Israel to boost Tel Aviv’s missile shield

Israel’s military has begun constructing a third battery of long-range, high-altitude Arrow anti-missile interceptors near Tel Aviv to boost defenses against Iranian ballistic missiles.

The planned deployment, and a scramble to develop and install other systems to counter short- and medium-range missiles and rockets, underlines the Jewish state’s growing fears that its cities and towns face a missile bombardment of unprecedented scale and ferocity.

The existing batteries of Arrow-2 interceptors, jointly produced by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and the Boeing Co., are deployed at an air force base in southern Israel and another near the city of Hadera in the north.

Additional batteries are expected to be added over the next decade.

NATO Sees Threats, but Is Reluctant to Say Just Who the Enemy Might Be

NATO’s secretary general expects two headlines out of this month’s annual summit meeting in Lisbon: an agreement to build an alliance-wide missile defense system, and NATO’s own “reset” with Russia, whose president has accepted an invitation to the meeting and says Moscow will explore cooperation on missile defense.

NATO is still negotiating key points in a new strategic doctrine, its first since 1999, to be published in Lisbon.

These issues include nuclear disarmament, which divides France and Germany, and the alliance’s relationship with the European Union, which gets tangled up, as always, in the complications of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey.