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MIT's Ted Postol Presents More Evidence On Iron Dome Failures
Lasrick (2629253) writes In a controversial article last week, MIT physicist Ted Postol again questioned whether Israel's vaunted Iron Dome rocket defense system actually works. This week, he comes back with evidence in the form of diagrams, photos of Iron Dome intercepts and contrails, and evidence on the ground to show that Iron Dome in fact is effective only about 5% of the time. Postol believes the real reason there are so few Israeli casualties is that Hamas rockets have very small warheads (only 10 to 20 pounds), and also Israel's outstanding civil defense system, which includes a vast system of shelters and an incredibly sophisticated rocket attack warning system (delivered through smart phones, among other ways).
TFA is very interesting & I'm smarter for having read it...
I'm glad people are looking at this kind of thing...it is *one* way to get some unbiased information
So, "5% effective"...
As TFA description reads, the number of Israeli casualties is mostly due to a combination of factors, including bomb shelters and early warnings...
I think the "Iron Dome" people would respond to TFA thusly:
"Yes, but **the program** is effective. "Iron Dome" is our missile defense system, which is one part of our civil defense, which is an entire program of things to keep people safe...if you look at the program in its entirity it's a success"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Postol has a long history opposing any form of missile defense. While his assessment may well be correct, it should be viewed with considerable skepticism until data from opposing viewpoints is examined against his. Postol's view can be summaraized as: "No missile or rocket defense can work, therefore we should not try."
story
20 rockets were found in a UN owned school in the Gaza strip. The UN is caliming they were not using the building and did not know the rockets were in the building. What happened to the rockets once the UN discovered they were hiding munitions for Hamas in a school? The UN did the only responsible thing possible and handed those rockets over to Hamas.
His perspective is that success requires in-air destruction of the warhead. That is not what the system is designed to do. No system has successfully hit warheads in the air with any frequency. Second, Postol (and Lloyd and others) assert that the falling warheads aren't large enough to do damage. But mortar shells do substantial damage and then contain, even using Postol's numbers, perhaps 1/20th the TNT. That's enough to blow big holes and kill a lot of people. Where are the holes? Where is the structural damage to buildings? Where are the casualties?
I guess since I used to raise money for Israeli medical research and investments in Israeli industry, that would qualify me as an anti-Semite.
But let's look at what the real anti-Semites are saying -- the Jews who actually live there:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/di...
Reaping what we have sown in Gaza
Those who turned Gaza into an internment camp for 1.8 million people should not be surprised when they tunnel underneath the earth.
By Amira Hass
Jul. 21, 2014
A book on Israeli military psychology should have an entire chapter devoted to this sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy: A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.
In contrast to the common Israeli hasbara, Hamas isn’t forcing Gazans to remain in their homes, or to leave. It’s their decision. Where would they go?
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion...
What does Hamas really want?
Read the list of conditions published in the name of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them.
By Gideon Levy
Jul. 20, 2014
we should stop for a moment and listen to Hamas; we may even be permitted to put ourselves in its shoes, perhaps even to appreciate the daring and resilience of this, our bitter enemy, under harsh conditions.
Read the list of demands and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them: withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces troops and allowing farmers to work their land up to the fence; release of all prisoners from the Gilad Shalit swap who have been rearrested; an end to the siege and opening of the crossings; opening of a port and airport under UN management; expansion of the fishing zone; international supervision of the Rafah crossing; an Israeli pledge to a 10-year cease-fire and closure of Gaza’s air space to Israeli aircraft; permits to Gaza residents to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque; and an Israeli pledge not to interfere in internal Palestinian politics such as the unity government; opening Gaza’s industrial zone.
These conditions are civilian; the means of achieving them are military, violent and criminal. But the (bitter) truth is that when Gaza is not firing rockets at Israel, nobody cares about it. Look at the fate of the Palestinian leader who had had enough of violence. Israel did everything it could to destroy Mahmoud Abbas. The depressing conclusion? Only force works.
