TEL NOF AIR BASE, Israel–The Israel Air Force (IAF) unveiled a new application capable of showing precise impact zones from incoming rockets and missiles and officers here said the system would be fully operational in a few months.
“It is one thing to know you have incoming missiles, it is another to sound the alarm over too wide an area,” Maj. Ron Toueg, from the Ofek technology arm of IAF’s Materiel Directorate, told sister publication Defense Daily recently.
Long range rockets and short-range ballistic missiles rained into Israel from Lebanon during last year’s war. Israel is convinced that if hostilities were to break out again it would face a barrage of rockets and missiles, possibly including some from Gaza, the West Bank or other locations besides Hezbollah-controlled Southern Lebanon.
During a rare “open house” here for the media and select public, the IAF Materiel Directorate introduced several of its important ongoing projects in C4I, unmanned systems, composite materials, weapons training, simulation and logistics.
Kador Poreach, which translates roughly to “Air Balloon,” is the name of Ofek’s new warning system.
While designed specifically for rockets, the system will detect and predict the impact point of virtually any incoming projectile, big or small, Toueg said. “The information comes in directly from various deployed sensors…[that] detect the object and its trajectory, then the system combines it all into one reality.” He could not elaborate on the sensors, other than to say they included “all types.”
By fusing all of the data in near real time, the system determines where it will land. “It is extremely accurate, fast and reliable…crunching information from several sources and getting that information presented to those who need it,” Toueg said.
During the Gulf War, when Scuds were launched at Israel from Iraq, the initial ellipses indicated possible impact areas often started out bigger than the area of the country, Toueg said. Israel learned it was not always best to alarm the entire country at each first indication, and also learned that better, more automated systems were needed.
Technology improved, yet the short range, almost continuous salvos from Lebanon last year also taught Israel some related lessons. There was not as much time from launch to impact, so people needed to be alerted with enough time to get them into underground shelters. However, having large portions of the population deep underground in shelters for weeks on end brought its own problems.
“We had to make the [impact area] ellipse as small as possible,” Toueg said. Now Israel Defense Forces and home front responders have the tools to create a proper warning for the areas and people that are truly in danger, he added.
Toueg said the system’s functionality would be incorporated into Israel’s future multi-layered ballistic missile defense (BMD) apparatus, though he could not elaborate.
RAFAEL and Raytheon [RTN] last year won a bid to produce for Israel an inexpensive defensive system against rockets and short range ballistic missiles (Defense Daily, May 22, 2006). U.S.-supplied Hawk and Patriot PAC-2 batteries here currently provide the next echelon of BMD, while Boeing [BA] and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) are teamed on the Arrow-2 program designed to defeat longer-range ballistic missile threats.