So lets recap:

Friday, 9 March
Israel strikes to stop a terrorist attack



Saturday, 10 March

We find out what the "shake the zionist enemy" means.

100+ rockets and a whole bunch of mortar rounds get fired at Israel on a single day.

To put this in numbers; 50 rockets was the count for the last month or 2-3 months in total (I'm not sure).

Link


An Israeli missile is launched from the Iron Dome missile system in the city of Ashdod in response to a rocket launch from the nearby Palestinian Gaza Strip on March 11, 2012.



The usual airstrikes in response came, sixteen militants killed on Saturday, and then the first civilian fatality on the Palestinian side on Sunday, a 12 year old boy.

Just another slow day in the middle east....

I'm curious as to how this stacks up to the USA's missile defense efforts. According to CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/11/world/meast/israel-iron-dome/ the iron dome missiles cost $62,000 a pop and "tens of millions" of dollars for a battery, with 13 batteries required to covers Israel's borders. Apparently, although the system was developed solely by Israel, the USA is currently subsidizing its deployment to the tune of $205 million. Meanwhile, the USA's missile defense system has cost tens of billions of dollars and (as far as I know) has yet to down an enemy missile in a realistic scenario. Maybe we should buy Israel's technology?

Also, hopefully this is a gamechanger for Israel that will allow them to be a bit less brutal without sacrificing security.

Ah, OK, this is designed to take down Hamas's shitty rockets whereas the US system is designed to intercept highly sophisticated ICBMs. Still, yay technology, maybe the South Koreans can use it.

Wow... After the Star Wars 2.0 fiasco, I thought the idea of missile-based artillery interception was pretty much pie in the sky... And the Israelis come up with a 86% hit rate. Very nice...

86% is fine when you're intercepting non-nuclear weapons, Star Wars was after much bigger fish.

What "Star Wars 2.0 fiasco"?

That's another thing to consider. It's not $62,000 anti-rocket interceptor versus a $300-400 rocket. It's the statistical value of a human life -- in the US it's about $6.9 million.

Even if we consider just the average wage of a typical median earner in Israel -- like $25,000~ a year; and the costs of hospitalization for a lengthy period if they're severely wounded by said $300 dollar rocket; then the costs balance out on that basis alone.

But yes, Israel can now do more than just "retaliate massively". Thanks to ABM, they now have more diplomatic options open to them domestically for dealing with rocket fire.

I actually saw an interception yesterday....wish I had a camera.



I'd say the "plus" column is bigger than that. Remember that the Palestinian rockets have a fairly poor kill rate, since they're fired blindly; the economic damage they do is more because people are afraid to go to work (or travel through the area when the conflict goes "hot") - to the point where at least one kibbutz in the area has been virtually abandoned by its residents. If the missile defense can restore that confidence, it'll do wonders for improving the economy there.

Doubtful that it will - even with Iron Dome, the missiles still set off alarms. Which means people still have to run periodically for shelter, and therefore everyday life continues to be disrupted.

And they will never turn off the alarms. The Dome has failed once or twice in the past few days, hitting a school that was thankfully empty because of the missiles.

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Even when put that way... I never understood why Iron Dome doesn't include Tunguska/Loara-like component. You could put lightly armoured turret on a truck and have 99% interception rate instead of 86%, using projectiles in the same price range, not two orders of magnitude more expensive... Especially when you consider the system basically ignored 85 missiles to save money. Cannons might have intercepted some of these, too, and limit damage to fields and roads around the city, boosting confidence even more.

Though, there might be a simple, quick reason why this is impractical/impossible, and I'm simply unaware of it.

The range of the Iron Dome missile is apparently 70km. The range of a Tunguska's guns is 4km. A simple ratio of areas, 70^2/4^2, implies that at least 306 Tunguskas would be needed to protect the same area as a single Iron Dome launcher. The true number will be higher because you need to create an overlapping circle pattern.

A Tunguska costs $16 million each. 16*306 = 4.9 billion dollars... but this is with the missiles. Even if a gun-only system only cost $1 million, that's still in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars each, compared to 'tens of millions' for an Iron Dome battery.

