The US Army, which bought two Iron Dome batteries from the Israel Rafael defense company last year, said that it was dropping its plans to acquire the Iron Dome missile defense system because they cannot integrate it with the US’s existing missile defense system, Breaking Defense reported.

According to the army, Israel refused to share the Iron Dome’s source code with the US army, preventing it from fully integrating the system into the US Army’s Integrated Battle Command System. Although Israel provided engineering information to the US it would not reveal the source code for how the system works.

“It took us longer to acquire those two batteries than we would have liked,” Gen. Mike Murray, head of Army Futures Command told the House Armed Service tactical air and land forces subcommittee on Thursday.

“We believe we cannot integrate them into our air defense system based upon some interoperability challenges, some cyber [security] challenges, and some other challenges. So what we ended up having is two stand-alone batteries that will be very capable, but they cannot be integrated.”

However, according to the Breaking Defense report, Murray admitted that it would be “exceptionally difficult” to integrate the Iron Dome into the US system even if Rafael would reveal the source code.

“My assessment right now is, it would be — and I hate to ever use the word ‘impossible’ — but exceptionally difficult to integrate Iron Dome into our layered air defense architecture [and] to get Iron Dome talk to other systems, other radars, specifically the Sentinel radar,” Murray said. “What you’re probably — almost certainly – going to see is two standalone systems, and if the best we can do is standalone systems, we do not want to buy another two batteries.”

The US military currently lacks a short-range air defense system and Congress ordered the US army to fully integrate the Iron Dome system or develop its own system, imposing a 2023 deadline. The army dedicated over $1 billion into a program to integrate the Iron Dome components into the Integrated Battle Command System but it is now canceling its plans to purchase another two Iron Dome batteries.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)