Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has finally prevailed upon his own military bureaucrats in the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv to buy Raytheon’s excellent Vulcan Phalanx super-fast heavy machine gun and guidance system as a defense system against very-short-range ballistic missiles.

Barak told the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz April 20 that he had finally taken the plunge to buy the Vulcan Phalanx system, a mature technology effective up to 4 miles in range that has operated superbly well for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the Israel Defense Forces. It is expected to be deployed to guard Sderot and other Israeli communities in northwestern Negev that have been under bombardment for years from Gaza.

Israeli press reports have presented Barak as the hero who wanted to buy the Vulcan Phalanx before but was stymied by his own bureaucracy, but there appears to be a large element of spin control in those reports.

The fact is that Barak had bet heavily and publicly on the Israeli-manufactured Iron Dome to provide defense for the embattled town of Sderot and other communities within pre-1967 borders that have been relentlessly bombarded by Qassam rockets from Gaza for years. But the Iron Dome system is still years away even from prototype testing, let alone operational production and deployment.

Barak enthusiastically embraced the Iron Dome very-short-range BMD system after taking office in 2006. But as we have reported in these columns, Iron Dome, being developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, has progressed far more slowly, with far more difficulty and cost overruns than Barak and its planners anticipated, though they should have.  [Space War]

In September 2007, Jane’s reported from the British DSEi exhibition that Raytheon is working on a Phalanx variant that can fire lasers. Kevin Peppe, Raytheon’s Phalanx program director, said that:

“The Centurion system has provided a near-term C-RAM (Counter-Rocket, Artillery and Mortars) solution for our deployed forces. But we know that our customers would like a larger defended footprint beyond the kinematics of a gunbased system. A missile is too expensive, so we are looking instead at a solution based on the adaptation of a robust but relatively lowpower, low beam-quality commercial laser…. By using clever optics to focus the laser beam at range, we demonstrated that we could achieve sufficient energy on target to deflagrate a 60mm mortar round.”

The concept has promise – but it also has substantial obstacles to overcome before it can become militarily useful…  [Defense Industry Daily]

Click the above link to read more about the potential obstacles a laser based Phalanx could face.

This is DID’s Spotlight article offering updated, in-depth coverage of the Phalanx CIWS. It describes ongoing deployment and research projects within the Phalanx family of weapons, the new land-based system’s new technologies and roles, and international contracts from FY 2005 onward. Israel is now considering the land-based 20mm version as part of its defenses against Hamas’ shelling of its civilian population, but several obstacles remain…

• The Phalanx Platform: Competition, Upgrades & Developments [updated]
• Land-Based Phalanx: C-RAM
• Phalanx Contracts and Key Events, FY 2005-Present [updated]
• Additional Readings