The U.S. consensus is both deep and broad: It includes the leadership of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force.

But the Israeli challenge has a lot of serious clout behind it. According to an article this week published by Defense News, two former Israel air force commanders, retired Gens. David Ivry and Herzl Bodinger, are leading the charge.

If there is one individual who can be said to embody the Israeli national security establishment, it is Ivry. He was arguably the most successful and respected IAF commander of the past generation. He also served a successful stint as the nation's national security adviser. Bodinger is a heavy hitter too. He followed his own respected tour as IAF commander by becoming a leading executive in the Israel defense industry sector.

Interestingly, they are not criticizing U.S. policymakers or military institutions -- at least not directly. Instead they are hitting out at bureaucrats in Israel's own defense ministry for not pushing the cause of the U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser, which was scrapped in 2004. Israeli policymakers under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon went along with the cancellation at the time. None of them anticipated how disruptive the Hezbollah Katyusha bombardment of the northern part of their country could be. They learned that lesson the hard way last year.

Ivry, Bodinger and their allies want to push ahead with a revived, smaller-scale version of T-HEL called Sky Guard that would be built by Northrop Grumman, Defense News reported from Jerusalem.

"We were already 10 years down the (development) road, and the technological feasibility was proven. ... Had we pressed ahead, we would have seen that Block 2 was much better than Block 1, and today we would have been into Block 3," Ivry told the first IMDA conference last month, according to the Defense News report.

In addition to the possibility of a revived Sky Guard, Defense News noted that Defense Minister Ehud Barak is pushing ahead with Iron Dome, a program to deploy very-short-range ballistic missile interceptors that could intercept incoming missiles with a range of only 25 miles or less.

The new offensive being mounted by the IMDA, and Barak's commitment towards expanding and broadening the range of BMD systems in Israel's arsenal, could lead to a renewed debate of over Sky Guard with the Pentagon and Congress. If that happens, it will be the result of an interesting irony. The Israeli armed forces and defense industry sector have both followed U.S. leads and U.S. fashions for more than 30 years ever since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- by far the most pro-American and visionary of all the founding generation of Israeli military commanders -- concluded his epochal Matmon C arms deal for heavy artillery and modern main battle tanks and aircraft with the Ford administration in 1975 as his price for bowing to American pressure and withdrawing from the western half of the Sinai peninsula under the Sinai II Disengagement Agreement.

Now, the very creation of the IMDA marks yet another milestone in which Israeli military and industrial leaders are following an American example. Creating independent, non-profit but also highly prestigious organizations to push key strategic issues, especially ballistic missile defense, is a venerable U.S. tradition going back decades.

The twist in this story is that the Israelis are following the American example this time to challenge a deeply rooted U.S. policy consensus on an aspect of ballistic missile defense that U.S. military commanders and policymakers have never before felt was worth focusing on: the threat from very-short-range tactical ballistic missiles.

Yet the ensuing debate may prove to be in the U.S. national interest in the long run, too. While U.S. military planners have not taken threats from massed Multiple Launch Rocket mortars seriously as a general rule, they have proven to be a formidable weapon in modern war over the past 65 years. Having a debate that focuses on this danger may be no bad thing.

Related Links
Learn about missile defense at SpaceWar.com
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All about missiles at SpaceWar.com
Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com

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