The insane developement history of the Israeli AD system
milc.xyz
milc.xyz
There is really not much text and/or information, and also a couple of odd typos
one correction, ID can intercept rockets and mortars shells come out of an artillery unit and would be quite difficult to hit. also, due to the trajectory, low range and low lethality of mortars 99/100 times ID will never be deployed in locations to intercept mortars
In order to catch mortars (very high angle of fire with very short range) you need be very close "to the enemy" when you are that close its much harder to detect rockets since they quickly pass by the radar in that range
The effectiveness figure comes from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and has never been independently verified (the same goes for the other figures - even the guesstimates about what Hamas and Hezbollah rockets cost to manufacture). The IDF purports to measure successful intercepts per attempt. That is, if Hamas fires 20 rockets and Israel fires 10 interceptor missiles that destroys 9 rockets, then the calculated effectiveness is 90%. Despite the fact that 55% of the rockets fired were not destroyed.
According to the IDF, the ID only intercepts missiles headed towards built-up areas. And, also according to the IDF, Hamas fired some 4 500 rockets in the latest conflict of which 1 500 were headed towards built-up areas (the rest missed their targets). Of these the IDF claims that the ID shot down 90%. It's quite a lot and there are reason to believe that the statistic is BS. Primarily because relatively many Israelis were killed. This time Hamas killed 11 Israelis using about 4 500 rockets but during the 2014 war, it only killed 6 using roughly the same number of rockets. One would expect the number of casualties to decrease - not increase. Either Hamas is finding ways to mitigate the ID or the ID isn't very effective or both.
The US regularly kills 12+ people via single missile strikes. No reason Hamas can’t kill 12 with a hundred missile strikes.
At $100K a pop a even a mid range CCD sensor seems to too pricey, the size of the missile also precludes any cryogenically cooled IR sensor or an active radar array and since they can hit a target as small as a larger mortar even passive radar sensing seem to be nearly impossible to achieve.
Day and night also seems to have no impact on the performance of the system if anything it seems to have slightly higher interception rates at night and since the rockets it intercepts are in their ballistic stage it can’t even use heat seeking to intercepts its targets.
It hits targets as small as 1.5M in length and 15-20cm in diameter so the overall cross section for the target lock is tiny.
The politics aside I can’t think of a single missile system that can even compete with this level of performance even at orders of magnitude higher costs.
I’m actually surprised that the US hasn’t bought and installed a battery on every single warship it has since the system can also intercept anti ship missiles and even combat aircraft at short ranges.
I wasn't able to find this explicitly stated. Do you have a reference for that? What I did find was that unsophisticated rockets are primarily what it defends against. So its guidance may also be 'unsophisticated'. Any reason the interceptor couldn't receive communications from the ground radar to update it's trajectory with minimal onboard guidance?
There have been proposals to add Iron Dome installations to the US arsenal in various contexts, but they've foundered on the difficulties of integrating it with other systems in use, and without access to the source code (which wasn't forthcoming) those couldn't be resolved (so far).
So, it looks like the US military has passed on deploying a system that is yet another special-purpose silo, however effective it is in its original context.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/us-army-iron-dome-cannot-b...
That said, a lot of money is at stake here, so Rafael and Raytheon may yet be able to get the square peg to fit a round hole. Their efforts are, reportedly, ongoing.
This is at least the third unique number I've seen for the cost of a missile. Wikipedia cites a cost of $40,000 per missile, for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome). I assume people are just guessing from the budget.
I tried following the citations on that page, but many of them fail to load.
As is the texts just amounts to a shallow introduction, making the title click bait.
The Qassam rockets indeed used to cost around $1000 in raw materials in the mid 2000’s when they were common but these aren’t the rockets being fired at Israel today, and it’s not like you can order them on Amazon.
While laser based solutions today are much better than when it was tested, but in the end ID was chosen when the AD project started
You will need many more laser based weapons than missile batteries for similar coverage.
That’s...not true. (Well, “kinetic force” seems like a poorly chosen phrase, but lasers deliver both force and kinetic energy.)
> a shell with reflective shielding might prove impervious to a pure light defense
Good luck with making a mirror perfect enough to do that and keeping it in condition on a fited shell.
Edit: I guess we should also take into account what a missle that hits its target costs to Israel, so I am not that disappointed in the efficacy now.
[EDIT] oh, without even going far-afield with second order effects, you'd also need to factor in the expected economic harm of each $800 rocket (on average) and the economic harm of the threat of $800 rockets landing more often (to, say, the tourism industry)
It seems like a reasonable (albeit very expensive) solution to the type of asymmetric warfare threats israel has faced in the past and probably will in the future.
Now it's a full-scale war (or at least that's how missile attacks on the population centers called in any other country except Israel).
As far as asymmetrical goes, i think its still pretty clear the parties have very different levels of resources.
Neither of those words can be applied independently without context. If both sides only have rockets than it would not be asymmetrical.
If somebody intended to steal something or to kill someone, he/she will still end up in jail.
Please read what I wrote about 9/11. Al-Qaeda's resources were a tiny fraction of what Hamas has, yet US started a full-scale war in the Middle East and ultimately destroyed Al-Qaeda and eventually assassinated OBL.
If you use Geneva conventions and so called "International Law", then I'm not aware of any recent military conflict which didn't had elements considered a war crime. I guess IDF is the only army in the world who operates according to these rules and has legal approval for every military operation.
The truth is it's only applied to a weaker countries, and never to [list of countries redacted], or UN "peace keepers" who frequently committed real war crimes like raping women they were sent to protect.
Are you expressing contempt for the principle of international law, or its implementation? Either way, it sure would be a shame if you were to accuse others of violating laws you don't believe in. Like, for example:
> UN "peace keepers" who frequently committed real war crimes
Whoop, there it is.