Also I expect that gun volleys of several hundred rounds will cost significantly more than '$300~$400' a pop, but I can't find good data on this. Also, those hundreds of self-destruct fuzes must be near-100% reliable, lest you accidentally shower a neighbourhood with stray 30mm cannon rounds. This would drive up the cost of ammo, and thus of a volley. A missile only needs one self-destruct mechanism, and all the hardware needed is already on the missile.

4km exaggerates to area a 30mm cannon could actually defend, that's max range against subsonic aircraft and pretty unlikely even in that role, which is why it has missiles. Intercepting a rocket is like trying to shoot the pilot out of his jet, only the pilot is going faster and falling steeper. Actually defending a 1.5km radius is a more realistic kind area one such weapon would defend and even then nothing is certain outside maybe 500m. Iron Dome does of course also have limits with radar field of view and slant range which also make its effective defended radius less then max missile range, but not to the same degree. Defending big areas with guns will take much heavier weapons. The US is working on a 50mm setup, but if you wanted to cover a city let alone suburban areas I doubt less then a 76mm OTO or even heavier caliber would have much luck.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Wrong. The only thing you need to cover is Gaza Strip/Lebannon border, and only in places where a city or settlement is in the range of Kassam rockets. Odd larger missile can be handled by ID rocket. Had the system been designed to do anything else than stop crude rockets, maybe, but so far all it does and will ever do is killing 300$ junk.



That was exactly what I postulated. No tank, no armored turret, etc, just cheap gun system targeting incoming pipe rockets. At your cost, 1 mln $, one Iron Dome battery less would buy 'tens' of such systems, which then proceed to take out badly welded chunks of canalisation for ~100$ [link to 30 mm HE round price from quick google] a pop, not 65.000$.

Also - it fired 40 missiles to defeat that last wave of 120 300$ rockets. That alone is 2.6 mln $ that would have paid by ~3 such systems by itself, isn't it?



A) You'd need to burn ~650 rounds before approaching cost of a single missile. Modern systems are capable of killing unguided rockets with a short burst, it wouldn't use 650 rounds to defeat the entire described attack of 120 missiles.

B) Note you're spraying in the direction of Palestinian border, into area that is often under rocket attack anyway. Read, into expendable land. That thing would sit between city and launch site, not in public park. Also, modern anti-air shells are HE anyway, they are more reliable in this regard than a missile, and a single 30 mm round weighs nowhere near weight of ID rocket. You could well reverse the question and ask why risk adding to damage by spraying neighbourhood with rain of big rocket parts when remnants of a few 30 mm rounds are far less dangerous, IMHO.



Um... Were talking about Kassams, right?

Slow, unguided missiles with refrigerator-like radar signature, barely good enough to maybe hit a city in 1/3 of the cases? These are not Scuds, heck, I'd be surprised if that thing breached mortar round speeds. But, even if we cut the range in half, to 2 km, two of these will still cover about any settlement on Israel border, and they will do it far more efficiently than planting a missile battery costing tens of million $ around the whole border.

As for the USA, aren't coastal cities in the USA a teeny tiny bit bigger (and that just one of them) than entire population of Israel put together? And weren't they protected from real rockets, not hobbyist crap filled with fertilizer explosive?

I don't postulate to replace ID with this, I just wonder why Israel spent hundreds of millions of dollars when a fraction of that would have supplemented Iron Dome's 85% hit ratio to something approaching 100% at fraction of the price. I can see coverage argument, but... Especially seeing they would have liberty to intercept all missiles then, not just 1/3, potentially saving a target ID programmers missed and sending much better message to Palestinians than 'we'll spend two orders of magnitude (two hundred twenty times!) more per rocket to intercept 1/3 of your missiles so keep sending 'em to bankrupt us!' one.

Also, since edit window closed: it actually turns out Iron Dome is completely useless if the settlement lies too close to the border, and a 65.000$ cost might be in fact far too optimistic and/or does not include US subsidies:



I cut out the political/obsolete parts of the article, but still... I wonder, how many automatic guns could 300 mln spent fortifying homes bought instead? Guns that would be of much greater use for the role even if that issue with launch time was somewhat fixed?

