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Iran's Ahmadinejad: does he think about software?
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| By Ashley Rindsberg November 6, 2006 |
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| Eran Shir: thinking like a startup may help stop enemy missiles. |
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Today, the specter of destruction falling from the sky is back. The US enjoyed a decade's respite after the fall of the Soviet Union during which American air superiority ensured that virtually no enemy bomb squadron could achieve a successful attack. But today, with Iran's dubiously peaceful nuclear program and with North Korea's recent long-range missile test, the possibility of an unconventional ballistic missile reaching American soil is no longer just the remnants of a Cold War nightmare.
Perhaps no country understands this kind of threat better than Israel. It was only a few months ago that the northern region of that country was huddled into shelters as rockets rained from the Lebanon border. And it was only a few years before that when Saddam Hussein launched more than 40 Scud missiles onto Israeli soil in retaliation for the first US-led invasion of Iraq.
Israel's decision to begin a missile defense program grew in response to this ever-looming threat. Already by the 1980s policy makers and systems designers were discussing the feasibility of a missile defense system that could accurately, and cost-effectively, neutralize an incoming missile attack. In the US, talk about missile defense had begun decades before President Reagan's famous 'Star Wars' plan which he announced in his Strategic Defense Initiative speech in 1983.
Today, after more than a half-century's worth of discussion regarding the possibility of missile defense, only one country in the world -- Israel -- has been able to fully develop a reliable and realistic missile defense system: the Arrow.
Eran Shir was a member of the founding Arrow unit in the Israeli army. His unit's task was to develop operating protocols, find operational snags, and build the skeleton of a new army unit that could successfully deploy the system against future threats. Shir, a young non-commissioned officer, was neither top army brass nor policy pundit. Instead, he was a guy-on-the-ground, an Israeli twenty-something who had been assigned to this unit because of the experience he'd gained, and the sharpness he displayed, working with a previous missile defense system.
Shir later became a computer scientist with a background in physics, in addition to the developer of the largest, most successful internet measurement program, Dimes (Distributed Internet Measurements and Simulations). Sitting in a popular Tel Aviv café where Shir had just finished a meeting for his latest high-tech startup, Dapper, he looks around at the packed cafe and reflects on the unit he helped build, and what it means for Israel, its enemies, and the world.
"Think of it like an army startup," he says of the unit. Much of the unit's work was devoted to determining the role of the human in the process. Although the system is highly automated, more so than the US Patriot missile defense system, people are still needed to "set the policy" of the system or, in other words, to determine its behavior given various real-world scenarios.
His unit, along with the development visionaries, politicians, and officers who helped give birth to what most analysts considered to be an impossible dream, was successful. The Arrow has proven in recent tests to be highly capable of intercepting long range missiles at extremely high altitudes.
But what does this mean for Israel? Should the public and the government forget about Iran's blatant aggression and military capability in favor of sitting back to munch sunflower seeds and watch a soccer game, comfortably assured by the Arrow's presence? Definitely not, says Shir.
"Think of it like the 5 stages of accepting death," he explains, referring to Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' outline of the process of grieving. "Israeli culture is going through those steps right now, maybe rapidly. We've been in denial [the first stage of grieving] for a long time. Part of dealing with the Qassam rockets in the south was denial. We didn't really want to deal with this issue. And now we're in the second stage, we're frustrated and angry. I think that at the end of the day we have to accept the fact that the oref [the homefront] no longer has any meaning. You have to talk about the civilian front and the military front-- everyone is part of the front."
The loss of meaning of the homefront has no better example than the recent Lebanon war. While life in Tel Aviv went relatively unchanged, life in the north did not. Even so, Israelis spoke of a palpable tension in country's largest city which came from the possibility that an Iran-supplied long range missile might finally burst the 'Tel Aviv bubble'. And this, Shir explains, is precisely what Israelis need to accept.
"We need to deal with the fact that in any potential war here, there is a very good chance that right here in this cafe a one ton TNT missile might drop. There's a very good chance that we might experience London in WWII all over again, only this time high-tech."
