Seeking to reinforce its defense capabilities against long-range drones of Iranian manufacture, the Israeli Air Force has upgraded its old AIM-9M Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, especially with regard to their guidance systems. In this way, the institution intends to lighten the existing burden on its air defense network, since the interception of this type of platforms of small size, low speed and capable of flying at low altitudes is more difficult to carry out using the systems that currently make it up.
The novelty in question stems from a recent report that was published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), in which the lessons that Israel has learned from the drone attacks carried out from Tehran in mid-April of last year are collected, the same ones in which the Defense Forces collaborated together with U.S. troops and other partners in the region to intercept. In a fragment of the published report, the FPRI indicated, based on an interview with U.S. Air Force officers: “Defenders quickly deduced that the most effective weapon to shoot down long-range one-way attack drones was the AIM-9X (…) The earlier variant, the AIM-9M, did not prove effective for U.S. anti-drone defense.”
It should be remembered in that sense that the X variant of the missile in question entered service for the U.S. during the year 2003, incorporating in its external and internal design a wide series of modifications in relation to the previous model: the AIM-9M; one of its main improvements being the installation of a new imaging infrared (IIR) seeker that considerably expands the capabilities of the missile. Moving in this line, Israel decided to apply similar yet unspecified improvements to its own inventory of M-variant missiles, which translated into a higher success rate in the missions where it was employed.
In relation to the secrecy under which this series of improvements is kept, the FPRI report details: “However, the Israeli Air Force has made a change in the seeker of the AIM-9M and has employed it with considerable success (…) they have not yet shared the technology with their allies, not even with the United States.” This makes it difficult to determine whether the improvements carried out by the Israeli troops on the missile were hardware or software, unleashing a wide series of speculations in this regard. Among the most notable, U.S. analysts point out that it could be new proximity fuzes with small radar antennas similar to those observable on the short-range FIM-92 Stinger missiles.
Another of the possibilities analyzed, derived from the actions of the Royal Air Force in its own interception missions, lies in the radar having been adjusted to mechanical scanning to facilitate detection and target lock. Nevertheless, it is indicated that this required coordinating launches with great care, since that tweak results in the detection of everything that moves over the ground background; which could lead to the destruction of civilian vehicles or other collateral damage. The U.S. Air Force, for its part, employed the new Sniper pods for target designation thanks to their infrared sensor, although it identified that the Iranian drones emitted a very weak signal.
Based on this, their detection was also attributed to factors such as the noise of their engines, which are reported as detectable even when the systems fly at thousands of meters of altitude and kilometers away. This last detail is not minor, taking into account that there are precedents in Ukraine regarding the use of acoustic sensors to fix targets. Regardless of what the modifications in question may have been, from the U.S. and Ukraine there would be great interest in Israel sharing the technology that turns its AIM-9M into weapons especially effective against drones, considering that both countries and their partners have a significant inventory of this armament that could be employed at the front.
*Images used for illustrative purposes
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