With the outbreak of any wave of confrontation between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation forces, voices are growing - inside and outside Israel - confirming the efficiency and accuracy of the "Iron Dome" defense system operated by the occupying power, and its ability to repel the vast majority of rockets coming from Gaza, but this claim, as confirmed by successive rounds of confrontation, including the existing confrontation, needs to be carefully examined.
Basically, Iron Dome (1) is an advanced missile defense system that starts from a radar that activates if any missile is launched within a range of 5-70 kilometers from a point centered on the area covered by the dome, while the radar sends information to a processing unit that studies the path of the missile, its type, and whether it is heading to a populated area or not, and through artificial intelligence algorithms, decides whether the next missile deserves to be intercepted or not.
The Iron Dome system uses cost-benefit analysis to make the decision, so that the priority is to prevent casualties, and when it makes its decision, an anti-missile is launched from one of the Iron Dome batteries, which are carefully distributed in different areas within the city to be secured, with a length of about three meters and a width equal to 15 centimeters, targeting the incoming missile.
The most powerful in the world!
The basic claim, which the Israeli occupation authorities have adopted since the war on Gaza in 2012, and which they continue to issue propaganda to all countries of the world as an unprecedented military and technical victory, is that the efficiency of the system(2) exceeds 84%, meaning that out of every hundred rockets that the dome begins to track, it successfully intercepts at least 84 rockets.
The military operation began with the killing of Ahmad al-Jabari, deputy commander-in-chief of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing, as a result of an airstrike, and lasted eight days, during which the resistance factions intensified their rocket attacks on Israeli cities, firing a total of about 1500,<> rockets at Israel, and more than a hundred rockets inside Gaza itself.
In the 2014 war on Gaza, which lasted nearly 50 days and erupted against the backdrop of popular anger that followed the kidnapping and torture of Palestinian child Mohammed Abu Khdeir by a group of settlers, Israeli propaganda evolved to say that the dome's capabilities(3) exceeded beyond 90%, with Iron Dome supporters portraying it as a great development of a project that began work on less than five years ago.
During that battle, the Palestinian resistance factions launched about 5,960 rockets, but only 735 of them were within the range of the Iron Dome, while the rest fell in uninhabited areas, and according to Israeli sources, the dome intercepted 225 rockets, and 70 rockets fell in areas within the dome's field of work, <> of these rockets the dome tried to deal with but failed, while the rest escaped completely.
This has led some interested in the scope of military science to say that the lack of Israeli casualties indicates that the Iron Dome is the most effective and most tested missile shield the world has ever seen.[4] But although you will hear and read these allegations a lot on social media and in foreign media outlets, especially since they receive tremendous media support, you will not hear or read much about the other opinion that questions the enormous publicity about the effectiveness of the Israeli system.
%90 really?!
The first to suggest that the figures announced by the Israeli authorities may be incorrect was a professor from the Massachusetts Higher Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, Theodore Postol, who specializes in engineering sciences and is interested in engineering matters related to national security. After the war on Gaza in 2012 and at the height of Israeli propaganda, Postol came out to say(5) that the announced percentages about the effectiveness of Iron Dome are incorrect, and that the interception rates of rockets coming from Gaza are less than 10%.
This image is simultaneously mesmerizing and horrifying, capturing the dynamics of modern asymmetric warfare in one snapshot. Iron Dome is the world's most sophisticated short range missile defense systems. But Hamas is testing whether quantity has a quality all of its own. pic.twitter.com/rsU80xIg8g
— Vipin Narang (@NarangVipin) May 14, 2021
Postol followed a large number of videos and photos that citizens of Israel displayed on social media of the moments when Iron Dome rockets intercepted other rockets coming from Gaza, and then studied them from a different point of view, as the engineering professor believes that it is not only about intercepting a military missile, but you must meet it head to head.
In order to be able to destroy a rocket, it is necessary to destroy the explosive head of the missile, which is located in the front, but if you hit it sideways, you may shoot it down, but it will still be explosive as soon as it reaches the ground, and Bostol focused especially on the so-called "laser fuse", which is laser beams that come out of the head of the interceptor missile in all directions, and as soon as it passes next to a rocket coming from Gaza, the dome rocket explodes and detonates the rocket coming with it.
Postol calculations(6) indicated that it is rare to reach that point where the two rockets stand so that the head of the rocket coming from Gaza is within range of the explosion, which led him to the conclusion that a large number of rockets dropped by the Iron Dome system cannot be calculated as a danger that has been removed because they will fall inside the field of the dome and explode on the ground, hence he concluded that the real result of the effectiveness of the Iron Dome does not even reach 10%.
