lines outside polling stations along the east coast early suggested that many Americans had embraced calls from the candidates, celebrities and activists to carry out their duty.

"It's way, way, way more people here than the last" election, Marchelle Beason, 46, told AFP in Erie after putting on an "I voted" sticker.

Others confessed that they would simply be relieved when the blanket political adverts on television and the internet would end -- and a vote that has kept the country on edge all year will finally be decided.

"I'll be glad when it's over," Guy Mills, 62, told AFP in New York.