True, after Hamas started firing rockets, Israel had to respond. But as opposed to what Israeli propaganda tries to sell, the rockets didn’t fall out of the sky from nowhere. Go back a few months: the breakdown of negotiations by Israel; the war on Hamas in the West Bank following the murder of the three yeshiva students, which it is doubtful Hamas planned, including the false arrest of 500 of its activists; stopping payment of salaries to Hamas workers in Gaza and Israeli opposition to the unity government, which might have brought the organization into the political sphere.
It seems that Ted Postol defines a successful intercept as one where the opposing warhead is completely destroyed in mid-air and doesn't count a rocket being damaged enough to be knocked down over an area where it can detonate harmlessly. He also relies on personal and public photos and reports to draw his conclusions. This would miss a good portion of the rockets fired as most are fired at night, when photographing rockets and interceptions are much more difficult.
I'm not going to argue that he is right or wrong. It just seems to me that his extrapolations are not based on enough factual evidence to draw a conclusion with any amount of confidence.
It would be cool to find out just what the real statistics are. I'm pretty sure, though, that Israel classifies this information as a state secret and we may never know in our lifetimes.
Why should anyone believe a person with a clear agenda, no access and no evidence?
Wake me up when you have actual data to collaborate your (conspiracy) theory Israel's estimates are lies.
Israeli's collect the rockets and rocket parts they are able to find. The answer is knowable and evidence obtainable. Have you even tried?
Don't tell anyone, but Iron Dome causes autism because it contains gluten! It's all part of a secret Illuminati plot, of course...
(Seeing as I live in Rishon Le Ziyyon, and watch interceptions every single day, and hear the distinctive sound of an interception (as opposed to a rocket hitting a building) several times a day, I reckon that the esteemed Mr. Postol would do well to loosen up his foil hat a bit)
The way he defines success and failure is framed to say all missile defense fails.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I did RTFA, and he makes two real claims. His primary claim is that the iron dome system must be failing, because when the interceptor approaches the target from anything other than head on, the interceptor will fire its warhead at the wrong time. He implies that this failure is an inevitable consequence of geometry, but I don't see it. If you actually look at the diagrams, the interceptor has just a good a shot when approaching (say) from behind as from in front. In fact the odds look better to me from behind or the side, as the crossing speeds are lower and the shrapnel fan might actually run down the length of the target. The interceptor just needs to fire its warhead at a different moment. But his diagrams all show the warhead firing at the wrong time, for reasons that are not made clear.
Is the iron dome system smart enough to account for basic geometry? I would think so, since the problem is pretty simple, and the approach angle will be known by the radar even before launch. But I don't really know. And I don't think he does either.
His second claim might be more credible. He says that in hundreds of pictures of intercepts, only one clearly shows detonation of the incoming rocket. I don't know if this is true, and I don't trust his claim. But if it is true then it cries out for explanation.
Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country. An area with an insanely high population density an almost no way in our out for armed forces of their own the what did you expect really?
I am not condoning the firing of any weapon or participation in any combat activity amongst civilians but really... What do the Israeli expect??
On the other hand, where are the other Arab countries when it comes to really help out the Palestinians?
It ll never get solved, this conflict will stay a global source of misery for as long as we live probably.
second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
Israel bulldozes Palestinian homes and builds settlements, Hamas fires rockets into Israel.
"Both sides" is usually a shitty argument to make, but in this case, both sides have been aggressors for decades.
If it wasn't complicated, we'd have peace by now.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Extreme would be to drop a nuke on them. See? Isn't it fun using strawmen to argue your point.
may be i'm a bit picky, but i'd say robbing their land, expelling them, denying access to water and healthcare, imprisioning them indefinitely with no warrant, and killing them at will or bombing them with white phosphor is quite extreme.
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one. At this very moment Israel and Gaza is exchanging rockets missiles and bombs and hundreds of people are being killed every day. If, as you say, "Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days", then do it and get it over with.
Israel are trying to minimise casualties on both sides. Hamas are trying to maximise Israeli casualties, and use Palestinian casualties to their political advantage. It's a perfect example of asymmetrical warfare; the capabilities and aims of the combatants are completely different.
Israel has the military capability to destroy Gaza, just as the US had the military capability to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan back in 2003. But doing so is not in their long-term interests.
If you view either side as clearly in the right, you're a fucking fool.
