Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
All purpose-built ABM systems use infrared imagers for terminal guidance with classifiers that pick out both the target and desired point of impact on the target. These are vastly more effective but we also don't sell them to foreign countries AFAIK.
What kind of optical window for the IR imager gets used for this application?
Even in this configuration, the ablation and thermal loading due to hypersonic transit through the atmosphere has proven to be so high that the optical window is covered in ablative shielding for the first part of the flight, where the terminal guidance package is not much use anyway. Once the missile is within terminal range, the ablative shield is removed and it switches to homing mode. Early tests didn't have the ablation shield, and the damage to the optical window was sufficiently high that the imager lost effectiveness.
The performance envelope within atmosphere of the rocket motors they use for ABM is high enough that it really pushes materials engineering to the breaking point.
Citations, pleeeeassse! I neeeeed it!
Fighter aircraft provide liquid nitrogen to captive IR missiles.
An interest research that shows the number of times in the past 70 years the NY Times has depicted various Saudi dictator as reformist [0]
Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me is the most bizarre choice word by Thomas Friedman in his op-ed [1]. As a writer, I'm so surprised he would even use such a word or the NY Times op-ed editors would actually allow that.
BTW, there seem to be an orchestrated media Blitzkrieg to show the new Saudi Ruler. Who is basically follow the same playbook as Saddam Hossein did (eliminating all possible opposition) or Stalin for that matter as a moderate person or country. Saudi Arabia, and other moderate Arab states would also welcome a more engaged U.S. into their backyard [2] Calling Saudi Arabia a "moderate" country is a bit of stretch
[0] http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34727/Seventy-Years-of-the-...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/11/28/how-obama-a...
Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current improvement.
The NYT article about M.B.S did sound like a general improvement in direction.
Apparently MBS was been behind the devastating involvement of KSA in Yemen from well before his taking power.
Not all problems are going to be solved quickly at least this appears to be trending a better direction.
I’m not dismissing the terrible things the country does, but it does seem like MBS is at least better about social issues and religious extremism.
“Mussolini made the trains run on time”
Israel's Iron Dome [1] system seems to be effective but I would assume there are differences in the system and proximity of Palestine to Israel and the missiles fired that allow it to be so effective.
As a further point, the fact that our missile defense systems are so poor just emphasizes how reckless our approach to North Korea is, their missile technology is getting better and better while our defense system is unproven and yet top Trump administration officials talk about war as if it's not a big deal. Truly scary stuff.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
not exactly. Most seems to be manufactured either in Iran or China and a follow on or similar development off basic USSR/Russian systems, like Grad, Uragan, Smerch - these rockets have speed anywhere between 2M and 3M. It is outside of capabilities of many air defense systems on the merit of the speed alone. Add to that multiple rockets in a salvo. Iron Dome being capable of dealing with that is a very huge achievement.
There are bigger ones than that of course, but the smaller ones are certainly subsonic.
"The Qassam's speed in the air is 200 meters per second." (= ~750km/h)[1]
The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/news/iron-dome-system-found-to-be-he...
The 'Qassam' are the low-end of Hamas rockets, and they are locally made low quality stuff. The rest is imported military grade production.
>The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)
Judging by the distance and the name Katyusha, it is probably Grad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad) rockets as by looks and function it most closer resembles Katyusha. The Grad is 122mm and it is the starting system in that type of weaponry and its rocket speed is ~700m/s. The higher-end, 200mm and 300mm, systems fly a bit faster and much farther (typically Chinese versions are even faster and longer range than original Russian).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
It's a tool designed to deal with the unique situation in which the Israelis find themselves. It's not any better at intercepting modern guided ballistic missiles than other systems.
So hitting them should be an easy task for a guided missle as long as it got enough time to reach it at all (which I think is not the problem here). So the only problem I can see is to disarm the missle during flight but am not sure if that is what is meant here.
Does anybody know why it should be hard to shoot down a ballistic missle?
So when it comes to "shooting down a Scud near the ground over a city", you're exactly right. Blowing up your interceptor only works when you've got a high-tech target and are willing to make quite a mess yourself to stop the thing.
They were very careful to "neither confirm nor deny" whether the site ever had nuclear payloads, but they _did_ make a point to tell everyone that the beautiful mechanical targeting computers had Sacramento programmed in as a target, "just in case"...
Yes - the usual way is to fit the interceptor with a nuclear warhead (see Sprint, Spartan and Nike Zeus on the US side - Fakel 51T6, Novator 53T6 and S-300PS/S-300PM on the Soviet side)... But it has sort of fallen out of fashion...
Radiation hardening the warhead against this type of attack would make it less effective.
