However, a new official State Comptroller's Report and scathing criticism from within the Israeli mainstream media cast serious doubt on Barak's handling of very-short-range ballistic missile defense, the Iron Dome and Magic Wand programs.

As previously reported in these columns, Barak, when he took over at the Kirya, the massive concrete Tel Aviv headquarters of the Ministry of Defense, in 2006, energetically backed the technologically ambitious Iron Dome very-short-range interceptor program to defend Israel from the threat of very-short-range missile attacks.

During the 2006 mini-war with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Party of God, Israel was bombarded by thousands of Russian-built multiple rocket mortars, or Grads, from southern Lebanon. They were very low-tech, little advanced from the famous BM-13 multiple launch rocket mortars, or Katyushas, used at the battle of Stalingrad in 1942. They were inaccurate and caused very few casualties, but they also caused great disruption and forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from the north of the country.

Since then, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement that controls Gaza with a strong hand, has continued to defy Israel by firing its virtually homemade Qassam very-short-range rockets continually at every target they can reach inside Israel. And with the help of Iran, Hamas is slowly but surely upgrading the kinds of missiles it has to threaten major population centers along the Israeli coast to the north, like Ashkelon and Ashdod.

However, Iron Dome is still years away -- if at all -- from any practical deployment, and critics charge that Barak and the Israeli military establishment could and should have found available far superior weapons in the U.S. ballistic missile defense arsenal. The most obvious one, respected analyst Reuven Pedatzur wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, was the formidable super-rapid-firing U.S. Phalanx, which has been used to great effect in Iraq.

Pedatzur wrote that the Israel Defense Forces have "treated the rocket problem rather derisively. How else can one explain that after eight years of Qassam rocket fire, the army has yet to define what it wants the weapons defense systems to do?"

Israel's Administration for the Development of Weapons has still "not even told manufacturers what kind of system it wants to develop."

It is particularly ironic that although Barak's Labor Party was decimated in the Israeli elections on Feb. 10, Likud Party leader and probable future Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wants him to stay on as defense minister if an agreement can be reached with other potential coalition partners.

Barak's reputation soared over Israel's tactical success in inflicting significant casualties on Hamas forces and leaders in Gaza in January. But the Gaza operation was required because Hamas had continued to fire Qassams into Israel with no Iron Dome or any other defensive system to defend against them.

(Part 2: The problems with Iron Dome)

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