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Why Iron Dome Might Only Work For Israel
An anonymous reader writes "Many this week have declared Israel's American financed Iron Dome rocket defense system a success. Some have even gone so far to declare it a vindication of Ronald Reagan's 1980's Star Wars missile defense system. Pundits have even gone so far to assume the system could be sold to other nations. However, the Iron Dome may not be the game changer many are making it out to be. Taking out unsophisticated rockets is quite different than advanced missiles: '...the technical and strategic challenges of shooting down ballistic missiles differ considerably from those of shooting down unguided rockets. BMD shares with rocket defense some common technological ground; both require fast reaction time and impressive sensor capabilities, and the Iron Dome project has benefited from technical work on missile defense. However, ballistic missiles in flight behave differently from unguided, sub-atmospheric rockets.'"
So some random 'journalists' have attempted to force an analogy and it doesn't work (ICBM defense is analogous to primitive short range surface-surface missiles). Woop de do. Iron Dome is much more closely related to the Patriot system which was designed to hit smaller, slower targets than ICBMs.
Not sure what the big deal is. Wake me up when they get the shark mounted lasers working.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, but people generally equate ballistic missiles with ICBMs.
The ones that the Iron Dome is made to work against are relatively short range. I did some research on this after discussing it with some other people. They can basically intercept unguided missiles which cross into Israeli airspace, with a total flight of 3 km to 30 km.
The primary missile it's used to intercept are pretty primitive. Think along the same lines as the kind most readers here would have built out of cardboard from an Estes kit. They use fairly primitive solid fuel, a payload of common or improvised explosives, fins to make it fly sort of straight, and not much else.
Thousands have been launched towards Israel. Dozens have been hurt.
It could work against any number of threats, but I would guess it is best at something with a fairly horizontal trajectory. If it were to intercept something like an ICBM, I would guess the resulting blast would still have the effect the attacker desired.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The 3-30km figure is completely off. Iron Dome already shot down rockets coming into Tel Aviv - some 80km away.
It can do more than that, it's barely at v1.1.
But the article is bogus in general. Iron Dome was designed to counter short range weapons. Surprise surprise, it won't work on ICBMs. It's still extremely useful to protect military based around the world, airports, and border cities (like Seoul).
Israel has not one but two additional anti missile defense systems. One operational - Arrow, which already meets the challenges mentioned in this article, and another one in development (Magic Wand) - for medium range missiles. Each has its own purpose - countering a specific type of weapon, and they don't replace one another.