Although the Arrow system smacks of the kind of sci-fi wonder which could prevent such a scenario, it is not a Star Trek-like forcefield, as every one would like it to be. The first reason for this is that 100% accuracy is basically physically impossible. Then factor in human error (and bad intelligence), mechanical failure and, as always, cost.
"All of these concepts of defending a certain region come down to a scale of economy: how much does it cost an aggressor to send a missile versus how much does it cost to intercept it. Then multiply that by 1000. If we had a Katyusha defense system for which every missile, like the Arrow, cost $100,00, or even $50,000, and you have to send a couple interceptors against each katyusha, and they have 4000 katyushas -- well you can do the numbers. It is not something we can withstand."
But even aside from logistical and economic parameters, the system is simply not designed to intercept other kinds of missiles, particularly smaller, shorter-range ones. The upside of this is that these kinds of weapons cannot (we think) be armed with unconventional warheads. But they are still deadly and they are still terrifying.
"One option is to say that we're not interested in Scuds and all those missiles. We're only interested in unconventional missiles. If you send a one-ton conventional warhead against us, it's not our business. But this has two problems. First, it will be very hard in real time to withstand this position. You have the ability to intercept a conventional missile so it's very hard to say no. The other issue is the problem of discriminating, knowing which is a conventional missile and which is not. If you have a salvo of 100 missiles, or even 20, it's not easy to discriminate."
"So the problem is not solved. But it's a very good first step."
Big Step, Tiny Country
It's a very good first step that most military technology experts had, for decades, thought could not be accomplished. Once it was accomplished -- once the Arrow proved successful in repeated tests-- many of the former skeptics began to hail the accomplishment in miracle terms. So how did this tiny country, with its relatively tiny military budget (Israel's defense budget is roughly one quarter that of France), accomplish what no other country could? A preliminary answer comes in the form of a four-letter acronym: BMDO. The Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (now the Missile Defense Agency) helped kick-start this pet project of theirs by anteing up with a large chunk of the cost of development. But if the Pentagon could finance it then why didn't they just build it?
"This goes back to culture," Shir says. "Out of everything, it's culture. In Israel you first do something, even if you know that maybe what you've done you might have to re-do from scratch again in a few years, or it doesn't solve the whole problem, or it's an improvisation, or proof of concept."
The Pentagon has in fact tried to push a number -- a large of number -- of missile defense systems to fruition. There was the Patriot, the THAAD, the Standard Missile 2, and others. Some of them failed and some of them half-worked, but none have been able to achieve the kind of broad-reaching missile defense system that Reagan seemed to be calling for his in his Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, speech.
"In the US," Shir says, "everything is very planned, with the project and the team and the budget and the timeline. And eventually you end up with nothing. You want to build a pie-in-the-sky system and you end up with pie on your face."
The Israeli approach, he explains, is somewhat different. In a country whose very existence was a case of geopolitical bootstrapping and where one of the biggest national fears, alongside destruction, is being labeled a 'freier', or sucker, people have to think fast and act faster. Improvisation there is not a tactic; it's a strategy.
"It's like the startup culture," he explains as his startup partner leaves the table in search of an outlet to charge his laptop. "It's very bad in many senses but it's also very good in many senses. It's the ability to improvise and start small and not worry about the fact that 10,000 people have failed before you. Just go forward and have this foolish confidence that you can do what no one else could."
Or, in words that recall the story of the birth of the State of Israel, "You start with what you can, not with what you need. Then life takes its own course."
"Death is on our doorstep"
With North Korea's recent nuclear weapons test, we are faced with the question of both what we need to do and what we can do to counter this reemerging threat. North Korea, though, with its fragile economy and ambiguous policies is perhaps not the most crucial threat. Its 'Axis-of-Evil' co-designee, Iran, which boasts a large army, relatively stable (and diverse) economy, oil wealth, and military proximity to other oil supplies, poses an entirely different challenge.
