Some of the missiles reportedly struck “Israel’s” Nevatim Air Force base, which is one of “Israel’s” largest airports and is the main base for F-35 fighter jets.
Some of the missiles reportedly struck “Israel’s” Nevatim Air Force base, which is one of “Israel’s” largest airports and is the main base for F-35 fighter jets.
Well it seems like the iron dome is useless against a near-peer barrage. I’m not surprised though. I did some research on ballistic missile defense and there’s no practical way to stop them once they reach terminal velocity.
Defense is focused on mid-flight interception when they’re moving relatively slowly and even the US’ latest and greatest system for that is ~56% effective. Im order to bring that up to 97%, you need to fire four interceptors per incoming missile and they cost $75M each. A patriot missile is $4M. The US has, in total, 44 interceptors with half in Alaska and half in California. It’s essentially useless against hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles.
You’re not going to have much success using the Patriots against modern ballistic missiles, as Ukraine has found out. And as the Israeli military bases protected by Patriots found out yesterday. It’s interceptor missiles are too slow. You need something like the Arrow intercept system with Arrow 2 and 3 interceptor missiles that travel at Mach 9+ to stand a chance of shooting down ballistic missiles mid flight. Israel has used this system to intercept ballistic missiles launched from Yemen before. But obviously against a combined multi layered attack by Iran the system got overwhelmed.