Israel Successfully Test-Fires Magic Wand, Successor to Iron Dome Interceptor | Hacker News Reader

Israel Successfully Test-Fires Magic Wand, Successor to Iron Dome Interceptor

ibtimes.co.uk

8 points1337biz10 comments

Its entirely unclear to me if it stabilizes or de-stabilizes an area by rendering missile attacks ineffective, but it is clear that this has come a long way from the Patriot batteries in the Gulf War which were not nearly as effective as one would hope.

Having done a bit of coding in my robotics work to have moving robots attempt to intercept other moving robots I came to appreciate how hard the tracking and intercept problem was from an inverse kinematics perspective.

How would it destabilize the area? Hamas and Israel aren't in a missile arms race.

At risk of getting into a political discussion on HN, they are. If Israel is able to shoot down missiles, those that want to hit it with missiles will try to make better missiles, at which point Israel will need to build a better missile defense system.

It strikes me as quite a bit like our anti-air defenses in the cold war, where we kept building weapons to shoot down Russian bombers, so they kept building better bombers. You can see the same thing with insurgent IEDs and US armor in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That said, I'm not sure that it will further destabilize the region. I'm not sure how it could make it worse.

In the best-known case of a fraught missile defense scheme (that of the US), the concern was that the US and Russian/USSR had effective parity in offensive capability and were thus stalemated (to the betterment of all). An effective missile defense capability could have broken the nuclear stalemate and made nuclear strategy once again fluid and unpredictable.

This is simply not the case with Israel. Israel and Hamas do not have military parity. What prevents Israel from wiping Hamas off the planet is humanitarian concern (either heartfelt or driven by realpolitik, depending on which Israeli leader you're thinking of and what you think of Israel in general). I would be surprised (and delighted) if you found a credible analyst that said otherwise.

Meanwhile, the notion that missile defense drives Hamas to seek ever more sophisticated missiles seems hollow as well, for a couple reasons: first, it implies that Hamas wouldn't source the most effective missiles available to it; next, it implies that there's no strategic benefit to forcing Hamas to source more expensive missiles (there is: first, it raises Hamas' costs, and second, it makes it harder for the entities that support Hamas to conceal their support); next, it implies that the costs to Israel of those more-sophisticated missiles are higher when what we're really talking about is Israel simply accepting the cost of less-sophisticated missiles killing their citizens.

I was watching the news last week and was struck by a fact that I didn't consider:

Iron Dome missiles cost upwards of $50,000 to shoot down rockets costing ~$800. I suppose those $800 rockets could do way more than $50,000 in damage if they hit an important target, not to mention causing casualties, but man, that's crazy.

That's basically a monetary DoS. :)

Brilliant, I guess this means there will be absolutely no excuse to bomb the shit out of densely populated Gaza now.

One of the biggest fears when the Star Wars program was launched was if it actually succeeded, there would be little hesitation by the military to be more aggressive since they would then believe they could survive reprisals.

Israel is probably not restrained by fear of reprisal by Hamas.

Effective anti-missile defense probably increases Israel's ability to absorb attacks, maybe try to use sanctions/blockade, etc. for longer.

If there were large numbers of Israelis getting killed, I'm confident Israel would bomb the shit out of Gaza and send in troops. I guess I trust technology to prevent this more than I trust Israel-Hamas peace process to prevent this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com