Over the past few months, we have witnessed unprecedented success and cooperation between the US, Israel, and Gulf states, especially with regard to missile defense. Facing renewed retaliatory strikes between the US and Iran, what are the key lessons Israel should take away from its air and missile defense operations against Iran and its proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis? 

My overall assessment is that Israel’s missile defense capabilities performed effectively over the past two years of hostilities, blunting the vast majority of air and missile attacks against the country. But there are several warning signs Israel needs to weigh as it plans for the future — most importantly, whether it can continue to count on the same level of US support that carried it through the run-up to and duration of the current conflict. 

Israel’s Missile Defense Architecture 

In 1991, Israel was repeatedly attacked by Iraq with ballistic missiles in an unprovoked assault. The objective was not military but political. Iraq’s leader at the time, Saddam Hussein, believed that striking Israel with ballistic missiles would provoke an Israeli entry into the war to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait — and that Israel’s involvement would in turn force the coalition’s Arab members to withdraw, fracturing the coalition’s ability to prosecute the war effectively. 

The strategy came close to working. As ballistic missiles began falling on Israeli cities, the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was strongly inclined to retaliate. That it did not is likely attributable to several factors, including intense political pressure from the United States and, critically, the deployment of US Patriot PAC-2 batteries to Israel. Although the Patriot PAC-2 interceptor was not originally designed to engage ballistic missiles, it was modified to provide a limited capability against them. As one analyst has observed, the deployment of US Patriot systems to Israel following Iraq’s initial Scud attacks on Tel Aviv helped stabilize an already volatile situation. 

At the war’s conclusion, Israel drew two lasting lessons. First, it needed a domestically designed missile defense system tailored to its specific threat environment — the war had exposed how limited Israel’s own anti-missile capabilities were, and how dependent the country had been on the US military to provide Patriot interceptors for its defense. Israel did not want to find itself in that position again. With substantial technical and financial support from the United States, it spent the next three decades building a layered missile defense architecture capable of intercepting the full spectrum of missile threats it faced. That architecture includes: 

The Arrow........

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