Pioneer said:
Well congratulations Israel and the IDF for keeping it under wraps for 30 years!
I truly thought and feared that most democratic countries/militaries had forgotten the strategic art of keeping weapons systems out of the knowledge of their enemies!
I doubt there has been any strategic surprise. As JFC Fuller says the IDF over the horizon ATGMs have been well known for the past 20 odd years. And they certainly did not have Spike NLOS missiles in service back in 1985. That missile family configuration had only just being designed by Hughes engineers at that time. The IDF did have the Tamuz missile in service from 1981 and its guidance technology was migrated to the Hughes AAWS-M aka RAFAEL Spike missile configuration to create the Spike NLOS. But that has only been a relatively recent event. Tamuz was developed as a response to the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to give the IDF an “assault breaker” capability against Arab tank formations.
And the IDF even publicly unveiled the Tamuz missile firing M113 system a few years ago. It’s just that now they have unveiled the Spike NLOS missile firing M48 system. Same capability as the Tamuz just with a more compact and numerous missile and a more survivable firing platform.
As to the strategic art of keeping weapon systems hidden away no one does this better than the USA and their “Black World” programs. Plenty of hidden capability and ambiguity there. You can even fill a library with speculative books written about what is hidden there not to mention create an entire conspiracy theory genre.