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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

If the hackers were after the Iron Dome, it looks like it doesn't work [1] based on analysis by Theodore Postol of MIT [2]

1: http://thebulletin.org/evidence-shows-iron-dome-not-working7...

2: http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/postol.html

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His analysis is flawed.

For example, imagine if several rockets are fired at a hospital. Iron Dome intercepts the rockets, throwing them off course. The rockets then land in parks and parking lots, killing no one.

Under Postol's standards, that's a complete failure. Because the warheads weren't destroyed.

But most people would judge that as a major success.

Assuming the rockets are reasonably accurate and targeted to do the most damage possible, simply damaging the rockets and changing their path is a success.

You're seriously overestimating the quality of the Palestinian rockets. See this http://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/dissecting-idf-propaganda-the-... article for the numbers. 12000 fired rockets yielding 26 casualties over a ten year period is not a good record. The number are from before the Iron Dome became operative.

Assuming the rockets are reasonably accurate and targeted to do the most damage possible,

I'm saying this hesitantly, because it has the potential for things to go off the rails into a flame war, but the rockets are very inaccurate -- literally hitting the side of a barn would be a good strike. Damaging them probably reduces the chances of them hitting a high-value target by a few percentage points, but they have no targeting systems on board. They are flung in a general area, and landing in place X or place Y in that general area isn't too much different.

There are also significant psychological factors at play.

Iron Dome calculates the probable impact point of rockets fired at Israel, and only intercepts rockets that are going towards inhabited areas.

Which means somewhere the Israelis have a priority map with which areas are more or less important to defend.

Can you imagine the shitstorm that would come out of something like that leaking?

Nah; if something is projected to land in a bunch of, say, farmland, then trying to intercept it could make it land someplace worse.

A necessary prerequisite to a missile defense system is a way of telling where rockets are going. Even if they don't have the first, they probably have the second.

I don't see Postol claiming that it doesn't work -- his report is full of theory but very low on numbers. Rather, it seems he is calling for the defenders of the system to provide verifiable numbers, such as "140 inbound targets were defended against, and here are the timestamps, and we intercepted 130 of them, given these timestamps," which could then be checked.

Watching from the outside, I have no particular reason to believe one side or the other.

Postol says maybe 5% of the Iron Dome rockets destroy their targets. A CNN page claimed 95%. This latest Krebs article has the IDF saying 20%.

This whole argument smells like a modern military getting everybody to believe that "Iron Dome is 95% effective", just like everybody knows that the Patriot system was 95% or more effective during Desert Storm I. Or like everybody knows that WMD were found in Iraq after the USA invaded.

That is, Iron Dome is more of a propaganda tool than a real defense system, or maybe its more of a way to funnel money to Rafael and IAI than a real defense system. I doubt we'll ever know. Statistically speaking, there's only a few real secrets, but there's lots and lots of career-ending blunders, accounting oddities, and systems gaming.

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