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"