Neutrons needs something with light atom like hydrogen - water or maybe polyethylene and lots of it to slow down. So a small nuclear explosion which emits a neutron pulse might work pretty well. It would hellish if it somehow exploded over a population center, though. Didn't get hit by the ICBM (good). Everyone's bones melted (bad).
Li6H is perfect for shielding warhead. Li6H (Lithium-6 hydride) contains hydrogen to slow down neutrons and lithium to absorb them. It has hightest hydrogen content of any hydride, high melting point and can be casted.
The shielding takes some space and the warhead yield is smaller than without shielding. The goal is not to completely block neutron flux but to reduce it to the level where exploding countermeasure must be very close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
Edit: Sprint was meant to defend against ICBMs - but the idea is the same, ballistic missile warheads are going very fast and really aren't that big.
It was cancelled after the ABM treaty.
You know how a rocket is sometimes described as a 'controlled explosion'? The concussion from a Sprint launch was severe enough that a large area around the launch pad would be lethal to any unprotected persons present during a launch. It basically explodes out of the silo.
1) ever seen a missile being fired and flowing? It isn't a smooth movement, rather wobbling in +- target direction. I presume this is due to turbulence in the air and resulting corrections by guiding software. Double the issue due to target and pursuer facing random turbulence on their own
2) some SCUDs have some sort of simple 'randomizer' in their flight for exactly these reasons - to confuse simpler defense (ie boat-based gatlink types which fires dumb explosive projectiles) - the target is still in aim, but there are random movements around axis of movement
3) sensors are/were not perfect, non-ideal conditions (clouds, night, cold, humidity, dust), bugs in software etc
One way to improve missile defense accuracy would be to use a small nuclear warhead but that's impractical when defending populated areas and anyway your adversary can make new missiles more quickly an cheaply than you can make nuclear bombs.
Modern missiles make things more complicated by using multiple re-entry vehicles, midflight maneuvering, creating a cloud around the warhead to prevent targetting etc.
"It's like trying to hit a bullet, with a smaller bullet, while wearing a blindfold, riding a horse."
Hitting something that is moving at Mach 30 towards you is already hard. Especially considering this thing moving towards you is also burning up in the atmosphere, thus you only have that bright spot which will be larger than the actual missile core. However, if it's moving exactly (or almost) at you, it's not impossible but still hard.
If it is not moving towards you but rather along your view, you have to match a significant portion of it's speed, which basically means building a ICBM to hit another ICBM. And going that fast takes a while.
If it's moving away from you, you can always give up.
Most other missile systems (like surface-to-air or air-to-air systems designed to kill planes) have proximity fuses, and don't need direct contact, they just blow up nearby and throw shrapnel into the plane. That's enough to kill a plane, but doesn't work very well to knock a ballistic missile off it's trajectory.
I would guess the real reason is that if the target is ballistic, you need to actually "kill" it, not just wing it like you can with an airplane. If you wing it the warhead will still fall in roughly the same place with a probably intact warhead. To be safe you want to actually destroy the warhead. Worse case it goes off at point of impact, which is better than on the target.
Perhaps I misunderstood what the update rate was, but I interpreted as the rate at which the "chaser" can update its trajectory or take action (kind of like the main loop running 10 times a second).
You also might be overestimating what "current tech" means in military hardware. The PAC-3 Patriots were entered into service from 1995-2000, meaning they were designed with late 1980's technology. The Saudis don't get to have the true top end hardware, the US won't sell their "best stuff" until they have "new best stuff" to beat it.
Why is that not possible?
Tldr: kinetic force is definitely the way to go.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3#A...
It's incredibly hard. I won't repeat sibling comments about how difficult the actual interception is, but will add that you likely have seconds AT BEST for your own launch to take place. You can do guidance mid-air, but miss the window...
On the other hand, a system to protect the continental United States from incoming missiles from anywhere to anywhere was always fanciful.
Both the missile and interceptor must meet at the same place at the same time. The time window decreases with speed, so timing is everything.
Faster the incoming missile, harder it is to intercept. If the speed delta between incoming missile and interceptor is to high, interceptor can't correct it's course fast enough to hit the missile. Interceptor has inertia and it's deflectors or thrust vectoring can correct it's course only so fast.
Interceptor positioning on the ground is also important.
Even if interception is conceptually simple, the speeds and distances involved make it a very challenging problem.
Additionally, you're starting from a false premise that ballistic missiles don't maneuver. Some of them, particularly MIRV ICBMs, are highly maneuverable.
