The Pentagon is planning to help the Zionist entity buy four more Iron Dome short-range anti-rocket batteries

The Pentagon is planning to help Israel buy four more Iron Dome short-range anti-rocket batteries, the head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said on Wednesday.

"In our budget, we have a proposal to assist with procurement of four more batteries," Army Lieutenant General Patrick O'Reilly, the agency's director, told the U.S. Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee.

The batteries consist of a mobile air defense system with a radar-guided interceptor missile launched from a truck-sized firing platform.

O'Reilly was referring to fiscal 2011 funding of $203.8 million added last June at the request of President Barack Obama, agency spokesman Richard Lehner said in an email. The goal was to spur production and deployment of the system, the first direct U.S. investment in the project.

Israel began deploying e50-million Iron Dome units two months ago.

O'Reilly said he considered Iron Dome to have been "highly effective" in combat. But Israel faced a "daunting task" because of the volume of short-range rockets and missiles it faces, he said.

"This is one which the United States benefits from understanding and studying exactly how they've been successful with the Iron Dome system," he said. U.S. troops could face similar threats from a combat zone, O'Reilly added.

Obama in his 2012 budget request asked the U.S. Congress for $106.1 million for U.S.-Israeli joint missile defense programs, including improvements to the Arrow ballistic missile shield and David's Sling. Unlike these two programs, the development of Iron Dome was a unilateral Israeli project.

Declassified video of two Iron Dome intercepts was screened in Washington this week at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israeli lobby group.