Israeli Very-Short-Range Anti-Ballistic Missile Interceptor System Fails Part Four

Why has Israel's very-short-range Iron Dome anti-ballistic missile interceptor system failed so badly? And why didn't the Israelis simply buy the already combat-approved, highly reliable U.S.-built Raytheon Vulcan Phalanx machine gun instead?
First, it should be noted that the huge cost overruns and delays on Iron Dome are hardly unique. This kind of thing happens to far larger and more expensive U.S. and Russian programs all the time. The Russians are still struggling to salvage their costly but dangerously unreliable Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile, and their aircraft carrier programs have been an exercise in failure and futility for nearly 40 years.
The U.S. armed forces sank hundreds of billions of dollars into the fairy-tale appeal of the Future Combat Systems under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. While some individual parts of the FCS have been made to work effectively, the overall vision of a super-integrated command and control communications system integrating everything in real time looks like an impossible dream that would require infinite resources that simply aren't available.
The cost overruns on the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.'s A400M heavy military air transport will certainly run into the tens of billions of dollars and could go even higher.
So Iron Dome's problems do not reflect some unique ineptitude of the Israeli military's aerospace and high-tech sectors. Such programs are always high-stakes gambles, however rosy the initial projections are.
But Iron Dome's unique problems do shed a revealing light on the nature of the Israeli aerospace industry and its strengths and weaknesses.
The most important point about Israel's very advanced and remarkably successful military aerospace corporations is that the country and its defense industrial sector are both small.
Israel's scientists, engineers and technicians deservedly acquired their world-class reputation not by building massive projects on the scale of the United States, Russia and the EU nations but by working with the major aircraft and defense companies of other nations.
They did so with France for the first 20 years of the Jewish state's existence. And for the past 40 years, they have done so with the United States. Utilizing this cooperation, Israeli companies have dramatically upgraded, and they have advanced the capabilities of the aircraft and combat systems they had acquired.
This cooperation has proven immensely fruitful for the United States as well as for Israel over the past four decades. But it often has caused the Israelis and their supporters to forget that Israel shines when it works fruitfully with its vastly larger ally.
In contrast, the Israelis have a very poor record of producing entirely homemade major combat systems themselves. Their outstanding success in this regard is usually cited as the Merkava -- Hebrew for "chariot" -- Main Battle Tank. But the Merkava has now been in use for more than a quarter of a century.
The Israelis had to give up their ambitious plan to produce their own air superiority fighter jet, the Lavi, more than 20 years ago. This was in large part because of intense opposition from the major U.S. aerospace companies and their allies in the Pentagon. But Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and top Israel Defense Forces generals fiercely opposed the project too because it would have cost so much money that the ammunition, spare-parts and maintenance budgets of the regular Israeli army would have been stripped to the bone to pay for it.
Iron Dome suffered from this problem too. It was quite simply far too ambitious and revolutionary a military technology for a tiny country like Israel with major defense burdens already in place to pay for and develop. The Israelis therefore would have done far better to buy off the shelf the existing weapons systems that could have defended their northern and southern settlements from low-tech, short-range rocket bombardment, and of these, the Raytheon Phalanx was by far the best and most obvious choice.