Those who claim they are anti-war, and for peace (inverted commas stand ready for use), have in the past often had a rather curious hostility towards anti-missile defence systems. I remember that when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Sec. in the US in the early noughties, his support for anti-missile defence (I am using the British spelling of defence, okay?) was seen as somehow problematic, a sign of what a fool he was, etc, etc.
Well, how the world turns. From the Wall Street Journal on Monday this week:
It’s no small irony that President Biden is hailing the success of missile and drone defenses over Israel. In the 1980s there was no more dedicated foe of missile defense than Sen. Joe Biden. Democrats have resisted or under-financed missile defenses for decades on grounds that they’re too expensive and too easily defeated by new technology.
Progressives oppose defenses because they think vulnerability somehow makes war less likely. On nuclear arms, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others prefer the doctrine of mutual-assured destruction to being able to shoot down enemy ICBMs.
Israel’s defenses proved how wrong this view is, displaying their practical and strategic value. If the more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles had reached their targets, Mr. Biden wouldn’t be able to say, as he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night, “take the win.” The mass casualties would have all but guaranteed a large-scale military escalation.
It seems to me that, if you are a small/minimal state sort of person, hostile to foreign interventionism (as much as of the domestic kind), and purely in favour of using force in response to the initiation of physical force, then having the ability to shoot down armed drones and ballistic missiles, fighter jets, etc, is in the same moral bracket as having locks on doors, or the freedom to carry concealed firearms, pepper spray, noise alarms, having a guard dog, a scary spouse, etc.
Here’s an item about the Iron Dome anti-missile system that Israel uses.
This article asserts that President Biden’s sceptical, even hostile approach, to missile defence goes back decades. In 2021, the Biden administration reportedly pullled a bunch of Patriot anti-missile systems from four Middle East nations.
The UK’s Royal Navy has a Sea Viper system to knock down drones. Here is an official release about such technology in the UK. The British Army has something called a Sky Sabre system.
Those who are against missile defense are supporting the mass death of civilians – it is that brutally simple.
And if there had not been missile defense in Israel the “Dome of the Rock” Mosque would now be rubble – it seems that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not care about it.
As for Joseph “Joe – 10% for the Big Guy” Biden – even before he went senile he was utterly corrupt and wrong about everything.
People who think he was a “moderate” have never studied his Senate voting record.
Being a moderate is not about fake “Irish” charm – it is about how someone votes.
Think back to the 1980s, when all the “smart people” mocked Reagan and the whole entire concept of ballistic missile defense. Remember all that? How “It will never work!!!”, and what a waste of money it was?
Do you remember who told you those things?
Now, ask yourself: Why do those people still have the slightest credibility on any issue, given how wrong they were on this pivotal point?
This is a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia. You had the authority tell you this, you accepted it as a truth, and now that it’s been proven through actual performance that it’s far from true, you still accept other lies from those same assholes.
Who’s the dummy, again? If you believed anything of the “conventional wisdom” about SDI and “Star Wars Missile Defense” back in the day, you need to go look yourself in the mirror and acknowledge some unpleasant truths.
Kirk – yes, yes indeed Sir.
I miss Ronald Reagan.
@Johnathan Pearce
Most politicians make things more complicated, a few make them more straightforward. But making things more straightforward deprives the bureaucrats of their reason for being and thus is resisted, downplayed, laughed at, belittled.
It is important to note that Israel is the country with best air defence in the world and also due to small size can it is easier to protect it all. All other Western countries have very small and complete inadequate air defence. All would have significant damage by the Iranian attack.
Sea Viper is a based on Aster a french-Italian missile, with a British fire control
Sky Sabre is based on CAMM an english missile – that Italians made a longer range version – with an Israeli fire control said to be based on Iron Dome.
The small number of CAMM batteries means that not even major airports and air bases in UK can be all protected.
We are seeing that the most dishonest profession – journalism – continues the narrative work to punish the countries that protect their civilians, and reward those that don’t.
Since Israel had very few losses from Iranian attack the media narrative is that it should do nothing against Iran. So Iran can continue to build their attack force until it wins over Israel defences in future.
Kirk, whilst I am glad that we never went to war with Russia, we still don’t know if Star Wars (as it was called) would have worked. The extra spending may have bankrupted the Russians, thus bringing about the end of the Cold War, which is all to the good, but would it have worked as well as Iron Dome?