The article has issues. The plume is irrelevant. The cited pic from syria looks similar but that has more to do with wind and temperature than similarities in warhead. Conclusions based on the launch angle of the patriots may also be incorrect as there the outbound patriots need not follow a strait line. The best intercept for their warhead might not be a head-on approach. We don't know if they turned mid-flight to intercept, which they can do.
And don't criticize patriot for firing five times. This thing was coming down as several objects on very similar trajectories. Each missile might have been targeting a different inbound part, any one of which might be the warhead. If 4/5ths of the inbound objects were intercepted, but the one that wasn't turned out to be the warhead, it wasn't a total failure.
Assume a target of 0.1km x 0.1km, but the missile may hit anywhere in an area of 1km x 1km around the target. That means the area of the target is 1/100 the size of the overall area. They'd have to launch at least 50 Scuds to have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the target.
Can someone tell me if that calculation is way off? It sounds like this attack, other than spreading fear and panic, was very unlikely to work.
Think of it like flipping coins. For a given coin flip, 50% odds of heads and 50% odds of tails.
But if you flip the coin 100000000 times there's still a tiny outside chance of tails coming up every time.
As you flip more coins, the odds of getting a heads on at least one of them will asymptotically approach 100%, but it will never get there.
The easiest way to solve "at least once"-type questions is invariably by subtracting P(!"at least once") = P("zero hits") from 1.
To do it with addition, you'd have to list all possible outcomes completely. Those would, individually, be far lower probabilities. Example:
P("at least one "six" when rolling two dice")
= P("first not six, second six") + P("first six, second not six") + P("first six, second also six")
= (1/6 * 5/6) + (5/6 * 1/6) + (1/6 * 1/6)
= 11/36
1 - P("never six")
= 1 - P("first not six, second not six")
= 1 - (5/6 * 5/6) = 36/36 - 25/36
= 11/36
P(hits >= 1) = 1 - P(hits = 0).
P(hits >= 1) = P(hits = 1) + P(hits = 2) + ... + P(hits = k)
P(hits = 1) = 100 chose 1 * 0.01^1 * 0.99^99
...
p(hits = n) = 100 chose n * 0.01^n *0.99^(100-n)
1 - P(hits = 0)
= 1 - (100 chose 0 *0.1^0 *0.99^100)
= 1 - 0.99^100
But, yes: The Scud is terribly (wonderfully) inaccurate.
> During the mujahideen attack against Jalalabad, between March and June 1989, three firing batteries manned by Afghan crews advised by Soviets fired approximately 438 missiles in defense of the embattled garrison.
That airport terminal is quite a bit larger, though, and the size of the blast radius of the explosion will increase the likelihood of doing some damage (significantly so for large blast radiuses. If this warhead carried a nuclear device, a miss by a few hundred meters wouldn’t really be a miss)
(1) I guess proper modeling of the error distribution will make that shape something else than a circle, but I also guess a circle is a much better first approximation than a square.
Finally, that attack may have made economic sense. That scud cost a lot less than the rockets fired at it, and showing the capability of firing at targets that far away will pin down quite a few expensive forces around targets in Saudi Arabia.
Yes they have. The PAC-3 missile is completely different from the hack job PAC-2/GEM they rushed into the field in '91.
The PAC-2 missile relied on its ground based radar to guide it onto the target, and relied on an explosive warhead to damage the target. The PAC-3 has an integrated radar to guide itself onto target and is capable of hit to kill intercept.
Now, those are all the claims anyways. We'll have to see how useful all these changes actually were.
The PAC-3 is based on the SDI ERINT, a missile which itself failed several tests and then finally passed a rigged test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#E...
... Ok I checked wikipedia and apparently the Patriot was first fielded in 1984 - though not used til '91.
It's a hard problem space and a lot of the apparent success/failure is really a matter of choices and tradeoffs made by the 'customers' who specify the design constraints.
The actual tests are 100% successful. Do some basic research please. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
The moral is that you can't be sure that the success rate is independent, there can be systematic errors that affect all of the interceptors at the same time.
- buying S-400 from Russia for 3 billions
- buying THAAD from USA for 15 billions
S-400 is totally unproven system.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/29/very-bad-men-trump-the-s...
1. "Arab Spring": The Arab Spring was a grassroots movement for democracy, self-determination for the citizens. That's the complete opposite of a dictator - in a monarchy even - consolidating power. That difference is the foundation of the United States in particular and democracies world-wide. It's double-speak, as absurd as calling the NSA an open source organization.
