Missile defenseIsrael open to offering missile defense coverage to Jordan, Egypt

A U.S. general on Monday said that Israel should consider extending the coverage area of its missile defense systems so they could cover Jordan and possibly Egypt, and an Israeli official cautiously welcomed the idea.

As is the case with other Sunni Arab countries in the region, Egypt and Jordan are worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but unlike other Arab countries, the two have peace treaties with Israel.

Daily News Egypt notes that Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba is also within range of short-range rockets fired by Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula. The Islamists have so far launched rockets only against Israel’s port city of Eilat, although some rocket landed in Jordan, probably as a result of error in targeting.

The proposal for Israel to extend its ballistic missile coverage was made by Brigadier-General John Shapland, the military attache at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. He made the comments in a presentation to a security conference in Tel Aviv.

“If we were able to build a regional defense capability in, say, Jordan, that capability could easily defend Israel, Jordan and even Egypt, if you so desired, adding one more layer to your multi-layered defense,” he told Israeli officials and experts during the keynote address at the INSS think-tank-sponsored conference on “Air and Missile Defense in the Modern Era,” held 10 March in Tel Aviv.

The United States has funded most of the research and development work on Israel’s layered ballistic missile and short-range rocket defense systems, much of it under the Obama administration (for the latest, see “U.S. gives Israel $429 million for Iron Dome,” Haaretz, 10 March 2014). The Obama administration, which has gone much farther than any previous administration to support Israel’s military capabilities and intelligence-gathering efforts, has also agreed to the integration of Israel’s deployed missile interceptor systems with U.S. global missile tracking and regional missile defense systems.

Daily News Egypt reports that Yair Ramati, head of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, was open to the idea. “The policy of the (Israeli) Defense Ministry is always to cooperate with the countries of the region, including the countries cited,” Ramati said at the conference, referring to Jordan and Egypt.

Ramati declined to discuss whether Israel’s two deployed systems, the Arrow II ballistic missile interceptor and Iron Dome short-range rocket interceptor, could already provide coverage for Arab neighbors.

“I won’t be sharing operational maps with you,” Ramati said. “You can draw your own conclusions from the fact we insist on not answering.”

The range of the Arrow II’s interception would allow it to cover much of the western parts of Jordan, including the capital city Amman, and the eastern parts of Egypt.

Arrow III, a new version of the system scheduled to enter service by 2016, would have the range to shoot down incoming Iranian missiles over Iraq, thus bringing all of Jordan under defensive coverage.

Iron Dome has an interception radius of about six miles, enough to protect Aqaba if the Iron Dome batteries re deployed near Eilat.

The United States has already deployed Patriot anti-missile batteries on the Jordan-Syria border.

The former head of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, Arieh Herzog, said that protecting Jordan had been discussed when he was in office between 2000 and 2012.

“I’m not aware of any current policies on this matter, but certainly they (Israelis) have been talking for many years about the theoretical possibility of using our systems to help the Jordanians if required,” he said.