I’m in favour of missile defence along the lines of iron dome. Whether such a thing can be made that would be of much help if there was a full scale nuclear war between superpowers and hundreds of nuclear ICBMs were launched simultaneously I am much more sceptical of.
Iron dome works against cruise missiles, rockets , suicide drones. It doesn’t against hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles. Israel have from low to high: Iron Dome, David Sling and Patriot and Arrow.
For Great Britain would make sense to have low end against cruise missiles and long range drones and and high end against ballistic missiles.
I should like to see some sums.
How many drones can you shoot down per hour / minute / whatev with $10 billion worth of :
(a) SuperfancyInterGalactica DroneKiller missiles from the Senate Defense Committee’s favorite US Defense Contractor
(b) 1990s technology
(c) machine guns and other 1940s technology ?
All sums assuming a genuine commitment to air defence – ie you may assume a good long production run.
No, I don’t really need y’all to do the sums, but I do worry that air defence procurement in the West is heavily influenced by (a) graft and (b) low production runs. Obviously in practice an enemy – like Russia – may deploy a mixture of high tech expensive missiles that (b) and (c) can’t touch at all, so you have to have some of the Superfancies for that. (Likewise Star Wars – machine guns perform poorly against ballistic missiles.)
But you also have to have plenty of cheap stuff to shoot down the enemy’s cheap incoming.
You can’t afford to be in a position where it costs you $500,000 to defend against something that it costs the other side $10,000 to shoot at you. However rich you are, you’re gonna run out of ammo first.
FWIW, as someone who is very strongly non interventionist, meaning that Johnathan and I would vehemently disagree on subjects such as Israel and Ukraine, I 100% agree with him on this. If you think the purpose of the military is to defend the country from foreign military intervention (as opposed to going all over the world, sticking our big bazoo in every minor political conflict), and, if you are the United States with two oceans to stymie conventional invasions, or the UK with the channel to serve a similar if more limited function, then missile defense should be probably the primary function of the military. It is the only substantial and significant threat to the homeland.
Feel free to argue with me about the threat of terrorism, you might be right, but it is small potatoes compared to the threat from missiles.
And yet it is something we have seriously neglected for fifty years. It is embarrassing and shameful. All those trillions spent on foreign wars and fancy planes, and still a single missile could take out Washington or New York or Boston, or all three.
In terms of Britain, at least in terms of the country itself, I’d say with regards to Iran, terrorism more of a threat than rockets. It came out in 2019 that the security services in 2015 quietly foiled a Hezbollah plot within Britain. I’d be surprised if Iran doesn’t have cells in Britain it could use if they wanted to. Given how ridiculous Britain’s immigration policies have been for over 20 years, I suspect many more countries than just Iran may have inserted terrorists into the country posing as asylum seekers or economic migrants.
I think that some of the reactions and denial of the need for missile defense (sorry, US spelling. UK spelling does make more sense FWIW) was a shallow minded understanding of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that kept the USA and Soviets from using nukes like footballers (of either the American or the British [Soccer] variety) use swear words. There was a streak of “defense would be aggressive and destabilizing” in the US Military, Intelligence agencies, and the Department-of-Traitors I mean -State. I found their arguments against missile defense mostly spurious and political, rarely logical or even budgetary. Being in the military and on the engineering side I was more in the “Can we build it? Yes we can!” camp. But the big LASERs never panned out (see Project Viper IIRC), the STS (AKA Shuttle) was too expensive for the lots of launches we would have needed. The various projects mostly ended up as funding for laboratories and think tanks.
@ZilWerks I totally get your point — missile defense? are the bozos who run the government even capable of spelling “ABM” in the ABM treaty?
But even in the government, if you sling around enough cash something is sure to shake out of all the corruption and pork — partly because there are many good and decent engineers working in the defense industry. I mean the F-35 for all its audacious and notorious corruption and oceans of fat, is still a pretty good airplane. If, for example, they had spent the five trillion dollars and twenty years pissed away in the mid east instead on an ABM system (which would counter the major threat in the US), they’d have something pretty good.
Five trillion is a lot of money. It is pretty hard to piss ALL of it away on crap.
I’m sure Biden would have been among to embrace “Ronnie Ray-Gun” as a means of referring to Ronald Reagan. Wrong on every major policy issue of his time in Washington, Biden’s handlers are pillorying us in an attempt to, as someone pointed out elsewhere,”reverse gaslight” us into thinking that the insane are the truly rational among us.
