[lee martell]

Everyone at that airport is now trapped like so many fish in a big barrel.

[11th_VA]

Need Predators on station, 24/7 … not sure if that’s possible though, flying out of UAE. Even Other aircraft would need in flight refueling to sustain 24/7 ops -

[PGR88]

So is this missile defense system going to be abandoned tomorrow on the way out, like every other piece of hardware we put in Afghanistan?

[Guenevere]

Would that have been the SAM-D

[Angelino97]

When I read this, I didn’t know if the rockets were fired by the United States or by the Taliban. The article seems to imply it wasn’t by the U.S. But this article could have been better written.

[TheCipher]

My nephew is there. Literally at the end of the runway. He is a warrant officer with an electronic warfare team attached to the 82nd. Says they will be the last ones out but doesn’t know where they will be going, and if he did couldn’t tell anyway.

[ronnie raygun]

Now its a game of damage control lies and scumedia support spin

[moovova]

Were the missiles fired from US drones? Their batting average hasn’t been so good lately.

[Paal Gulli]

The doesn't smell right. The US doesn't (officially) have anything like a tactical anti-rocket defense system. The Israeli newspaper ynet.co.il reported in January of 2019 that the Israelis were preparing to sell to the US two of their Iron Dome batteries, which probably is the most mature system of the sort in existence (reportedly for $400 million). And it was only reported earlier this month that the US Army had only just conducted the first official field tests within DoD of the Israeli-sourced system (against cruise missiles).

It's not beyond the realm of possibility that they could have hustled the Iron Dome 'prototypes' to A-stan so quickly but that would have required being pro-active, which is something that there's been precious little evidence of since the start of this fiasco.

Of course it could be the same as the case of the SpecWarriors who defied orders and went outside the wire in Kabul to round up all the Afghanis who had served them as guides and interpreters. Maybe somebody in the Air Defense command structure with both brains and balls (and probably at Ft Sill) saw this coming and put the wheels in motion to move those Iron Dome systems to A-stan simply because it was the right thing to do and damn the consequences.

There are other versions of the same story on the 'web offering more detail from this anonymous source, stating that the US military has defenses against rocket and mortar attacks. Except I think that their source is conflating a counterbattery fire system with a system that can literally shoot rockets and mortars out of the sky. Or maybe the reporter fails to understand the distinction.

As to the former, the US has had systems in the field for decades that use radar to measure the trajectory of incoming artillery and use that data to back-track to the point of firing. Then it relays those grid coordinates to an artillery battery and the cannon-cockers execute a fire mission against that target.

But those counterbattery fire systems don't do anything approaching shooting an arty round in flight out of the sky. And until this story surfaced, there was no indication that the US had anything that was both designed for that purpose and had proved itself effective.