On Oct. 27, The Intercept platform reported that the U.S. military is quietly expanding a secret radar installation in Israel. Referred to as “Site 512,” it failed to see the Oct. 7 rocket attacks from Gaza because it’s aimed at Iran.
Site 512 is perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, and budget documents examined by The Intercept reveal plans for a $35.8 million barracks for additional troops, suggesting that the site is undergoing expansion.
But the existence of Site 512 has been publicly known about—though not necessarily under that name—since at least 2009, according to a Time magazine report dated May 30, 2012. Time then identified the radar as the Army-Navy Transportable Surveillance Radar, or AN/TPY-2, an over-the-horizon radar that supposedly can see a softball in the air at a distance of 2,900 miles. The main feature of the Time report is the assertion that the radar and the data that it generates would be under the sole control of the U.S. Were Iran to launch a missile attack on Israel, presumably those data would be shared right away. But the other side of that coin was that should Israel decide to attack Iran, the Israeli jets would be visible to the U.S. almost immediately after they took off from their airbases. That fact is said to have been acting as something of a restraint on Israeli aggressiveness.
Not mentioned in the Time 2012 report is that there was a great deal of tension between the Obama Administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Netanyahu’s threats to attack Iran at the time. But what does the U.S. radar base in Israel mean for threats of war, today?
