Anti-Missile Technology is needed now

From The Washington Post:

JERUSALEM, July 18 -- Israel and the radical Islamic groups Hamas and Hezbollah are waging war for the first time largely in the skies, exchanging rocket fire, artillery rounds and airstrikes in battles that military officials and analysts here say could redefine the regional conflict for years to come.

Both militias are now drawing on longer-range arsenals to send missiles deeper into Israel. The launch sites are hard to detect, and the short-range rockets reach targets in seconds, making interception nearly impossible. Israel dominated air power in earlier years but now faces a fresh challenge from the crude rockets that Hezbollah and Hamas are using to strike Israeli cities. The war of the missiles could also render less relevant the large-scale ground operations that the Israeli military relied on in the past.

[Snip]

"Israel has long ruled the skies," said Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an academic research organization here, and the author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," a chronicle of the 1967 Middle East war. "Since they can't shoot down the airplanes, these groups have developed a way to try to rule the skies themselves with missiles. And our ability to stop missiles is very limited."

This is another good argument for spending whatever it takes to develop anti-missile technology. More than a system to knock down intercontinental or intermediate range missiles is needed. A system that can acquire an incoming small rocket or even artillery shell, track it back to its launch point while simultaneously targeting it with a projectile, counter missile or even energy beam is needed. Of course the backtrack data would be fed to your own side's artillery for counter-battery fire.

Right now this kind of system does not exist, but the only thing standing in the way of one is money and the will to act.