U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel
Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
✓ On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.
The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that
there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas,
a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the
government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
- He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”
A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an American base, insisting that it was merely a “living facility” for U.S. service members working at an Israeli base.
- Such obfuscation is typical of U.S. military sites the Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a “cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.
✓ Site 512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.
- Following the attack, the U.S. doubled the number of fighter jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of Israel.
“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel.”
✓ Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on Iran.” While some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack, there have been indications from the U.S. intelligence community that Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.
The history of the U.S.–Israel relationship may be behind the failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas U.S. military bases.
“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept.
“The announcement of U.S. military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for Israel.”
RELATED
Though this new site may be technically permanent, it expands on an existing forward deployed base at the top of Israel’s Mount Har Keren, also in the Negev. For nearly a decade, members of the U.S. Army’s 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command have maintained a long-range X-band AN/TPY-2 radar, primarily associated with the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense System (THAAD), at a so-called “cooperative security location” known as Site 512.
While the U.S. military has no THAAD interceptors in Israel at present, the radar helps provide additional situational awareness for both American and Israeli forces. It feeds information into at least one of the Israel Defense Forces’ command centers responsible for operating the Arrow 3 ballistic missile defense system.
On top of that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has facilitated a significant amount of other construction projects in Israel through the Foreign Military Sales program, including at least two massive underground command and control bunkers. In 2015, the Corps told the author that it was awarding contracts for an average of 10 to 14 major building programs on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense each year.
Site 883 looks set to improve upon that existing cooperation, possibly helping to streamline the flow of data from Site 512, as well as other U.S. intelligence sources, such as Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) early warning satellites. Of course, its existence “would not hamper the IDFs ability to act independently against any threat to the security of the State of Israel,” Brigadier General Haimovich stressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment