Slashdot Mirror
A Skeptical View of Israel's Iron Dome Rocket Defense System
Lasrick (2629253) writes It isn't as if real analysis of Israel's "Iron Dome" isn't available, but invariably, whenever Israel has a skirmish the media is filled with glowing reports of how well the system works, and we always find out months later that the numbers were exaggerated. John Mecklin at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists looks at the coverage of Iron Dome in the recent exchanges between Israel and Hamas and finds the pattern is repeating itself. However, 'Ted Postol, an MIT-based missile defense expert and frequent Bulletin contributor, provided a dose of context to the Iron Dome coverage in a National Public Radio interview Wednesday. "We can tell, for sure, from video images and even photographs that the Iron Dome system is not working very well at all,"' Includes a good explanation of the differences between Iron Dome (a 'rocket defense system') and missile defense systems pushed by the U.S.
This post (like the one with the Brazuca for the World Cup) is certainly subject bait. It works because it attracts lots of tangentially on topic comments but that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter of the article.
...
So please, don't fall for it. Don't spend the whole comment section arguing about causes and consequences of the conflict, who started it, who deserves is, etc.
Stay on topic and discuss the technical aspects of the missile system, at least that is what should be discussed here.
On bizarro world Slashdot, maybe
The rockets being sent against Israel are small, sporadic, unguided, and mostly lack the range to hit major population centers (Tel Aviv). On the rare occasions it does hit a building, it won't destroy the building but will gut a room.
If the Iron dome is effective, great. If the belief of the people is it's effective, even better, especially for politicians in power. Pretty much what the article says.
It's difficult to find a technological solution to a combination of relatively minor disagreements as to the exact details of the God of Abraham, plus disagreement over land ownership.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Ted Postol cannot be, even from being from MIT be considered a realable source for opinion. Postol has a large bias against anti-missle systems, which is down right dumb. The rockets are almost the size of small airplanes, but we don't consider anit-aircraft missles to be completely ineffecitive.
So, you're spending your saturday anonymously posting to slashdot about "libtards" and the persecution you face from them every day. i don't really need to say much of anything else, do I?
Traditionally these conflicts are resolved by one party eliminating the other.
You keep using that word. I don't think that it means what you think that it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://allenbwest.com/2014/04/...
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
From TFA in the Bulletin: "Regular readers of the Bulletin are well aware of the long history of inflated claims of missile defense efficiency."
Regular readers are also well aware of the extreme and longstanding bias (running back to the 1960's) of the Bulletin's editors against missile defense (because even a partially effective defense weakens their case for nuclear disarmament, their true goal) and the long history of inflated "criticism" that purports to claim that it cannot possibly work. This... is just more of the same. They don't actually have any numbers or anything resembling hard data - just the opinion of expert(s) whose bias on the issue is well known.
Here's the promotional video from Rafael, the system's maker. If the Iron Dome launchers are in a position to hit incoming rockets when they're still in boost phase, they're clearly effective. When they hit, the ascending rocket's flare disappears. Israel has Iron Dome launchers both forward postioned near Gaza, for boost phase defense, and near cities, for terminal defense. For terminal defense, it's harder to tell if they worked. The incoming rockets are just falling at that point, and success requires blowing up their warhead, not their rocket engine.
Videos show the missile's warhead exploding. That's triggered by a proximity fuse. There's a spray of shrapnel from the warhead; it doesn't have to be a direct hit. Whether that sets off the incoming rocket's warhead isn't visible from the videos of terminal defense.The Patriot missiles used in the Gulf war were able to hit incoming Scud missiles, but often didn't detonate the warhead.
It's not defense, it's a rampage. Almost a genocide.
You should remember that Israel (which have one of the best armies in the world) is fighting against a ethnical group without army.
If anyone else in the world did that, We could call it a massacre, a butchery or even a genocide.
seriously, this is just bullshit on par with fox news.
"We can tell, for sure, from video images and even photographs that the Iron Dome system is not working very well at all," Postol said. "It—my guess is maybe [it hits a targeted missile] 5 percent of the time—could be even lower. ... And when you look—what you can do in the daytime—you can see the smoky contrail of each Iron Dome interceptor, and you can see the Iron Domes trying to intercept the artillery rockets side on and from behind. In those geometries, the Iron Dome has no chance, for all practical purposes, of destroying the artillery rocket."
"for sure," really? how about some actual numbers instead of speculation?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
+5 inciteful!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'm in Israel with my family this month. We've had to go to shelters several times over the past week (f- you very much, Hamas). You can hear the difference between successful Iron Dome intercepts vs. the rockets that land (most, presumably, in unpopulated areas). The system is working and saving lives; that's good enough for me.
No, in recent history, these conflicts are resolved by pressure from the international community. It's how apartheid in South Africa ended, to a great extent.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher referring to Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist" and his party as a "terrorist organization". It turned out they were dead wrong. Last year, the philosophical progeny of Reagan and Thatcher hailed Mandela as a hero.
History is not going to be kind to the government of Israel in the first decades of the 21st century (if not longer).
It didn't have to be this way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
He "thinks that" because for him, and many many like him, a system that successfully neuters Hamas is very troubling; Iron Dome removes a pain point for Israel and a bargaining chip for Hamas, and Ted Postol and his NPR ilk don't like it. The fact that Israel has created the antidote for Hamas and their ballistic pipe bombs means Israel can exist relatively untroubled, and this reality is so disturbing to these people that they will grasp for and cling to any claim to the contrary.
In the long run they need not worry. This is an arms race and eventually Hamas will be given something better to use. The qassam rockets themselves were just another step in that progression after Israel isolated itself from Gaza suicide bombers with the West Bank wall, another successful and effective Israeli creation that NPR routinely lambastes.
Eventually Hamas will be given new weapons, Israelis will start dying again and all will be well. Until then it's all hands on deck at NPR to downplay and discredit Iron Dome, and if you've got a claim that will convince any of the vast hoard of Israel Derangement Syndrome sufferers that Iron Dome doesn't work, they have the air time.
Israelis have interwebs just as good as you and, unlike the subjects that live in the surrounding dictatorships, theocratic monarchies and failed states, they're allowed to use it. Despite this there is very little video evidence of damage in urban areas and Israeli civilians aren't being killed. Given the quantity of rockets fired and past performance of qassam barrages, it is not possible that the rockets are getting through in large numbers.
"But they're covering up the deaths!!!!1" you say.
Ok, well, the burden is on you to prove your conspiracy based argument then; what's the "real" body count and were are you getting it?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Yeah. And now South Africa has gone from being a nuclear power with a space program to a third world shit hole that's mostly known for it's murder rate. I don't think history is going to be very kind to the Enlightened(TM), either.
See Desmond Tutu's comments.
No, you're both wrong. In recent years, these conflicts are never resolved at all. They fester forever.
According to yourself, you value an personal ancestral connection to the land. And you also said you think it's the same for Hamas. So please don't try to twist things into a "good vs. evil" or even "sane vs. insane" narrative. It's not.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I am so glad you brought that up because I was reading a post elsewhere earlier today when I realized a problem with many of the people who cry "ad hominem fallacy" in arguments. The poster you responded to pointed out that the article does not contain any actual data, just the opinion of "expert(s)". When considering arguments made by someone who does not provide any actual data, it is entirely relevant to consider the credibility of the person who is making the argument. If that person, or organization, has been known to distort facts in order to support their position, it throws into doubt the validity of the claim they are currently making.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There's really nowhere else to put this, so here goes:
Thank you dotancohen for all your comments. They are insightful, mature, and, perhaps most importantly, civil.
As a general on the discussion so far, I find it informative that the most vitriolic comments directed against Israel and Jews were posted anonymously; the posters are well aware that their remarks are defamatory and have no appropriate place in civil discourse.
Per the preceding discussion, the staggeringly different perspectives on life, the afterlife, martydom, etc. add a dimension to the conflict that is not easily resolved. As the product of a "modern", western civilation and education, I personally find it impossible to subscribe to any sort of notion of the promise of heaven, nor do I have any willingness to sacrifice myself for a religious cause. The asymmetric philosophy that enables suicide bombings, among other atrocities, has had an outsized influence on the conflict and global perception thereof.
Mark it as flamebait all you want:
"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." - Golda Meir
f you count the prices of the missiles launched at Israel, you'd have enough to get food to most of the Palestinians, to repair most of the buildings, to create medic centers, schools, ...
Their not allowed to repair the buildings as concrete is on the list of goods that Israel prevents from being imported:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
I dont read
On some other planet where the IDF isn't wiping out 100 Palestinians for every dead Israeli? Where the United States doesn't praise every cluster bomb dropped on Gaza as Israel "defending itself"? Where the Palestinians are on of the world's top military powers and the Zionists are a bunch of unarmed refugees?