> I'm not aware of any recent military conflict which didn't had elements considered a war crime
One war crime does not justify another. That's a basic principle of all law.
> I guess IDF is the only army in the world who operates according to these rules
They don't. They have repeatedly been found in violation of those laws, but nothing can be enforced because...
> The truth is it's only applied to a weaker countries
... and Israel, especially with the US as its frequent lone ally in the UN security council, is not a weak country.
Not sure where intent comes into it.
Re, international law. That's not something i mentioned, so i'm not sure what point you're trying to make there.
There is a reason why no other country has a system like the Iron Dome, they simply don't need it. They prevent such a problem from arising in the first place by moving the battle into enemy territory and using a disproportionate response.
Example: 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 3,000 people in the US, resulted in 800,000 people killed and 37 million people displaced in the Middle East and other parts of the world.[2] There are no more repeat Al-Qaeda attacks on US.
Now imagine that the US response to 9/11 attacks instead was building and deploying a better air defense system, and not moving the fight to the enemy (and their allies') territory.
With each additional private jet hitting a building in NYC, they would incrementally improve their air defense capabilities. At first they would ignore attacks hitting the neighborhoods like Harlem, and only really respond to attacks on Manhattan.
But even a response on Manhattan attacks would've been bombing some sand dunes in the desert, and politely asking terrorists and their families to vacate caves before bombing them from the air.
Eventually the system will become "good enough", so it will become possible to ignore all attacks altogether, and convince the public that they have to live with the small civilian casualties from time to time.
Al-Qaeda would become a specialist in the creation of third-generation kamikaze stealth aircraft, while OBL would constantly brag on Al Jazeera how he brought Big Satan to his knees.
Of-course this scenario seems more SciFi-y than Iron Dome's Star Wars-like fireworks. And that's because unlike Israel, US is a normal, healthy, and strong country, with better thinking and decision making processes.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_defense_is_a_good_off...
Israel also does disproportionate response, and moving the attack to enemy territory, and preventing accumulation of materiel in geographically-near adversaries' hands. And they have Iron Dome, because they still have missiles shot at them from time to time.
The Israeli government just putting a show for the international media and for the Israeli civilians. They have to show that they're doing at least something, like bombing sand dunes and empty buildings.
And Iron Dome is the main enabler for this show.
John Oliver and Trevor Noah - the great philosophers of our time were right - Israel should provide Hamas with the Iron Dome to level the playing field ;)
The operative definition of proportionality is not between attack and counterattack, as most people seem to think. It's between the military benefit and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties. Since the military benefit of Israel's actions was quite small and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties was extremely high, it's nearly impossible to argue that such proportionality was respected.
> The Israeli government just putting a show
212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.
I think its unclear (to us, the public) what the military purpose/need of the strikes were, so its unclear how porportional they were. As pointed out elsewhere,iron dome is really expensive to operate and probably has limited capacity. If the military goal was to get the rockets to stop before iron dome ran out of ammo, that doesn't seem disporportionate to me, especially if Israel took steps to minimize civilian casualities where possible.
I dont know enough to say if they actually did or not,i just dont think its as clear cut as you make it out to be that it was disporportionate.
"Show" means fake / not real / severe under-proportionate response, not disproportionate.
Do you really think that Israeli Air Force was acting in its full unrestrained force?
It uses the same american fighter jets, only with much much better Israeli electronic warfare equipment.
> 212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.
128 civilians (per UN OHCHR)[20]
80–225 militants killed (low est. per Hamas, high est. per Israel)
About 20-30 of the Gazan civilians were killed directly by the Hamas' own misfired rockets.
And all of them were indirectly killed by the Hamas who used them as human shields.
Plus we can't trust their numbers, as they're inflating them in order to solicit donations and monetary aid from the world.
I guess many photographers in Gaza are making a living from selling stock photos and videos. Some of these photos are clearly staged, i.e. a single kid's toy nicely placed in the center of the demolished building, or a kid holding a teddy bear, etc.
Anyway you can't compare this with atrocities done by NATO in the Balkans or by the US and their allies in the Middle East, there are several orders of magnitude difference in the number of civilian casualties. I'm not talking about WW2 or Chechnya war, were carpet bombings were used.
Give me a single example of any other military force in the world who uses Roof Knocking[1], all the other armies have orders of magnitude higher civilian casualties.
Total non sequitur. It doesn't have to be the absolute worst possible response to be disproportionate. Do you know how thresholds or ratios work?
> About 20-30 of the Gazan civilians were killed directly by the Hamas' own misfired rockets.
Do you know how subtraction works? What's 128 minus 30? Still enough to be considered disproportionate by the standard defined in international law.
> all of them were indirectly killed by the Hamas
For the second time, one crime does not justify or exonerate another. Nobody's denying that Hamas also committed war crimes.
> Anyway you can't compare this with atrocities done by NATO >
For the third time, etc. It's not worth trying to debate someone who can't learn.
> There are no more repeat Al-Qaeda attacks on US.
Would there otherwise have been? Its not like there were a bunch of 9/11's prior to 9/11. I think its risky to assume thd usa's plan worked when there are a lot of other factors involved like if they even had the capability to do a repeat performance at all. And the (long term) cost to the usa has been high. America's over-reaction to 9/11 may even eventually cost it its place as the world's sole super power as geopolitical rivials take advantage of the mistrust it has sewn.
Regardless, what are you suggesting? - that Israel should pacify the region by extreme force, crushing it under its heel to whatever end? Because, even ignoring the humanity of that, it sounds tactically stupid when you consider the geopolitical situation in the region. They'd essentially turn themselves into the world's common enemy, and that's usually a bad play unless they're desperate.