Defense One:
If Iran launches a ballistic missile at the Middle East, nuclear or not, Arab states would have as little as four minutes to act before impact.
Ideally, the launch would be detected, the missile tracked during its flight by radar and its trajectory then passed to an interceptor missile, which would then blast off. If all goes as planned, the interceptor would collide with the Iranian missile as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere.
But which country would shoot down the missile? While the missile’s target may be in Saudi Arabia, it would travel over UAE, Qatar or Kuwait. America’s friends have sophisticated, American-made missile interceptors. But there’s one problem, the equipment in one country does not talk to the equipment in another. So, the United States is renewing its push during this week’s Gulf Cooperation Council summit outside Washington to get Arab states to link-up the missile interceptors and radars into a single Middle East missile shield.
“You can’t just buy lots of interceptors and park them in the desert,” said Thomas Karako, a missile defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “You’ve got to stitch them together into the network and give them plenty of early warning and sensor information so they know where to shoot.”
GCC members are united in their fear of nuclear missile attacks from Iran, but regional politics, military rivalries and even cyber espionage concerns have blocked them from setting up an intertwined missile defense shield akin to what NATO has built in Europe. There, alliance members have been beefing up missile defenses to protect the continent from long-range Iranian missiles.
“The difference is that you don’t have NATO in the Middle East,” Karako said. “Really the prerequisite to serious cooperation, to serious interoperability and integration is and always has been the lack of political integration and … security integration like you have with NATO.”
Cooperation, information sharing and connecting equipment are “the crown jewels of what needs to be done on missile defense,” Karako said.
That lack of strategic planning between countries has lead Gulf states to individually buy their own missile defense systems, primarily Patriot missiles and more recently longer-range THAAD interceptors…