The article even suggests something similar - to employ lasers as supplement, too, getting rid of the whole 'unexploded munitions' problem and still dealing with the threat at fraction of the cost. While I agree the Defence Ministry assessment that such lasers are untested and poor at dealing with waves of rockets, anti-air artillery is good at both of these, IMHO.

Irbis, another problem with massed AA guns: they require gun crews. If you replace one SAM site (Iron Dome is basically a SAM, just one with missile interception capability) with a dozen AA guns, you need to drastically increase the manpower used to run the system- and the salaries of the skilled labor operating those guns can run to hundreds of thousands or millions per year per gun. Counterintuitively, the up-front cost of military hardware is not always the biggest factor in figuring out how much it costs to use it.

AA guns have a ceiling, too, not just a range. The zone where they can shoot down missiles reliably isn't a cylinder running all the way from the ground to low Earth orbit.

For a stream of 30mm bullets, it's entirely conceivable that the rockets will fly above a single gun's engagement range entirely. So you need defense in depth- several layers of overlapping circles, so that you have a gun close enough to matter when the missile lands.

...A "short burst" is less than five rounds, from a modern automatic cannon? Do you really think so?

The only serious missile defense capability the east coast of the US ever had involved nuclear-tipped solid fuel rockets, not gun emplacements.

I'm pretty sure they did the math, knew the actual performance of the systems they were dealing with, and decided that Israeli!Patriot missiles were in fact a better deal than 30mm spam.

With a 76mm round, wouldn't the danger of unexploded AAA ordinance become much greater (IIRC, a lot of civilian casualties at Pearl Harbor were due to that happening).

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If you knew what you were talking about you'd know they don't use Qassam rockets in Lebanon. Hezbollah has a very wide range of factory produced weapons. In fact Iron Dome is quite capable against more advanced rockets, all that matters as far as an intercept goes is how fast the damn thing travels and how big it is not how crude it was welded together. The US Army has been evaluating the system for a while and considering deploying it in Afghanistan.



Its not going to cost 1 million dollars. The chassis is the cheap part, not the turret with guns, radar and computers. Try ten times that as a minimal ceiling, more if it was produced in the west, and considerable operating costs linked to operating so many separate radar and computer systems each requiring its own crew.



Nope. Also a cannon system can only engage one target at a time, and will thus be easily overwhelmed by a salvo of rockets in view of its limited range and thus limited engagement time. Iron Dome can tackle multiple targets at once.



Tunguska fires at about 5,000 rounds per minute, you'll easily end up expending 650 rounds on one rocket engaged as a crossing target. Guns completely suck against crossing targets.



Yeah it wouldn't use 650 rounds, it'd use more like 50,000 rounds and several new gun barrels to defeat that many rockets, if it could ever engage them all.



Yeah, trying to use a gun to engage a target falling over your firing position is going to work like crap.



Your opinion is wrong, your talking about firing thousands and thousands of shells, at least some of which will have fuse failures and come down live and whole. Its much easier to put a reliable fuse in a handful of missiles then large scale production runs of cannon ammunition.



122mm rockets in general. Not everything Hamas fires is home made, and nothing Hezbollah has is. Iron Dome was not meant to be the most minimal defense that might barely work some of the time like your idea to spread huge numbers of gun systems around would be. The US basically DID rush a minimal anti rocket defense into service with C-RAM and it only manages a 60-70% kill rate while defending a 500m radius and being easily saturated. Each C-RAM fire unit by the way costs 15 million dollars while being much smaller then a Tunguska turret.



Yes because you are the super genius, and the Israelis don't know anything right?



The hell are you even talking about now?



You wonder because you have reached hopelessly wrong conclusions, and somehow assumed that the difference between those conclusions and the conclusions of the IDF mean the IDF is wrong and not you. Did you even read that article and understand why Iron Dome was ineffective against very short range attacks? And how this might be relevant to a gun based system too?

