top of page

After drone interceptions, Rafael hopes to take Israel’s maritime Iron Dome global - August 2, 2024

  • Aug 1, 2024
  • 2 min read

August 2, 2024







JERUSALEM — Earlier this week an Israeli Sa’ar 6 corvette ship intercepted an unmanned aerial threat heading towards Israeli economic waters, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, which posted a video of the interception online.


The IDF didn’t say what system it used to take out the drone, but a spokesperson for Israeli defense giant Rafael told Breaking Defense it was the company’s maritime air defense platform known as C-Dome.


C-Dome systems have been installed on the Sa’ar 6s, Israel’s most advanced corvettes, since the ships came online in December 2020 and, according to Rafael vice president of naval warfare systems Ran Tavor, they’ve performed well enough, including in recent combat related to Gaza operations, that the firm is looking abroad to other “tier one” navies as potential customers for the system.


“We now see a growing demand for such systems for rapid deployment around the world,” Tavor told Breaking Defense in a recent interview.


C-Dome is the maritime version of Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defense system, which is itself the lower layer of Israel’s land-based defenses. (The second tier is David’s Sling, which deals with medium-range threats. The top tier is the Arrow, which intercepts ballistic missiles and exo-atmospheric threats.)

For Israeli corvettes, the C-Dome system was installed during the ships’ production in Germany, but Rafael envisions and wholly self-contained platform in which the interceptors, launcher and combat management system are all delivered together as a package — similar to how the system has been installed on some of Israel’s older Sa’ar 5 corvettes. Plugged into the ship, they can be used with the ship’s radar, or work with a third-party radar system, in what Tavor referred to as a “turnkey” solution.

“We understood quite a long time ago that we want to have a naval version of Iron Dome, back in 2017 when we actually tested a prototype of the system in which we took the land version and actually put it on a deck of a ship,” Tavor said.


C-Dome has been deployed in a new era of unmanned combat, when less well-equipped militaries, like the Houthi rebels in Yemen, can fly relatively cheaply made attack drones at pricey ships. Appropriately, an operational C-Dome made its first combat interception in April, when it took out an unmanned aerial vehicle over the Red Sea, the IDF said at the time.


“We are facing asymmetric warfare where the threats are cheap, coming in large quantities,” Tavor told Breaking Defense.



 
 
bottom of page