Posted on 11/21/2012 7:50:10 AM PST by chessplayer
Israel’s highly controversial and very expensive ‘Iron Dome’ rocket defense system is being tested by extremist militant groups to its very limits. At $65,000 per round to hard kill a $500 rocket, its one expensive piece of mind that Israel has a lot riding on. It would seem that the strategic goal is to make rocket launches a worthless and unacceptable risk with no reward to the terrorists that launch these terror weapons, as opposed to an affordable defense system intended for continuous and prolonged use.
(Excerpt) Read more at aviationintel.com ...
I guess I read it differently than you did.
I think his rage was directed at TRUSTING Iron Dome EXCLUSIVELY, and at Iron Dome as an EXCUSE not to do what must be done.
The “Iron Dome Sucks” tone was a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
The U.S. pays much of the cost of Iron Dome, through our military aid to Israel.
Funding Iron Dome is one government bail-out I can support. It works and creates high-tech jobs, but in Israel, not the U.S.
They are a hell of a lot better off than we are.
>> those [that will fall harmlessly into open space] are ignored by the system
I wondered about that. If so it’s a pretty sophisticated system — with a lot of responsibility placed on its *correct* operation.
I hope IronDomeCo didn’t hire away too many Microsoft programmers to staff their engineering team. :-)
That’s a credible idea. Similar to CIWS but using the larger HE shells AAA offers. If I had to guess I’d say there are limitations of accurately setting the warhead’s fuse along with the high CEP of inertial targeting for a ballistic target interception.
Slight variances in AAA muzzle velocity may also pose issues for successful interception.
A missile otoh can make the necessary in-flight adjustments to its launch solution for greater likelyhood of interception.
Similarly, spamming HE CEWS would likely incur higher collateral damage.
Same problem as everyone else has had with AAA - what goes up must come down and given the trajectories, you’re going to be getting a lot of ordnance landing on Israeli territory that missed or failed to explode.
Hence todays cease fire. Time to reload. Lets get that next ship of “humanitarian” supplies into the Gaza Strip.
Yes they do. And they catch hell for it because the launch sites are on top of hospitals, back yards of mosks, roofs of apartment buildings..
If they had daycare centers they’d launch from those too.
To Hammas? I thought he already did give them a blank check.
“Hence todays cease fire. Time to reload. Lets get that next ship of “humanitarian” supplies into the Gaza Strip.”
Exactly!!!
our pallie pals: a bunch of chicken hearted bullies with an entire frito-lay factory on their shoulder. they won’t police themselves worth a hoot, so israel has to stomp them good and hard from time to time.
The AAA projectiles are fuzed meaning all that comes down are pieces of shrapnel and hopefully pieces of the rocket.
Air raid sirens would be wailing so, the population would have been alerted to seek shelter.
this, too, depends on the rocketeers using dumb rockets, that can’t significantly change course but which obey ballistic physics. once the rockets stop being dumb, then the dome has to shoot them all down.
i dunno what they use. might be real time linux.
I hope it’s not a M$ os they are using..
It’d hang on “are you sure you want my to hit THAT rocket” questions..
and the price of a license is hard on the wallet!
Or they could sabotage Iranian refineries - the cost per missile delivered then goes up by a factor of at least 100 for the Iranians, who should get the message before long.
but, will the old liberal, richard stallman put a no military usage clause in the next gpl?
Slight variances in AAA muzzle velocity may also pose issues for successful interception.
I agree there are a number of AAA targeting variables but I tend to believe CEP related issues can be overcome through barrage fire. The rockets themselves have very predictable trajectories. It seems to me that multiple guns under central control could barrage fire automatically fuzed projectiles and achieve a sufficiently dense bracketing to bring the rocket down.
A missile otoh can make the necessary in-flight adjustments to its launch solution for greater likelyhood of interception.
True and that's why systems like Iron Dome would be the second line of defense should the less expensive AAA fail to bring down the rocket. Obviously, the entire system would require integrated targeting and fire control.
Similarly, spamming HE CEWS would likely incur higher collateral damage.
Fuzing would result in shrapnel and hopefully pieces of rockets returning to earth. Air defense sirens would have been wailing so, people would have been alerted to take shelter.
Pacifists and terrorists all over the planet hate BMD systems. Both love a vulnerable population to serve their cause.
In any given lot of AAA shells, something like 3-10% of them (at a minumum) are going to have fuses that don’t work as advertised and they will be coming down somewhere.
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