2. "only a fool would not root for it": Friedman is far too experienced and sophisticated to fall for the promises and hopes of the latest "benign" despot who is at the stage of consolidating power. It's standard operating procedure for dictators at this stage: Promise a lot to everyone, especially to the West (apparently via Friedman), [EDIT: and liberalize] in order to neutralize potential threats - 'he says great things; he's liberalizing; let's wait and see what happens!'. Once power is consolidated, you can do whatever you want; the "benign" part is forgotten, the freedoms taken away. It never turns out differently. Why not let the citizens vote on your power if you are so benign and they love you so much? EDIT: Only if the citizens have the power to protect their freedoms, through voting, will the freedoms be maintained - I defy you to find a counter-example.
3. "his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail — the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton — until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day": In fact, you do see it every day a new dictator consolidates power. It's so standard that I could have told you it would happen: They imprison their enemies and force them to confess or just convict them (summarily or via show trial); corruption is a popular charge in these situations for its propaganda value with the public and the West - look at Xi in China for a recent example. There are no independent courts, trials, rule of law, or justice.
4. "It’s “ludicrous,” he [the dictator] said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab." Accepted without question by Friedman, who apparently was born the morning of the interview.
5. "Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive." What a surprise! As the new King is rounding up people and consolidating power, nobody told the NYT columnist that they objected. Only in dictatorships is there universal effusive support for anything. Did Friedman talk to the imprisoned people or their families?
6. "While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”" Those ridiculous foreigners, worried about trivial nonsense like the rule of law, independent courts, and justice for the accused. Just let the King decide who is guilty; that whole American Revolution was a mistake.
7. "to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation — whence it diverted in 1979." First, Friedman buys the framing from the dictator's propaganda: This is the normal state of it, to which the King will return it. I didn't see anyone mention that natural state of things before, in many years of reading about it. Also, this is obviously a play for Western support for his dictatorship. If Friedman is serious, how about talking to some historians and providing some serious history, not the dictator's narrative?
8. "After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country." and "A lawyer by training, who rose up in his family’s education-social welfare foundation." and more: Was this ghost-written by the dictator's flunkies? Kim Jong-Un has similar things written about him, but not in the NY Times!
I'm out of time (and probably so are you), so I'll stop reading the column there ...
9. It is completely one-sided, with barely a hint of skepticism and zero discussion with or even mention of the the dictator's opposition (including the people in jail), critics, victims; no discussion of his weaknesses and failures; no holding him to account for the lack of democracy (or even mention of it). It's a PR piece for a candidate, except there is no election there.
It's so obvious and over-the-top that I almost think Friedman was trying to call attention to the absurdity, like the old satarists behind the Iron Curtain who would get their point across without triggering the censors by being over-the-top effusive* about their oppressors. But who is censoring Friedman?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-...
To call it sickening seems a stretch.
> "The findings show that the Iranian-backed Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war."
Shifting the balance in the war? Not even remotely true and is quite simply impossible while the Saudis have all the help from the US.
But the ability of the Houthis to strike Riyadh is a pretty significant development. If they show the ability to keep doing it consistently it will certainly change how the war is going.
What Yemeni defenses? There are none, and there is no story about it.
The NY Times has covered the outrageous Saudi behavior extensively.
"Saudis Try to Starve Yemen Into Submission" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/saudi-arabia-yeme...
"Yemen’s War Is a Tragedy. Is It Also a Crime?" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/world/middleeast/yemen-cr...
"2 Paths for Yemen’s War-Scarred Children: Combat, or Marriage" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/world/middleeast/yemen-wa...
"‘It’s a Slow Death’: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/23/world/middlee...
"U.S. Fingerprints on Attacks Obliterating Yemen’s Economy" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/world/middleeast/yemen-sa...
I could keep going. Trying to characterize them as excusing the Saudis somehow seems to misrepresent their reporting.
It doesn't say anything about the situation in Yemen, it's just a solid investigative piece about whether the missile was actually intercepted.
Also, "analysts" from Middlebury Institute of International Studies — apparently another nonproliferation shop.[1]
And finally, anonymous "U.S. officials".
If so, I applaud your sense of equity.
Questions:
1. Can you point me where to find more info on UCS ignoring results that contradict their political positions?
2. What "angle" does a nonproliferation shop have in this matter?
3. The article attempts to present some evidence (obviously mostly not to a level required for independent, academic confirmation). So when you see you "see no evidence here", are you saying you need to see it presented in greater detail and to a higher standard, or do you think that the evidence is flawed or misrepresented in some way?
I like the general subject, and I'd love to hear more about it, but this is not good. It's just going to encourage more launches -- and perhaps more deaths.
Part of that is understanding the weaknesses of the existing systems and working to improve them. Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are ineffective.
Unfortunately life is not a linear program and we often don't find maxima at the extremes.
