December 25, 2025: Israel is selling its Arrow 3 anti-missile missiles to Germany in a $4.6 billion deal. Germany will also receive the Green Pine radar. Germany eventually expects to have several Arrow batteries deployed along their eastern border to intercept Russian long range missiles. The first German Arrow missile battery arrived on December 3rd. The German purchase is part of the European Sky Shield Initiative that will link missile defense systems of all participating nations into a control center multiple nations have access to. Production of Arrow began in 2017 and continues as new missiles are designed and existing ones receive upgrades.

Arrow was developed by Israeli and American firms with most components being produced in the United States. An Arrow 3 missile has two stages and reaches an altitude of over a hundred kilometers. Top speed is about 3,000 meters a second. Steering is provided by thrust vectoring. It uses INS/Inertial Navigation System, which cannot be jammed. Terminal target homing is via a gimbaled seeker.

Arrow has seen combat in the 2024 war with Iran, the 2025 Red Sea conflict with Houth rebels in Yemen and the 2025 war with Iran. In all three conflicts Arrow was successful at intercepting incoming missiles. Arrow also passed several tests where air launched missiles acting like incoming ballistic missiles were intercepted by Arrow.

Twelve years ago the United States agreed to build a base for the new Israeli Arrow 3 anti-missile missile. This has caused a major security problem for Israel. That’s because the United States publishes, for all to see, precise specifications of military construction programs that are not classified, so that contractors can come up with realistic and accurate bids for the job. In the United States something like the Arrow 3 base would not be classified. But in Israel details of military bases are very much a secret. So there was consternation in Israel when they saw all the details of their new Arrow 3 base, including specs on the six missile silos and support facilities, on the Internet, where the U.S. Department of Defense publicizes jobs to be bid on. After all the yelling and recriminations were over, it was agreed that there was a failure to communicate on both sides.

The basic problem was that for over 14 years the U.S. has been giving Israel money, technology, and other aid for their work on the Arrow system. In return, Israel shares whatever technology it develops. Until the recent incident, Israel handled all the construction projects, using its own rules, and apparently no one on the Israeli side of Arrow development was aware of the differences in how the two countries handled obtaining bids on military construction projects. Now everyone knows, because this misunderstanding was front page news in Israel.

On the positive side, Israeli conducted the first test firing of the new Arrow 3 in 2013 and it was a success. Those tests confirmed the effectiveness of new detection capabilities of the Green Pine radar. The improved Green Pine radar entered service a year earlier.

By 2013 the Arrow system had been in service for 13 years and racked up an impressive string of successes in test launches. Designed to deal with short and medium range ballistic missiles, it was built to protect Israel from Syrian and Iranian attack. In 2013 Israel had three Arrow batteries in service. An Arrow battery has 4-8 launchers and each launcher carries six missiles in containers. The two ton Arrow 1 has been replaced with the 1.3 ton Arrow 2, which can shoot down ballistic missiles fired from Iran. The latest battery to enter service in 2010 had the new Oren Adir/Magnificent Pine radar, which has a longer range and is better able to identify potential targets than the existing Green Pine radar.

The United States has long shared the expense of developing Arrow, and this includes contributing over a hundred million dollars for work on the Arrow 3. More than half of the nearly three billion dollar cost of developing and building Arrow has come from the United States. In addition, American firms have done some of the development work or contributed technology. The U.S. has also provided Israel with a mobile X-band radar that enables it to detect incoming ballistic missiles farther away.

In 2013 the Israeli Green Pine radar could only detect a ballistic missile fired from Iran when the missile warhead was about two minutes from hitting a target in Israel. The X-band radar allows the Iranian missile to be spotted when it is 5-6 minutes away, enabling the Israeli missile to hit the Iranian warhead farther away and with greater certainty. The Arrow 3 needed something like the X-band radar to take advantage of the longer missile range. The Arrow 3 could also use satellite or drone warnings of distant ballistic missile launches. Arrow 3 weighs about half as much as Arrow 2 and costs about a third less.

In 2010, Israel began increasing the production of its Arrow anti-missile missiles. Costing over three million dollars each, and partly constructed in the United States, the Arrow missiles are one of the few proven anti-missile systems available. Since Arrow entered service, just over 130 missiles have been built by 2013. At that point Israel had over a hundred Arrow missiles available and wanted to increase that to 200 in the next few years.

Twenty four years ago Israel's Arrow anti-missile system finally got something of a real life test. The tracking radar detected the launch of a SCUD missile in Syria. The Syrians were conducting a test, and the missile headed for the desert in southern Syria, rather than Israel. Had the Syrian missile headed for Israel, an Arrow missile would have been launched to intercept it. Arrow has already passed several live tests involving ballistic missile intercepts. Syria had a large arsenal of 40-50 SCUD or similar type ballistic missiles, and they were all aimed at Israel.