The US military did the same thing with the anti-missle lasers they’ve been playing around with. They released a video of a missle being shot down with a laser, then quietly admitted that they’d used a homing beacon to make sure they could actually hit the damn thing :rolleyes:
The idea was to mount super-powerful lasers to [del]sharks[/del], er, I mean airplanes, which would intercept incoming ICBMs.
Last I heard, the “window of opportunity” with these laser systems was pretty small, something like 10-30 seconds. I wonder what would happen if the enemy just painted their missles silver. It might well buy enough time that most of them could slip past the lasers. Failing that, they could fire a preliminary nuke which would explode just as it got within range of the defenses. The next volley of nukes would then have a clear path.
ETA: I can go the hardware store and buy a can of silver paint for BBQ grilles that can withstand hundreds of degrees of heat. I’m sure that reasonably reflective paint for missles would not be a significant technical challenge for any nation that can build an ICBM in the first place.
True. OTH, the system at least might give the sites more time to do the needed, that is survive long enough to issue launch orders in Moscow and launch missiles, for the US.
Indeed , I would not be surprised if the real reason the Israelis deployed the Arrow is to defend certain sites rather than the whole country, if things go pear shaped.
Well, Safeguard was deactivated because it wasn’t believed to provide benefits in line with the expense suffered to maintain it. It was becoming increasingly clear in the 1970s (and earlier, really) that it was far easier to add extra ICBMs & MIRVs to the offensive force than to add a sufficient number of interceptor ABMs to the defensive force. There was also the ABM Treaty.
Israel is in a very different situation from the Cold War standoff between the US & USSR.
Israel is under frequent bombardment by missiles, rather than preparing for a hypothetical one-time all-out armageddon.
The missiles Hamas and Hezbollah use are not guided (or not guided effectively)
The missiles Hamas and Hezbollah use are not achieving atmospheric re-entry from orbit speeds
Israel has a much smaller airspace to defend than the US or USSR
The cost calculation of missiles hitting their targets vs. deploying interceptors, both in cost of resources and political/PR costs, are very different than in the US/USSR confrontation
The Israelis have an advantage of 30 years additional missile & radar technology over the Cold War confrontation
You’re right, Israel doesn’t have to defend the entire country, and certainly doesn’t have to worry about near-misses in the same way the Cold War participants did. A lot has changed since the 1970s systems to make missile defense much more viable in some situations.
Ignorant question: how sensitive would a ground-based descent-phase defense system be to a NEMP attack? And would they be able to identify a NEMP-profile trajectory?
The thing is, anti-missile systems in the cold war did not have to be 100% effective. The point of an antimissile system, like constantly airborne bombers, like cruise missiles and submarine-launched missiles, was survivability.
The classic fear and scenario in the cold war was a surprise attack (always by the enemy, not us!). The first wave would knock out the missile silos, and the victim (us) would be unable to retaliate. An anti-missile system simply would knock out enough nukes aimed at, say, a farm of missile silos, that many would escape damage enough to keep functioning. This would allow them to destroy the aggressor - Mutual Assured Destruction. In Reagan’s plan, as technology improved even more of the population and infrastructure would survive too through interceptions, thus leaving a very serious threat of a retaliation and occupation after the first strike. The result of an attack would not be a draw but a loss.
the problem with the Iron Dome is that IIRC those missiles cost a heckuva lot more than the home-made pipes that Hamas was launching. I wonder if the next step is to add random wandering to the missiles to try to avoid simple ballistic tracking - maybe a bit of wiggling the fins? Add some small wings to do more than just ballistic flight, even GPS aiming tech. You know that capability is not far away. Given that sort of control, the problem only gets worse.
Looked 'em up and they’re just SHIT! It’s a wonder their flight is as predictable as it is. It wouldn’t take effort to make them less accurate, just stop trying to make them more accurate.
Sugar and fertilizer propellant, lit by a cartridge from an AK-47. Yeesh. Asymmetric warfare has a lesson every country on the powerful side has to learn over and over: You either cut a deal or kill every man, woman, and child, because they’ll just keep coming with sticks, rocks, and stuff they got at the grocery. I thought Israel would’ve figured that out by now, having been built through asymmetric warfare. But that’s for another thread.
6 rockets go up, four explosions up overhead, two rockets hit.
Does not seem like a lot of missing to me or him.
That critic will need a bit more than just being a critic before I will call my friend a lair.