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

You'd have to design custom ammunition that would fragment as much as possible. This can be done several different ways, such as internally scoring the casing to ensure evenly sized fragments called COFRAM for controlled fragmentation, as well as using very high intensity explosives and using prefragmented projectiles inside of a very thin casing. A lot of research down that path kind of died off in the 1970s because everyone was going nuts for cluster bombs and SAM warheads were so big you didn't have to get very fancy. Shell designs in WW2 were still pretty crude, and the calibers being used at Pearl Harbor were on average much heavier in turn so you got lots of big heavy fragments raining down at high speeds. It wasn't uncommon for warships at sea to be damaged by falling fragments and shells in WW2 either. But actually whatever the problems Italy has already begun marketing its old Otomatic project to put the 76mm automatic gun on land, now specifically as C-RAM type weapon, but the main focus is on defending military targets. The Germans have fielded 35mm Millenium Guns in Afghanistan, but for the exact same role as the US 20mm C-RAM, defending a small point base. Coverage is just nothing like Iron Dome, and never could be.

The US 50mm EAPS (Extended Area Protection System) project is being designed alongside a small interceptor missile, smaller then Iron Dome, but the 50mm project also intends to use radar command guided shells to reduce ammo consumption and expand effective range in the first place. Still just a weapon to defend fairly small military areas.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Well, when I last heard about it, US ABM interceptors were notable for failing to hit every single target in every single test. Admittedly, I haven't checked up on it lately, but that was the situation last time I did.

No I'm afraid you never checked up ever, or else just purely read anti ABM propaganda pieces written by idiots with zero factual information. Such piece were commonplace for a while, they've died off now that its been blatantly proven that ABM is workable and that nations all over the world are either buying US systems for export or developing similar hit to kill technology domestically. Even the first early 1980s tests of hit to kill produced a kill with technology that was basically a lab experiment on a rocket. Taiwan and the UAE are buying billions of dollars worth of US ABM weapons and radar as we speak meanwhile, while Japan has been a joint partner designing and building SM-3. The success rate is quite high, and much higher then the combat success rates that are reasonably expected out of surface to air missile system. Since 2005 for example the THAAD system, which did have quite a bit of trouble early in development, has scored 10 for 10 in tests. Three other tests were aborted, because the target missile failed to function correctly and THAAD was never launched. This is every test of the actual operational configuration; all early failures involved a system which was purely a demonstrator and not suitable for combat employment by design. ABM works. No reason it shouldn't considering that by definition the target is on a ballistic trajectory. You need high precision in the system, but high precision is straightforward engineering.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

All of them, in fact. I believe it's been proven that all the supposed Japanese bombs that hit civilian areas were in fact defective or improperly fused AA shells. Spraying a ton of 30mm or up rounds up into the sky to stop a Qassam rocket could be a cure worse than the disease, especially if you make the bullets out of something fun like DU or tungsten. Remember, mankind will always have a perfect record when it comes to flying objects- we never leave one up there, so it all comes down somewhere.

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Now now, Chaser, humanity has thrown at least half a dozen things into the air that will never come back down. Ever. It's all a question of manning up your throwing arm; no one has a better fastball than NASA.

That said, the basic point about AAA fire and its hazards is well taken. When your cities are being bombarded by slow, large WWII aircraft and you're trying to inflict damage on their planes to limit their sortie rate, it's arguably worth it; when rockets are coming in relatively limited numbers it's more of an issue.

It sounds more like you haven't checked up on it, ever, as Skimmer said. Start here with Aegis BMD. GMD here. THAAD Here. All of these had successful hits. The last time they had a long string of unsuccessful his was in 2002. When was the "last time you did" check up on it?

WW2 air raids meant normally all civilians would be in shelters anyway. Shelter construction on Oahu had not been completed, barely started in fact and proper air raid drills had not been implemented, as well as the attack being a surprise. The whole point of Iron Dome meanwhile is to spare civilians from needing to constantly dash to shelters when one or two rockets would land every day at any random hour. Now massed attacks can get some rockets though, but the occur far less often accomplishing more or less the same thing. Much less disruption of local life.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Jeez guys, lighten up! I was honestly under the impression that US ABM efforts had been unsuccessful (due to some news articles I read back in the Bush years). So why the hostility? Can't a guy make an honest mistake without being beaten over the head because of it?