Israel is clearly in the right.
That doesn't mean that Israel is without fault. Clearly, they're not. But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
The situation is not complicated. That doesn't mean solving it is easy; there are many simple problems that are hard to solve. But we can say for sure that false equivalencies do not help.
As much as I have sympathy for the Palestinians, their land is gone and it isn't coming back, no more than the Roman Empire is going to rise again and reclaim Palestine as a province for the Romans.
Is it fair that the land has left the hands of the Palestinians? Probably not. Did it happen? Yes. Will they ever get it back? Not in any meaningful way.
For their own sake, it is time to move on. If their answer is getting their own civilians killed, I'd think even unconditional surrender and exile would be preferable to any group that is actually concerned about their civilian population.
The Israelis are there. They aren't going anywhere, and they don't like the rhetoric that has been thrown at them about being cast into the sea. They remember genocide, and they aren't going back to Diaspora. The rocket attacks on the cities will only increase the resolve of a people who have the history that the Jews have.
Peaceful protest does work, probably better on a country that is a democracy like Israel than a war ever would. We've seen it work elsewhere. Israel can hold a hard line while rockets are shooting at their cities, but they cannot hide behind that excuse if the rockets stop falling. Violence has failed the Palestinians and their Arab allies for 70 years, and that isn't going to change now.
The time for what is "just" is over. It is now time to do what it takes to improve the future for everyone in Palestine. The bombs and rockets need to stop falling, and someone has to do it first. I think the Palestinians would have the most advantage from ending the struggle and adopting a policy that might actually net them more gains and fewer deaths of their own people. If Israel persists in extremist settlements and reprisals when there is nothing to reprise against, they will lose the support of their allies, and they need their allies. Painful as it would be, there is no military option for Palestine worth considering and so those actions should be set aside.
Israel has never shown themselves to be ready for peaceful coexistence (and neither has Hamas). The closest they've come to that is being agreeable to peacefully doing whatever they want; there have been plenty of times during ceasefires where they continue with illegal actions, knowing full well it'll result in return illegal actions by the other side.
Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country. An area with an insanely high population density an almost no way in our out for armed forces of their own the what did you expect really?
I expect Israel would gladly hand the Gaza Strip back to Egypt at this point. It doesn't seem that Egypt wants it back.
First evidence from the article is shown in figures 4 and 4a ... As can be seen by inspecting the photograph in figure 4, there is significant damage in the area where the rocket fell. This damage was almost certainly due to the detonation of the rocket’s small warhead."
"Figure 4 and figure 4A show the consequences of a failure in the fuse timing
However, the figure is a cropped version of an image taken from Ynet article
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4541542,00.html
and the picture title is "The shrapnel that hit the Tel Aviv synagogue.".
As clearly seen in the full picture, there is very little damage that is easily explained by a steel tube falling through the roof. The picture clearly shows that there were no explosion. This was the only direct evidence of Iron Dome failure that is provided by the article. This "evidence" is malicious manipulation of an image that is easily available online.
The images and more facts can be found in ...
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?239702-An-Explanation-of-the-Evidence-of-Weaknesses-in-the-Iron-Dome-Defense-System
Since slashdot is not very graphics friendly
More than 500 Palestinians dead and climbing and you say Israel is trying to minimise casualties? Do you seriously expect people to believe that?
Absolutely, yes. If Israel were actually out to cause casualties, rather than to prevent them, the death toll would be enormous. If they were merely careless of civilian casualties, the death toll would not only be higher, it would be statistically correlated with the demographics of the Palestinian people, with deaths of women, children, and the elderly roughly in proportion to the size of those groups in the general population.
Instead, the Palestinian death statistics are massively skewed towards males aged 18-38. That can't happen if you're killing civilians either deliberately or carelessly. But it's exactly what you'd see if you were carefully targeting enemy combatants.
As long as they keep firing rockets at people, using their own people as human shields, they might as well let Israel block humanitarian aid, because humanitarian aid isn't going to get through anyway.
What happens is that some of the stuff you mention will likely happen. No one is suggesting that the Israelis are saints here. It will take time for a peaceful solution to turn the tide. Is that worse than not only death, but decades of deaths that have been completely ineffectual?