What is reported in the news is believed? You believe what is in the news??? Or a person who has stood right there with the local engineers and government people actually watching this going on overhead.
So Hamas launches 117 rockets, Iron Dome intercepts 29… but the critical missing piece is: how many did Iron Dome try to intercept? I don’t know, but clearly if they tried to intercept 32 rockets, they got a 90% success rate. If they tried to intercept all 117, they got a 25% success rate. Since no one knows how many rockets were deemed to be on non-threatening trajectories (except the Israeli military, and they’re not telling - at least in that article,) the point is kind of moot due to insufficient information.
I’m confused by this thread, way back in 1988 my primitive aircraft carrier had 2 systems that were very good at shooting down incoming missiles and combined with the fleet’s Aegis system the success rate was extremely high. The systems we had were the Phalanx CIWS which worked great from almost day 1 (as long as it was turned on) and the Sea Sparrow anti-missile missiles. These were pretty good by 1988 though I recall them still being shaky when I got to the boat in 1985.
So all that said, why 30 years later would it be so hard to have a working anti-missile missile system?
The CIWS and Sea Sparrow are intended to defend against sea skimming cruise missiles (and their efficacy against supersonic cruise missiles has not been demonstrated). It is not intended for or suitable for interception of ballistic missiles due to the speed and angle at which they approach the target. The anti-ballistic missile system used in Saudi Arabia was the MIM-104 Patriot Advanced Capability 2 (PAC-2) missile system which is essentially the same that was used in the First Gulf War in 1991 against modified unitary warhead Scud missiles with highly questionable efficacy (the Department of Defense orginally claimed an over 95% intercept rate, when then dropped to less than half, which then dropped to 9%, and even that figure is in question). In this case, the PAC-2 was in use against a seperating warhead threat, which means it either has to intercept the booster during boost flight prior to warhead seperation, or engage the warhead during reentry, which it is absolutely not designed to do.
There are more modern theatre defense ABM systems such as PAC-3, THAAD, and the Navy Aegis/Standard Missile (SM-2 and SM-3) ABM which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles which have seperating warheads and travel at higher speeds, but the efficacy of these systems even in orchastrated tests has been uneven (PAC-3 has the best record to date but against non-separating targets, Aegis has had the most tests but some significant failures). The problem isn’t just the ability of the interceptors to physically intercept the threat, but for the system to discern a real threat from environmental interference or deployed countermeasures and provide a precise enough trajectory estimate to guide the interceptor to a kill is very challenging from a systems perspective. And there is an unfortunately culture at the US Missile Defense Agency in particular to obfuscating problems so the agency and its contractors can claim operational readiness and meet deployment goals even if tests do not actually stress the capability of the system or demonstrate functional reliability.
The US Ground-Based Mid-Course Defense System (GMD) which is designed to protect against ICBM-class threats from “rogue states” (e.g. North Korea or Iran) has been deployed for over a decade despite serious problems with every aspect of the system except the interceptor booster (the OBV, which was actually a secondary design after the Boeing BV and then Lochkeed BV+ boosters failed repeatedly). The Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) has gone through multiple major design revisions due to persistent failures in tracking threats, and the Sea-Based X-Band Radar platform which is supposed to direct the system and provide tracking guidance to the interceptors has never spent any significant time on station and in fact has spent the vast majority of its life sitting idle in Pearl Harbor where it is completely useless.
The Israeli Iron Dome system, BTW, is a point defense system against mortars and short range missiles. It has shown good reliability in both realistic tests and actual deployment, but it does not defend against ballistic missiles or provide theatre-level defense. Israel has developed their own ABM system (Arrow) intended to replace Patroit for domestic defense, but it bears the same set of concerns and issues that have been seen with THAAD.
Anti-ballistic missile defense isn’t “bullshit”, per se, and as more states develop ballistic missile technology there is a need to develop countermeasures (although the kind of perfect defensive umbrella of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was never anything more than a series of cartoon fantasies), but there are a lot of people spreading around some foul-scented manure in trying to promote the effectiveness and reliability of existing systems.
Two misses out of three test runs over the past year does not fill me with confidence that we’ll actually be able to stop a missile from NK til the 30’s or 40’s.
We’ve been working on this since the 1980’s. Busjes declaration that it was “operational” was merely a political ploy to give a moribund program some ill deserved bureaucratic heft.