Postol is not the only skeptic of the effectiveness of the Hebrew defense system, as many experts supported it[7] such as Richard M. Lloyd, a former warhead expert at Raytheon, and others from within the Israeli occupation army itself, such as Reuven Bedatzur, a former fighter pilot in the occupation army and a supporter of laser-based defense systems, and Mordechai Schaeffer, the winner of the Israeli Defense Award, all of whom rated the effectiveness of this system between 5% and 40% maximum.
Reluctant accounts
At this point, the Iron Dome movement argues that the results on the ground can be judged in its favor, and at that point they compare the average damage rates achieved by enemy missiles (resistance rockets) during wars before and after the use of Iron Dome, specifically during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 compared to the military operations against Gaza in 2012 and 2014.
But even this argument lacks accuracy,8 because if we put one of the military operations, the war on Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, during which the resistance factions fired hundreds of rockets at targets inside the occupying state, the equation is shaking and the results do not seem to be constantly oriented towards minimizing the damage, which means that there may be other reasons besides the strength of the Iron Dome system, such as the type of rockets fired in each battle of the war. Hezbollah on the part of Lebanon, and the resistance factions in Palestine, with all their armaments).
Both Postol and Lloyd,9 suggest that the low death toll caused by rockets coming from Gaza, or elsewhere, has nothing to do with Iron Dome's capability, but primarily because of the early warning system that tells people on the ground that a rocket is moving in their direction, as well as the shelter system arranged so that individuals can easily reach them within tens of seconds of the alarm.
During World War II, one of the factors that greatly reduced the damage in several English cities was the increase in the number of seconds available after warning citizens, before any rocket fell on the city, and the capabilities of this early warning system in the occupying power, affiliated with the Iron Dome, were developed to reach 15 seconds(10) in cities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, and more than 90 seconds in distant cities such as Jerusalem or areas such as Beersheba.
Temporary solution
In addition to all this, even if the success of the Iron Dome system is confirmed, there are existing damages related to the nature of the system itself, which fails to deal with certain types of rockets, especially (11) short-range rockets (5-7 kilometers), as the Iron Dome cannot deal effectively with this type of projectiles, leaving the occupation cities located on the borders of Gaza threatened.
Even if Iron Dome succeeds in repelling the attack by 90%, as Israel claims, the solution would be to launch more rockets by the resistance, and Fateh Shabir,[12] a military scientist from Tel Aviv University, believes that there is an undeclared maximum endurance limit to this system, and if this limit is exceeded, all rockets will pass deep into the occupied territories.
In addition, firing just one Iron Dome rocket costs about $50,<>, compared to just a few hundred dollars for rockets coming from Gaza, so two thousand rockets coming from Gaza, even if they do not cause significant damage, will undoubtedly affect Israel's defense budget.
After all this cost, the rockets coming from Gaza are still effective regardless of whether they hit their targets or not, because the citizen inside the occupying power finds himself forced to leave what is in his hands at the first warning and immediately flee to a shelter, and there is also a need to stop the airlines throughout the battle, and therefore the magnitude of the "psychological", and perhaps economic, damage is still great.
All this while we are talking about a very advanced system, using artificial intelligence mechanisms, in the face of rockets of the Palestinian resistance factions, which are usually locally made or have weak capabilities, so what if you know that researchers in this range do not expect things to continue like this? One day, the resistance factions will reach more sophisticated missile technologies, whether by following complex and unpredictable trajectories or using missiles that can maneuver, which already exist but remain to reach their hands at some point.
Of course, we can understand the reason for the exaggeration of the allegations coming from the Israeli occupation state, as the matter does not stop only at the limits of the attempt to terrorize the resistance factions, but also has political purposes such as displaying technical force on the countries of the region, and reassuring citizens inside the occupying power, as well as an economic purpose, as the occupying power is working to sell this system to several other countries, and countries such as Azerbaijan, Romania, India and the United States have already concluded agreements with the Israeli occupation state to obtain it.
In the end, the Iron Dome is a superior piece of technology and may witness in the future a great development, this is something that no one denies, and it has contributed to reducing the losses of the occupying power, but its alleged "enormous" success is doubtful, because it depends in large part on the weakness of the resources of the Palestinian resistance factions, and the calculations of some specialists in this scope primarily question the Israeli figures about its effectiveness, and in any case, everyone agrees that, no matter how strong it is, it will remain A temporary solution that will soon be overtaken with the development of the military capabilities of the resistance.
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