In time of war, minutes are an eternity. No reason these soldiers should have had to wait so long other than inefficiency.
34 karma · joined March 24, 2014
Missile defence is a funny thing, especially when it comes to budgets and politics. There is often this cost/benefit of perfectly intercepting a missile/at all vs. just letting it hit. It sounds sick, but it really is a problem.
Right now in Israel, we have an issue with our kipat barzel system. Originally they said it was a stupid idea and too expensive, but it has really proven itself in the field. This brings several problems. First, people are dumb sometimes and think when it is deployed near them that they are perfectly safe. Interception rates for this system are also no where near 100%. Secondly, shooting what amounts to flying garbage with this thing is really expensive. You might as well burn money to keep warm in the winter.
What is much different from a lot of other systems like the Patriot is it really factors all kinds of things like will it hit a projectile that will impact a populated area or will the target just explode in the middle of no where?
The same problems with people rallying around the Patriot are happening now. Luckily though it's being put into perspective and supplemented with systems that do other kinds of interception. At least the army realised that multiple kinds of interception are necessary and something like the Patriot will not be appropriate in every situation. These systems range from actually blowing up the targets to confusing them to throwing garbage at them to make them explode at the wrong time.
As I mentioned in my other comment, my perspective as an Israeli witnessing all this was, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." It is a shame that Americans and others had to pay a price for arrogance and politics. It may not be the official story, but anyone exposed to that world could tell you otherwise.
The problem was that we knew it had issues, complained many times, but it was tied up in politics. We wanted to develop and deploy our own missile defence systems for a long time, but in many ways we were more or less blackmailed into spending the defence loans we receive to pay back the American defence establishment. The message was take what you are given and enrich private American companies, or else (btw for the haters, we must spend our "aid" with companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc., it does not go to anything else at all, so really it's your tax dollars shilling your military industry).
Anyway, I saw first hand Patriot misses and the fear after that, especially regarding chemical weapons. A huge part of the country spent time with gas masks and plastic in safe rooms during the gulf war. At the end of the war, we felt like our leaders failed protecting us sufficiently, especially when they knew there were issues.
The interesting outcome is this directly lead to various missile programs including kipat barzel, arrow, spider, and others. Before, missile defence was a much harder sell, but the aftermath of patriot failures raise the case that again as a country we had to be more self-sufficient regardless of the cost. The other reason of course is that the Americans never really had an offering that assessed needs such as short-range, low flying projectiles, rockets, shells, multiple-target tracking, etc. Today, we have arguably the most advanced short-range and tactical missile defence systems.
All of these systems are built heavily on targeting/guidance and to run on cheap hardware that can fail massively. The interceptors and computers are not necessarily cost effective and super expensive, but much more practical. Additionally, redundancy in terms of overlap of targeting errors and misses is a heavy part of deployment. Resource-wise, it's not always possible, but I know first-hand it is a combination of various operational failures of the Patriot combined with years of relentless attacks by our enemies using anything from glorified flying garbage to old Soviet tech.