The realization needs to be made that there will never be improvement while Hamas is shooting rockets at Israeli civilians. It is simply PR cover for hardliner Israeli politicians to keep circling the wagons.
You need a peaceful Israel that feels safe enough to not have to circle those wagons for them to purge the extremist elements that they can't quite get rid of now.
Palestine as a current state is the worst kind of place carved out of completely impractical considerations. It's a failed state before it even had a chance to succeed. It needs peace more than it needs anything else to even have a chance.
Hamas, is more like a gang that thrives from exploiting the misery and anger of its people more than it is an organization for freeing them. If Hamas was serious about protecting its people, it would unilaterally stop the rocket attacks and only use defensive measures, even if ineffectual. They *know* that the rocket attacks won't stop the Israeli reprisals, its just that they can only seem to respond to any crisis with violence, possibly because it is the only way they can maintain the backing of their supporters.
There is no war to be won here. Just constant bombing into the distant future. The Palestinians can't conquer their ground back, and the Israelis won't budge unless the Palestinians stop pretending that it is still 1949 and they have addresses in what is now Israel. The Israelis grabbed that land by right of conquest, and then defended it against all comers, pretty much like every conqueror before them. Israel is there to stay, and Palestine is a shithole that will only improve if they stop pretending and get on with their future.
This isn't the fair way for them to move forward, it's merely the only way they will move forward. Peace, even if unilateral, is the best option for the Palestinians as a people.
Yeah, those damned terrorist children in their terrorist-loving hospital beds. Good riddance!
Oh, but Israel warned them, right? Yeah, great how that goes down!
Gaza has been since the beginning like a giant open-air prison camp. Where the heck are the impoverished people trying to flee the conflict supposed to go? And for that matter, for everyone criticizing Hamas for fighting and storing weapons in or near civilian areas... there is nowhere in Gaza not near a civilian area, certainly nowhere further than a stray tank shell can fly - it's one of the most densely populated places on Earth, over 5 times denser than Taiwan and 11.6 times denser than Japan. Israel forced as many people as possible into as little land as possible. And not accidentally. What little farmland there is can be overrun in a matter of minutes. Israel could fill the entirity of Gaza with tanks and artillery at a density of over 100 per square mile.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
That is a combination of revisionist history repeated in mainstream publications and outright lies.
Sure, some properties were sold. But does China have sovereignty over California because many Chinese nationals bought land there?
So, we can see that Hamas is just following what it was organized to do. It's not difficult to understand.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I actually agree with this, but two things. Nearly 70 years have passed. The UN drew a line in the sand. What if Germans decided they wanted their land back, which they lost in war? Pakistan was founded at a similar time, largely for a religious group. The UN partly created this problem, the UN needs to solve the refugee crisis which is the Palestinian people, regardless of what their "leadership's" ideas are about changing history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
What exactly are they supposed to offer?
There's two concessions that would grease the wheels to allow peace to happen. Either Hamas is barred from any government capacity in Palestine or Hamas recognizes Israel's right to exist. Barring either of those concessions, any cease fire will only last until something else relights the powderkeg. You cannot negotiate with a party that doesn't recognize your existence unless you have leaders in that party that can see the forest for the trees like Anwar Sadat following the Yom Kippur War who was, incidentally, assassinated by Islamic jihadists for signing peace with Israel. That peace treaty also lead to Egypt getting kicked out of the Arab league until 1989.
Israel has demonstrated in the past that it wants peace. It has removed Israeli settlers from Gaza, forceibly. It returned the entire Sinai pennisula to Egypt once the peace treaty following the Yom Kippur War was concluded. However that requires that the other party will engage honestly in negotiations that are seeking lasting peace. I cannot honestly say that will ever occur with Hamas.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Israel's pre-1960 borders? The ones were the West Bank belonged to Jordan and Gaza belonged to Egypt?
If it brought a real chance at peace, I believe Israel would agree to that. But Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore. Egypt doesn't want Gaza. Israel's pre-1960 borders still would not create a country called Palestine.
Jordan and Egypt don't want to deal with the Palestinian problem anymore than Israel does.