Missile defenseQuestions raised about Iron Dome success
MIT professor Ted Postol is at it again: in 1992 he successfully challenged the claims made by the United States, Israel, and Raytheon about the effectiveness of the Patriot missiles in intercepting Iraqi SCUD missiles fired at Israel, and now he is raising similar questions about the accuracy of claims made about the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system during the 10-day Israel-Hamas war last November, a war code-named Pillar of Defense.
MIT professor Ted Postol is at it again: in 1992 he successfully challenged the claims made by the United States, Israel, and Raytheon about the effectiveness of the Patriot missiles in intercepting Iraqi SCUD missiles fired at Israel, and now he is raising similar questions about the accuracy of claims made about the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system during the 10-day Israel-Hamas war last November, a war code-named Pillar of Defense.
The official Israel numbers are these:
- Hamas launched 1,504 rockets at Israel, at an average of 154 rockets a day.
- Only 500 of these rockets were heading toward populated areas. The rest fell in empty fields.
- Iron Dome successfully intercepted more than 441 of these 500 rockets
- The interception rate was thus an astonishing 84 percent
Postol, however, argues that Iron Dome’s success rate was “drastically lower.” He says his analysis shows that it could not have been higher than 5 percent.
Background
Hamas and Hezbollah have thousands of unsophisticated and cheap rockets in their arsenals. A typical Iron Dome interceptor costs between $50,000 and $100,000 each. It is not cost-effective to use a $50,000 missile to destroy a $300 Kasam rocket.
The designer at the Israeli defense company Rafael, which manufactures Iron Dome, came up with a brilliant idea: there is no need to intercept every Kasam or Katyusha rocket fired at Israel – the only rockets which need to be destroyed are those heading toward populated areas.
From the numbers above we can see that the cheap and unsophisticated rockets Hamas and Hezbollah deploy are also not very accurate.
Rafael engineers thus developed computer programs which allowed battery commanders to determine, within about three seconds after launch, whether a Hamas rocket was heading toward a built-up area, or toward an empty field. The Iron Dome rockets were launched to destroy only the former.
Note that both Hamas and Hezboolah had more sophisticated, Iran-made, mid-range rockets, but in the last two wars – against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, and against Hamas last November – Israel, using a combination of intelligence and operational brilliance, was able to destroy these strategic weapons during the very first hour of each of the two wars.