Iran has had a long and well-documented relationship with nearly all of the world's leading producers of advanced arms systems, including the US and Israel. The fruit of this web of weaponry is not only an impressive arsenal but an ability to produce its own weapons or modify Russian, North Korean, or Chinese systems for its own purposes. The most recent news, reported in Jane's Defense Weekly, is that Iran is now developing a missile with a range of 4,000-5,000 km, which puts Paris, London, Rome, Mumbai and, needless to say, Tel Aviv within range.
Putting aside conjectures of a messianic Iranian will to world destruction, the issue of mutually assured destruction is obscured not only by the high-intensity rhetoric of that country's government but also by the very presence of a reliable missile defense system in the region.
Some analysts have theorized that because would-be aggressors understand that the chances of a ballistic missile attack on Israel (and now other countries) have been significantly diminished, these aggressors (like the guerilla factions that often brought them to power) are forced to find new and often more brutal methods of attack. Suicide attacks, dirty bombs, and mass poisonings are some of the better known varieties. But as troubling as these scenarios are, it's what defense experts have not yet anticipated that's scarier.
It's a game that Shir calls 'Circumvention': "I think of the terrorists, as well, like a startup. You just need to circumvent the problem: if you cannot fight against the Israeli air force then you use Scuds. And if you can't use Scuds you use Hizbollah. The other side understood Israel and is trying to make the best out of its inferiority. It's quite understandable. It's like when you hire a strategic consultant for your company to compete with IBM. They don't tell you to go head-to-head with IBM, they tell you to go around, go under, go to the side."
With Iran now engaging the UN, courting the 'non-aligned' nations, continuing its nuclear program, and all the while waging a rhetoric war, it seems that that country is doing all three. The question that faces the US, Europe and, most critically, Israel, is what to do about it?
Israel, which sits two houses over from Iran and is ringed by the high-tech picket fence that is the Arrow system, faces particularly complex questions. Shir explains the position of some opponents of the Arrow who believe that the presence of the system withers Israel's deterrence abilities. The Arrow, this school claims, sends a message to enemies that 'You can try shoot us and we won't strike back so hard.'
"Think about this scenario where Iran sends a nuclear missile, intending to destroy Israel, and we manage to intercept it with the Arrow-- will we be able, in a situation where not a single Israeli dies, to send a nuclear missile and destroy Teheran?" And if the answer is no, then what stops Iran, or any potential aggressor, from trying again and again until by force of sheer probability it is successful?
"I think we need to develop a new strategy of retaliation. We need to make it clear, beforehand, that the minute we see a missile coming out of Syria or Iran or any other place we will make sure that those countries will be wiped out. We need to get into their minds that the Jews are crazy, on the one hand. On the other hand we need to do as much as we can to remove any excuse: we need to finish up the peace process with the Palestinians and normalize relations with them. And we need to approach Lebanon and make it very hard for them to say no to a peace treaty."
In this sense peace is its own strategic defense weapon. And this, he explains, is precisely what Yitzhak Rabin understood at least a decade before anybody else in Israeli politics. Rabin expressed this position as early as 1992 when in a speech to Israel's Knesset on Islamic fundamentalism he remarked that "the danger of death is at our doorstep", while simultaneously reiterating strong calls for peace with the Palestinians.
Shir explains that this strategic concern is part of the reason why Rabin, who was an experienced military strategist, focused so heavily on achieving peace. He realized that Israel needs to be able to focus its military and political resources on critical threats -- in this case on a country whose leader now openly calls for the genocide and destruction of the Jewish state, along with a Shi'a-led redemption of Islam against the West.
"It's a gloomier future," Shir says in a matter-of-fact tone. "A gloomier prospect."
But, returning to his startup-culture wisdom, he says, "Once you get into the mode that the answer is out there so let's find it, it becomes much, much easier to find an answer. We need to look at the issue through the solution, not through the problem."
Whatever the solution might be, it will not be simple. It will involve a careful combination of diplomacy, deterrence, partnership, and isolation. But more than all this, it will first require acceptance of the fact that there is a problem and, likewise, that there is a solution. And also that, as with any startup venture, the search for the solution entails both confrontation with failure and the ability to look that failure in the eye and push past it.
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