Iran Launches More Than 100 Drones Toward Israel | Hacker News Reader

Iran Launches More Than 100 Drones Toward Israel

wsj.com

25 pointshtk22 comments

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40025617

Technically speaking, why not a missile attack instead? Drones seem to be easier targets to defend against.

It's looking like this whole thing might have been theatre for their own population: they've now been seen to have taken severe enough action to have received international military defense and condemnation, without going so far as to provoke retaliation.

Exactly this. The announcements in advance "we will attack", "it's going to be huuuge" - if they were serious, it would have been idiotic to give their opponent warning.

Then the supermassive attack...is about what Ukraine deals with every week, only Israel has allies helping it defend.

Honestly, Iran looks pretty stupid here. But I'm sure their internal propaganda frames it differently.

> Honestly, Iran looks pretty stupid here

They've performed a real world test on how their weapons perform against Israeli air defences.

And the results of the test were not impressive. But no doubt they've gathered lots of real world data, which they can use to inform the development of their next generation of weapons.

And no doubt they'll share that data with Russia and China. Because a lot of Israel's air defences is based on technology shared with the US and other US allies, so whatever Iran learns from this might end up being applicable in conflicts in other parts of the globe

Maybe not such a stupid decision after all

Timing: if you want everything to arrive around the same time, you launch the missiles later; and this is in fact what happened.

As for why drones at all, well, the swarm koolade is tasty.

Can’t the drones fire missiles?

Not really, the sort of missile with range and speed relevant to this conflict is itself larger than the drones that would be firing them.

There are orders of magnitude difference in size and capability for things called “drones”, and likewise for “missiles”.

So what do the drones do, kamikaze basically? They’ve got a warhead attached to their belly and just fly into a target?

Not completely up to date, but: https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Drone-Revolution

“OK, but are we sure that we couldn’t just substitute a huge quantity of cheap systems for the expensive ones? Quantity has a quality all its own, and if we throw enough drones at a carrier, it’s going to die. Again, no. In theory, you could overwhelm a carrier by throwing drones at it, but for cases where the “drones” aren’t just cruise missiles, this is like attempting to break down a door by throwing mashed potatoes at it.”

Exactly, yeah.

It's a sore spot for me that we don't call them cruise missiles, even though I understand the argument (in principle they can be called back and recovered, and will have a loitering capability that is sometimes useful).

You are seeing an snapshot, we don't know if something comes next.

you can relax. there were also cruise and ballistic missiles. timed to arrive at ~same time. probably attempt to overload air defense

There were no ballistic missiles, that report was confirmed false.

yeah. and this is why idf speaker jumped into live tv and said that missiles were lunched. after this entire south was covered by air defense alerts and high altitude interceptors were launched.

Cruise missiles are not ballistic missiles, and even if it was just drones, it would be stupid to not prepare for the possibility of ballistic missiles.

cruise missiles were launched more than hour ago. it were ballistic missiles and to intercept were launched arrow 2/3 which work way up there and deal specifically with ballistic missiles

Sorry, I'm having some trouble understanding what you're saying.

They have layered ballistic defense, and it's on alert. Are you saying that they've confirmed launches in an attempt to shoot down ballistic missiles they've spotted? Do you have any links to sources? Everything official I've read seems to confirm my understanding, and there has only been one unconfirmed source claiming otherwise that I've seen.

yes. almost hour ago were detected ballistic missile launches from Iran and Israel launched interceptors. There is some random footage of high attitude intercepts. It's all over israeli news web sites and was/is discussed on israeli tv news in last hour

video https://new.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1c3fd8u/arro...

edit: news saying now that ~100 ballistic missiles were shot at israel and majority were intercepted outside of it's borders

Fair; took a little bit for that news to get here.

drones are more versatile

Not meaningfully for the purposes they're being applied here: drones are cheap, and will eventually arrive (if they're not shot down first), and so you can launch a bunch of them and make a credible claim to your people that you've taken the matter seriously, while not actually costing much or risking a huge retaliation in response to your alpha strike.

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