By Yaakov Katz — The Jerusalem Post
US Navy missile ships started arriving in Israel on Sunday ahead of next month’s joint missile defense exercise between the IDF and the American military’s European Command.
Officials say US may leave some systems in Israel after planned drill.
Called Juniper Cobra, the exercise will include the Arrow missile defense system as well as three American systems – the THAAD, Aegis and PAC3 – that will all be deployed in Israel for the duration of the exercise.
Defense officials said the exercise would not begin for a few weeks, but that the ships were already arriving to begin preparing the infrastructure for the joint drill, the largest since Israel and the US began holding the biennial Juniper Cobra drill in 2001.
The arrival of the ships began a day before Defense Minister Ehud Barak was scheduled to fly to Washington for talks with his American counterpart, Robert Gates. Defense officials said that their talks would focus on the Iranian threat, Israeli-US defense cooperation as well as the role Israel will play in the new American missile defense shield announced last week.
Expectations in Israel are that the US will deploy several Aegis ballistic missile ships – that are capable of intercepting ballistic missiles – in the Mediterranean and Red seas. Israel is already home to the advanced X-Band radar that the Bush administration gave as a farewell gift last October.
Officials said it was possible that the US would decide to leave some systems in Israel following the drill to bolster Israeli defenses in face of the Iranian threat. One possibility under discussion is that Aegis ships, that carry SM3 missile interceptors, will be deployed in the Mediterranean and Red seas.
On Sunday, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in which he contended that the new European defense plan – which won’t include a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, as per the US announcement last week – was a reworking of the previous proposal, and provided more protection in light of the current threat assessments.
Gates said that while the previous plan would not have provided any protection before at least 2017 – and likely later – the new program will begin providing some level of protection by 2011, will receive a significant boost in capability by 2015, and will be built over time to create “an increasingly greater zone of protection.”
Read more at The Jerusalem Post
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We didn't build these ships in Pascagula Mississippi, with American tax dollars, to be some gift to the Israelis, while they sit on 300 nuclear warheads of their own, and acting like Iran has China's nuclear capability! (Should we go ahead and paint USS LIBERTY on the side of one of them prior to mossad claiming it was an Iranian Flying Saucer that sunk it?……………………………..DUMB!
Exactly!!
The power of Zion is almost absolute. We must break this Zionist yoke!
This Naval show of support is nothin abnormal, IMHO. Nothing to freak out about. An exercise is an exercise… it's still abou the cold-war, nothing much more. You know… Kremlin will support Syria and expand the threat matrix there as well as expand the threat matrix of Iran… as USN will counter-balance with its own show of force.
Very tragic, still today, sure..
A bunch of Neanderthals we both are, indeed.
Nothing to see folks.. move along.