Father of Israeli Missile Defense Program: Hezbollah’s “Insane Pace” of Missiles Constrains Israel

Hezbollah has succeeded for more than a decade in surprising political and security decision-makers in Tel Aviv by imposing newly set up deterrence strategies on the Israeli regime, Al-Akhbar newspaper reported yesterday.

Each strategy served as a pivotal turning point in the ongoing conflict movements which made the enemy leaders, subsequently, change their calculations, it said.

Al-Akhbar noted that a new stage of shock whose repercussions continue to have impact on Israeli media and political official sphere, is manifested in Hezbollah’s evolving tactics in improving the accuracy of its missile; therefore, posing a threat to ‘Israel’.

This actually prompted Jerusalem Post to ask Uzi Rubin, the father of Israel’s missile defense program, to warn of the emerging, growing threats to which public and elite Israelis are subjected, according to Al-Akhbar report. The introduction of nuclear weapons would not replace conventional threats, but create an additional layer of nonconventional ballistic threats, Rubin said.

Based on this concept, Rubin discussed Hezbollah’s accurate missiles which Netanyahu suggested, during his speech at UN, are capable of striking with an accuracy of about 10 meters. Rubin pointed out that the two critical points in Hezbollah’s missile capabilities are “the rate and the precision of the missiles.”

In the same context, when asked about the rate of missiles launched by Hezbollah, Rubin noted that the question must be “how many rockets per day an adversary like Hezbollah is capable of actually launching against Israel as compared to how many rockets Israel can shoot down when under attack by a simultaneous hail of rockets.” Recalling 2006 Lebanon war, he said that Hezbollah fired around 4000 missiles eventually. Rubin was concerned that Hezbollah’s arsenal and its increased mobility might allow it to fire up to 1,000 or 1,500 rockets per day. Based on the figures presented by Uzi Rubin, we can conclude that Hezbollah is capable within “3 days” of striking Israel with the number of missiles it launched during 33 days in Israel-Hezbollah war. “That would be an insane pace,” Uzi Rubin said.

The founder of Israeli missile defense hoped that the “offensive, defensive, active and passive efforts” would reduce the missile rate by a few hundred per day. As an attempt at intimidation, Rubin who, just like other Israeli leaders, concedes that Hezbollah can be neither deterred nor destroyed, said “We cannot be in bomb shelters while they are (Lebanese civilians) sitting drinking coffee in cafes.”

Rubin admitted that the precision has changed the very nature of the weapon that ‘Israel’ faces. “A simple rocket is a terror weapon. It is like blowing up a bus. Yes, it is a problem and you need to deal with it, but precision-guided rockets cross over into being a military weapon,” he stated.

Quoting the Jerusalem Post, “Rubin said that the precision of certain rockets meant that, absent a hermetic defense, which could be very difficult to achieve, it became virtually certain that Hezbollah could hit some key aspects of Israel’s infrastructure.”

Translated version of Al-Akhbar‘s Arabic report

Source: Al-Akhbar Newspaper