Maybe I’m too dumb about this stuff, but the link to the Iron Dome system, shows a nice cartoon of “detect incoming missile”, “decide what it is”, “shoot it down if you don’t like it”.
Now if that first system, “detect (and track!) incoming missiles” is good enough, can’t you back calculate where the missile originated from (only works for ballistic launches, not for guided munitions, obviously)? If you can–and that calc takes like a millisecond–then a fourth element of the system is needed: “send something 10x bigger back the way that one came”. And if the targeting accuracy is off a bit, chances are you’ll hit something useful anyway (idiot standing next to the launcher).
My guess is that the attack-defense cycle of Iron Dome is so fast that if my fourth element were roughly as fast, the bad guys’ launcher would get hit before they could start the engine to move it!
Others here know a lot more about such things…but surely some version of this is possible…at least for some threats. Yes?
GregWA – that system would be even better if the targeting accuracy wasn’t too good.
I can’t think of anything more likely to discourage the mad mullahs from poking Israel than a robust and somewhat indiscriminate response.
I don’t think they’d care. They’d probably consider that to be a miss (on them), and a good thing, as it would help motivate their hired mobs’ frenzy.
As possibly alluded to by Lee Moore, the cost of offence vs the cost of defence is critical.
From the viking invasion of Saxon England, the battle of Britain, and now Ukraine/Israel, it has always been the case that offence is cheaper than defence.
If you want to bomb some part of London, you just need to point a rocket in the right direction as long as you are confident that it will land within a +/- 5 km radius of the target. You’re going to hit something worth hitting. If you want to shoot that bomb carrying V2 down you need to hit it with pinpoint accuracy. That is much more difficult and expensive.
The best way to defend your population is to have it dispersed over a large territory. Yes, missile defence can work in the short term, but you better be prepared to follow up quickly with offensive action.
The best way the West can help the Ukraine is to send it missiles capable of reaching cities deep in Russia. The best way Israel can ensure its continued existence is to wipe out the Iranian missile capability.
@GregWA
And if the targeting accuracy is off a bit, chances are you’ll hit something useful anyway
Like a children’s hospital? When you, as a country, decide to behave according to some moral code of decency it is definitely a tactical disadvantage. But it is the price of decency. And if you have vast technological superiority, part of that superiority is paid for that decency. It is the difference between fighting for what you believe in rather than just fighting to win.
No doubt there are times when dropping a bomb on a children’s hospital is necessary. There is also no doubt that sometimes we have to abandon decency and fight just to survive. But it is not something we should relish, and certainly not something that some automated system should decide.
If Hamas puts a rocket launcher in a children’s hospital and retaliation causes the death of those children then it is definitely Hamas’ responsibility. The blood of those children are on Hamas’ hands. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a hospital full of dead children. Irrespective of who is morally responsible, decent people demand that such collateral damage be either eliminated or reduced even if there is great cost in doing so.
I’m in favor of an intense and violent response to Oct7, and the utter destruction of Hamas. Hang the bastards on a pole in public. However, I find the relish for the indiscriminate genocidal destruction of all Palestinians[*] in Gaza that I read here quite disturbing.
[*] or at least people who call themselves Palestinians.
FWIW, as someone who is very strongly non interventionist, meaning that Johnathan and I would vehemently disagree on subjects such as Israel and Ukraine, I 100% agree with him on this. If you think the purpose of the military is to defend the country from foreign military intervention (as opposed to going all over the world, sticking our big bazoo in every minor political conflict), and, if you are the United States with two oceans to stymie conventional invasions, or the UK with the channel to serve a similar if more limited function, then missile defense should be probably the primary function of the military. It is the only substantial and significant threat to the homeland.
The first sentence overplays it, but I agree totally on the rest of that paragraph. After all, I wrote it!
I am for intervention not for the altruist/nation-building reasons that have led countries astray on multiple occasions, but if the country in question poses a clear and present threat, or is providing shelter to such a C&PT. Of course, judgements can be wrong, and there are unintended consequences to consider.
Israel is intervening in Gaza, and likely to do so in Southern Lebanon, and soon. Ukraine is “intervening” by hitting targets in Russia, and so forth. (Putin, in his malevolent way, claims he was doing the same in trying to topple the government in Kyiv, but the dishonesty of that, and his previous actions in formenting trouble, render that argument moot).