“The world’s got to look at the fact that left-of-launch, it’s not going to be a hundred percent. It’s not even going to be a guarantee. Look at this inventory being thrown at you from not a very sophisticated capable group that’s amassing these kinds of numbers. And we’re not able to stop it, we’re not. So you can’t rely just on left-of-launch on offense. And I go back to this point, defense matters. We spend 2% of our [Department of Defense] budget on defense, that’s it. Everything else is going on offense. So this is a lesson for all of us. It’s a huge lesson and it’s a validation of what two partners, two countries can do together. Because you got to share the cost. That’s a lot of money. And what we’re doing in Israel, and we’re sharing those experiences, is making us better at what we do to negate and defend against these threats. This is the threat of the future right now. It is escalating and thank God for Israel. Thank God for the U.S. and thank God that we can do this together and get better. We got to get better because that other side is going to get better” – Riki Ellison.
We were very honored and very fortunate to have “Live and Under Fire” in Tel Aviv, Israel, presentations to provide a much more detailed and much more thoughtful analysis of what is happening in Israel, both the actual threat from Gaza, what it is, where it’s going and what the missile defense systems that we have in our partnership between Israel and the United States in place to defend against that threat. Click here for the video and/or transcripts of our discussion.
A few highlights from our discussion:
“This is not a theoretical discussion for us. So it’s a reality of our daily life in the last few days and generally speaking for years. And today also marks a special event for Iron Dome. We’ve the first operational kill of an armed or a suicide UAV, alone from Gaza. So it was the first time we knew that Iron Dome has those capabilities, but for the first time in the operation to use, we knock down a UAV, fired against us.”- Mr. Tal Inbar.
“The friendly forces, so to speak, has a limited number of interceptors, while we recognize that several of our adversaries, the terrorist organizations previously mentioned and others globally, have tens of thousands of rockets in their arsenal. So it’s imperative that it goes back to the network, but it goes also back to the technical means of these weapons systems, whether it’s Iron Dome, whether it’s Patriot and so forth, that each of these systems and the operators are defending their critical asset, meaning there’s no missile wastage because we don’t have those interceptors to waste.” – COL (Ret.) David Shank.
“Generally speaking, Hamas has two families of rockets. One family is imported rockets from Iran and from Syria and from various other sources, but this is now becoming obsolete… The current line of Hamas rockets are domestically produced [in Gaza], basically on a foreign, initially on a foreign know-how. Some of the knowledge came from Iran, no doubt about it. And in this conflict here in Israel this week, we saw the first use of a massive use of hundreds of heavy rockets for a longer range of more than 100 kilometers.” -Mr. Tal Inbar.
“You must have that network capability redundancy where systems have the ability through technical means to talk to other systems, whether it’s through a landline capability, whether it’s through internet protocol, internet protocol capability, or whether it’s through some type of other landline device or handheld for that matter. And then the last point again, I just wanted to reinforce was the relationships piece. That if you have the positive relationship, and you have that trust between one another, it’s incredible what you can achieve.” – COL (Ret.) David Shank.