Just another day in this alternate reality built on bald-faced lies you guys have constructed for yourselves....
This reasoning, on the face of it, is absolutely ridiculous.
Because one side is very advanced militarily and the other side is not, then the side that is very advanced needs to let the other side have a fairer fight? No. Not at all.
A mugger comes at you with a knife. If you have a gun, that's not fair, you need to let the mugger with the knife stab you a few times before you pull the trigger?
Or let's say the other side has a stone, and is perfectly happy to hit you over the head repeatedly with it until you are dead. You have a M240 light machine gun. Very asymmetrical. You can take out the guy with the stone and a few of his buddies with a burst. But no! Unfair! They should be given machine guns too to make this fair. You should wait until they are given machine guns. Matter of fact, you can watch them get machine guns. So you wait to make sure they get all set up with their new donated machine guns, make sure they get the right training so that they know how to kill you with it, since it is only fair, right? No. If this were you, you would kill them if they are trying to kill you, no matter what weapons they possess, no matter how asymmetrical the military technology.
We are in very twisted times, as Hamas knows it can't really hurt Israel militarily with these tactics, but is very willing to provoke the situation such that they get pummeled. Each time Hamas provokes a pummeling, they get more funding and better weaponry from outside sources and more sympathy from both within and around the world. In the short term, Hamas has no hope of winning militarily. However, they hope that in the long term, they can grow strong enough to take on Israel militarily and wipe them out.
I remember in the "run up" to the First Iraq War (the "Gulf War') about an interview with some high-ranking Saudi dude being concern-trolled "what about Iraq attacking the oil fields (with Scuds)?" The Saudi official smiled somewhat patronizingly at the news dude and responded, "We are equipped with the Patriot" at the time when the US public didn't know a Patriot from a Tory or that anyone was mad enough to use an ack-ack missile against a Scud rocket.
War is always about PR (i.e. deception). Everyone knew the Scud couldn't hit anything (except in some lucky for the enemy, unlucky for us shots). The Saudi leaders were just too happy to go along with "the Patriot is a Scud defense shield" because they knew that strategically, the Scud was of no consequence and this way they could tell their people to "just chill, bro, the Americans shared with us the Patriot" as the Scuds rained down. The US hurredly gave the Israelis the Patriot to get them to "just chill, bro", but everyone was coming out of the woodwork about how the Patriot was just a sham defense against an incoming missile not aimed at anything.
The "Patriot works" fit Saudi propaganda interests, but went against the Israeli propaganda at the time because they Israelis were itchy to get into the fight of "Scud hunting", where air attacks against this mobile platform that couldn't hit anything in the first place were regarded as futile by the U.S.. The Israelis argued that their pilots would press futile attacks against the Scud more aggressively because they were defending their women and children against the largely ineffective Scud attacks, but the US argued this was Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti's war aim, to lob Scuds to draw the Israelis in to fracture the coalition.
As for Palestinians and the war fighting power they have, suicide bombing are perhaps the most effective thing they have to inflict Israeli casualties, but it really works against them propaganda wise. The singularly most effective thing they had going was the First Intifida, where they were using rock-throwing young people as rubber-bullet sponges. From a propaganda standpoint, that was devastating in its effectiveness of portraying the Israeli troops as hateful goons, whether this was true or not, but the optics on TV were rapidly undermining Israel as a just cause. Why the PLO gave up on a tactic that was working I have no idea, but this may speak to why the conflict has dragged on so long when the Palestinians have demographics and world sympathy in their corner. The Palestinians may simply have bad leaders.
The rocket attacks are a kind of middle ground tactic in sacrificing your own guys. It is not the casualties inflicted by the rocket attacks, it is the 100:1 casualties of your own people that is a feature-not-a-bug, of rallying your own people and of getting Americans to pray in their Christian churches "for an end to the violence."
As to why the Israelis are playing along be inflicting so many casualties, maybe that is a feature-not-a-bug. For one thing, they are targeting "the leaders" and trying to be creative in a tactical sense with their tech for giving telephone warnings. Maybe the Israeli calculus is "the leaders talk tough but they are not that keen on being blown up themselves."
Also, on one hand, Israel is a "Western" country where people get all hand-wringy about the "violence" (I use scare quotes because what is taking place is a war between two sides with irreconcilable national interests and not some unexplained "violence"). On the other hand, Israel is a Middle Eastern country with a substantial Oriental Jewish population displaced from Cairo, Baghdad