Israel’s first missile, the Shafrir, did not perform as well as hoped during the 1967 Six-Day War, but the experience quickly led to improvements.
By Hezy Laing
Israel’s rise as an air-to-air missile powerhouse began with a weapon that wasn’t good enough.
When Israel’s first domestically developed air-to-air missile, the Shafrir, saw combat in the 1967 Six-Day War, its performance fell short of expectations.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli fighters used the missile to shoot down dozens of enemy aircraft, giving Israel valuable confidence in its ability to develop weapons specifically for its own battlefield needs.
Israel’s response was characteristic of what would become a defining feature of its defense industry: study what failed in combat, fix it quickly and build something better.
That process ultimately produced the Shafrir 2, the Python family and the Derby, transforming Israel from a country struggling to develop its own air-to-air missile into a global leader in the technology.
More than six decades later, Israeli fighters carry weapons capable of striking enemy aircraft at extreme angles in close combat and engaging targets dozens of miles away before opposing pilots may ever see them.
Python 3, introduced in the 1970s, represented a major improvement and became an important export product.
Later versions continued to improve a pilot’s chances in the fast-moving chaos of an air battle.
Python 5, introduced in the early 2000s, was another major leap.
The old image of a fighter pilot maneuvering behind an enemy before firing is increasingly obsolete.
With modern seekers, helmet-mounted cueing and high off-boresight capability, the pilot can potentially engage an aircraft far away from the fighter’s nose.
It can attack targets from almost any direction around the fighter, giving pilots much more freedom during a close-range engagement.
The missile is used on Israeli F-15s, F-16s and F-35Is and has also become a successful export.
While the Python family transformed the close-range dogfight, Israel was simultaneously attacking the problem from the opposite direction: destroying enemy aircraft before the dogfight ever begins.
Israel developed another path with the Derby family, designed to give fighter pilots the ability to attack enemy aircraft from much farther away.
The latest I-Derby ER is reported by Rafael to have a range of up to 100 kilometers.
From the disappointing performance of the original Shafrir to the Python 5 and I-Derby ER, Israel’s air-to-air missile program has followed a pattern repeated throughout the country’s military history: battlefield necessity produces innovation, combat produces lessons, and those lessons produce the next generation of weapons.
For an air force that has always depended on quality rather than numbers, those missiles are more than weapons hanging beneath a fighter’s wings.
They are part of how Israel built and maintains its edge in the skies.