This raises an interesting question: is there evidence that anti-missile systems have actually deterred missile attacks?
The Iron Dome system has a (disputed) success rate vastly higher than the Patriot system, but I can't find evidence that missile attacks against Israel have substantially declined in response to its deployment. Perhaps better organized entities like national militaries would react more thoroughly, but that also raises the specter of a displacement effect that fails to save lives.
I definitely agree with you that "improving defenses" and "promoting defenses as deterrents" may be conflicting aims, but I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place.
I find it fascinating this HN thing we do where we skim over a comment, decide whether author agrees with us or not politically, and then pile on.
I didn't say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect. The topic was not part of my comment. At all. My only point was a simple and pragmatic one: if you have a stockpile of missiles, and you shoot one? Having somebody give you a moment-by-moment account of what happened on that missile's journey is a quite valuable thing that you will use the next time you shoot one of your missiles.
My comment had zero to do with missile defense (aside from noting my interest in the subject). It was just pointing out that in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
I'm not going to comment on missile defense. Not relevant to the point I was making.
You said this but then failed to cite anything from the article remotely supporting your claim.
> in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
Saudi Arabia is not us. Hell, I don't even like KSA, an autocratic regime with a value system completely antithetical to ours but yeah, with a boatload of oil.
Governments are obviously made up of people, just like corporations, but they seem to become an entity unto themselves. I see this often when Europeans talk about policy initiatives in the US (and vice versa by Americans when discussing mass immigration in Europe). While KSA does not (yet) enjoy a mutual defense pact with the USA on paper, neither does Israel. And yet, in certain circumstances, an attack on Haifa is an attack on the West. I don't particularly like Bibi and his buddies, but that doesn't change the strategic geopolitical situation in the slightest.
So the KSA is sometimes an extension of the US, for better or for worse, which is what i think the commenter you were responding to was implying.
I don't have any idea what your politics are, and neither the conflict (Houthis vs. Saudi government) nor the news story align neatly with a political position. I considered the Trump section basically incidental, especially since even US government officials are split on the details of the story.
You did not say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect, but you said that writing an article about the failure of an anti-missile systems "..is just going to encourage more launches". That's only true if damage reports and anti-missile news influence launch decisions; I think I (and the other people responding to you) made a completely obvious inference.
There's also serious equivocation here, buried under "you". If you mean "the KSA had an obvious incentive to say they shot the missile down", I agree. But the top-level comment was about "irresponsible journalism" which you suggested might literally kill people. Again, that's only true if this story undermined a deterrent effect, and "the New York Times" is certainly not the same "you" as "the Saudi Government".
Deterrence itself is such a tricky animal. Does my act of open carrying a firearm discourage ne'er-do-wells from initiating crime? Put another way, it is hard to tell the efficacy of using a safety helmet because we generally have poor statistics about the people who do not get hurt at all precisely because they were wearing a helmet (...because they don't go to hospital or morgue). I recognize that this is a bit of a bird hop from the topic at hand.
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
Iron Dome is a realistic reaction to short-range, unguided rockets which can be intercepted with proximity explosives; it's entirely suitable for defending Tel Aviv against the West Bank.
At a nuclear level, the Safeguard system may have been a reasonable variant of Patriot defenses to stop ICBM attacks, I wouldn't really know.
But in the gap between the two, defenders have to shoot down guided, high-velocity conventional warheads near the target site using near-impact or impact interceptors. That's pretty much the worst possible position to be in, and as far as I can see no ABM system is actually effective at it.
I keep seeing the role of editor missing in mainstream news. This is the kind of article that could have been published with judicious editing without ending up a bomb damage assessment for terrorists.
I don't think you get to point out how important the topic is and get a free pass regarding impact. Articles like this have consequences.
Better to get the system refined when the stakes are low. When the Houthis miss the airport and they're a lot more likely to hit sand than city. When NK misses some city in SK (not necessarily Seoul because they can hit that with conventional artillery) they're much more likely to hit something we don't want them to hit. Now, the latter situation may not be relevant within the lifetime of this system but having the system be "battle tested" serves to make it even less likely.
This sort of scaled to all defensive and deterrent systems. The more successful they are the more the generals in the war room will say "We can't just do $offensive_thing because it's not likely enough to be effective in the face of $defensive_thing"
With that said, if anybody's going to block a sale like that, it's Israel, not KSA. The Israelis don't trust KSA anywhere nearly enough to trust KSA with domestically developed systems.
And you are wrong about the war including every other Arab country. It would only include Iran.
SA is trying to counter Iran, and they want that badly enough to work with Israel to accomplish it.
Other Arab countries aren't going to get involved.