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Comment by 0dayz | Hacker News Reader

This is not mostly true: Israel's anti air defense works surprisingly well against Iran's attack, the issue has always been 2 things:

Who has more missiles to throw?

And the Patriot is still top class in it's designed goal: shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.

The second big thing is that no one has designed air defense to take into account effectively slow moving artillery pieces that have the same maneuverability as a missile.

Because that is what drones are and what has been the biggest glaring problem for but the USA, Israel and Russia (the gulf states both use Russian and US anti air defense).

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The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.

It has around 42-77% success rate according to Ukraine themselves against specifically Iskander 9M723 and KN-23.

And your comment makes 0 sense considering S-400 was more designed against aircrafts and cruise missiles than ballistic missiles.

And that success rate comes after significant improvements to the Russian weapons and finesse. They were much less effective early in the war.

Cat and mouse is always a factor in war. The patriot wasn't very good when it was first introduced and took some refining to become the gold standard, which it still is.

It still works very well against planes too, reaching out and downing EWACS aircraft at the edge of it's range.

They were neither designed nor expected to have 100% defense rate, but 50% is lower than expected. 75% isn't great either.

> aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics

Decades-old Patriots shot down Russia's newest "hypersonic" missile.

> Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point

What? Source? You're describing the systems that have been getting floored the world over. Why do you think nobody is placing orders for these anymore?

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