WASHINGTON — The U.S. Military will ship to Guam one of many two Iron Dome air-and-missile protection batteries it lately bought as an interim answer for cruise missile protection, in line with an Oct. 7 assertion from the 94th Military Air and Missile Protection Command.
The deployment, dubbed Operation Iron Island, will check the capabilities of the system and additional prepare and refine the deployment capabilities of air defenders, the assertion notes. It’s going to additionally fulfill the requirement within the fiscal 2019 Nationwide Protection Authorization Act that an Iron Dome battery be deployed to an operational theater by the top of 2021.
Iron Dome will arrive in mid-October and the train will final via November, an Military spokesman confirmed.
The 94th AAMDC will oversee this “short-term, experimental deployment,” to Andersen Air Pressure Base in Guam, in line with the assertion.
Troopers and tools from the 2-43 Air Protection Artillery Battalion from Fort Bliss, Texas, will deploy with the system. The unit has been coaching on it for the higher a part of a yr. Troopers from the thirty eighth ADA Brigade can even come from Japan to help the mission.
The train is targeted on “gathering information on sustainment, deployment concerns, and the way we combine Iron Dome with our present air protection techniques,” which, on this case, is the Terminal Excessive Altitude Space Protection Battery that has been deployed to Guam since 2013, the spokesman mentioned.
“There’s at present no plan to conduct a stay hearth of the system whereas it’s on Guam,” the assertion mentioned.
Iron Dome is manufactured by Israeli protection firm Rafael and was co-developed by Raytheon Applied sciences. The Military purchased the 2 Iron Dome techniques on the request of Congress to fill the cruise missile hole whereas it develops a extra enduring answer to counter quite a lot of air and missile threats.
The Military doesn’t intend to purchase extra Iron Dome batteries, however as an alternative might incorporate components of the system into its oblique fires safety functionality, which is being designed to defeat cruise missiles and drones in addition to rockets, artillery and mortars.
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Protection Information. She has lined protection within the Washington space for 10 years. She was beforehand a reporter at Politico and Inside Protection. She gained the Nationwide Press Membership’s greatest analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Protection Media Awards’ greatest younger protection journalist in 2018.