This article skirts dangerously close to helping one side in this war kill folks from the other side. It also has little redeeming social value aside from poking at the current president and missile defense, all of which can happen in other ways. For those reasons, I consider it irresponsible journalism.
I like the general subject, and I'd love to hear more about it, but this is not good. It's just going to encourage more launches -- and perhaps more deaths.
It is very important that we know from real life examples that the missile defense systems they are claiming will protect us are not functional, and that the resource allocation and strategic planning being made around these false promises be re-evaluated.
What is most important is that we avoid death and destruction from these missiles.
Part of that is understanding the weaknesses of the existing systems and working to improve them. Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are ineffective.
Unfortunately life is not a linear program and we often don't find maxima at the extremes.
If these systems have been deployed and are meant to stop missile attacks but the only way they work is if people believe that they work, then they are worse than useless and need to be exposed before our dependence on them grows any further.
> Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are ineffective.
This raises an interesting question: is there evidence that anti-missile systems have actually deterred missile attacks?
The Iron Dome system has a (disputed) success rate vastly higher than the Patriot system, but I can't find evidence that missile attacks against Israel have substantially declined in response to its deployment. Perhaps better organized entities like national militaries would react more thoroughly, but that also raises the specter of a displacement effect that fails to save lives.
I definitely agree with you that "improving defenses" and "promoting defenses as deterrents" may be conflicting aims, but I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place.
"...I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place..."
I find it fascinating this HN thing we do where we skim over a comment, decide whether author agrees with us or not politically, and then pile on.
I didn't say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect. The topic was not part of my comment. At all. My only point was a simple and pragmatic one: if you have a stockpile of missiles, and you shoot one? Having somebody give you a moment-by-moment account of what happened on that missile's journey is a quite valuable thing that you will use the next time you shoot one of your missiles.
My comment had zero to do with missile defense (aside from noting my interest in the subject). It was just pointing out that in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
I'm not going to comment on missile defense. Not relevant to the point I was making.
> This article skirts dangerously close to helping one side in this war kill folks from the other side.
You said this but then failed to cite anything from the article remotely supporting your claim.
> in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
Saudi Arabia is not us. Hell, I don't even like KSA, an autocratic regime with a value system completely antithetical to ours but yeah, with a boatload of oil.
I think it is important to remember that personal feelings have almost no bearing on geopolitics. Plenty of French and British citizens couldn't have cared less about the Sudetenland or Poland.
Governments are obviously made up of people, just like corporations, but they seem to become an entity unto themselves. I see this often when Europeans talk about policy initiatives in the US (and vice versa by Americans when discussing mass immigration in Europe). While KSA does not (yet) enjoy a mutual defense pact with the USA on paper, neither does Israel. And yet, in certain circumstances, an attack on Haifa is an attack on the West. I don't particularly like Bibi and his buddies, but that doesn't change the strategic geopolitical situation in the slightest.
So the KSA is sometimes an extension of the US, for better or for worse, which is what i think the commenter you were responding to was implying.
Bluntly, I think you're hiding behind semantics to push an idea without owning it.
I don't have any idea what your politics are, and neither the conflict (Houthis vs. Saudi government) nor the news story align neatly with a political position. I considered the Trump section basically incidental, especially since even US government officials are split on the details of the story.
You did not say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect, but you said that writing an article about the failure of an anti-missile systems "..is just going to encourage more launches". That's only true if damage reports and anti-missile news influence launch decisions; I think I (and the other people responding to you) made a completely obvious inference.
There's also serious equivocation here, buried under "you". If you mean "the KSA had an obvious incentive to say they shot the missile down", I agree. But the top-level comment was about "irresponsible journalism" which you suggested might literally kill people. Again, that's only true if this story undermined a deterrent effect, and "the New York Times" is certainly not the same "you" as "the Saudi Government".
As an example of the power of deterrence vis a vis defensive capability, you can peruse the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty from the Cold War. Both sides were equally terrified by the thought of their first strike capability being neutralized so much so that they both fairly readily agreed to stop* working on ABM systems to maintain the status quo/balance of terror.
Deterrence itself is such a tricky animal. Does my act of open carrying a firearm discourage ne'er-do-wells from initiating crime? Put another way, it is hard to tell the efficacy of using a safety helmet because we generally have poor statistics about the people who do not get hurt at all precisely because they were wearing a helmet (...because they don't go to hospital or morgue). I recognize that this is a bit of a bird hop from the topic at hand.
I think Iron Dome has a high success rate due to the type of missile. Mostly 80mm unguided 'Katyusha' and 122mm 'Qassam' unguided rockets, which are destroyed by multiple interceptor missiles with proximity fuzed explosive warheads.
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
Agreed on all counts. Iron Dome appears to be a vastly better missile defense solution than the Patriot system, but that's basically because they deal with different problems.
Iron Dome is a realistic reaction to short-range, unguided rockets which can be intercepted with proximity explosives; it's entirely suitable for defending Tel Aviv against the West Bank.
At a nuclear level, the Safeguard system may have been a reasonable variant of Patriot defenses to stop ICBM attacks, I wouldn't really know.
But in the gap between the two, defenders have to shoot down guided, high-velocity conventional warheads near the target site using near-impact or impact interceptors. That's pretty much the worst possible position to be in, and as far as I can see no ABM system is actually effective at it.
What is the most important is that USA stops causing and going into wars all around the globe. After that nobody will threaten to nuke you. Double win.
It is important. It's just not important enough to kill a bunch of people when they didn't have to die. Like I said, I like the topic and would love to hear more on it.
I keep seeing the role of editor missing in mainstream news. This is the kind of article that could have been published with judicious editing without ending up a bomb damage assessment for terrorists.
I don't think you get to point out how important the topic is and get a free pass regarding impact. Articles like this have consequences.
That's quite a conclusion to draw from one article about one test about an early-generation system deployed in a developing country. How does that lead to believing that no such system currently works or could ever work?
I do not think NYT reporters have magic sources, access or analytic ability. They seem to have used public sources of information as sources. The Houthis, or their allies, should have enough analysts to piece the same sources together and arrive at the same conclusion.
"It's just going to encourage more launches" - no it won't. The current missile defense systems do not have a deterrent effect. They are expensive to launch and the 3rd world missiles that they intercept are much cheaper. Even a successful interception is a victory for the agressor.
On some level it's a statistics game. Even in the absence of a defense system X/Y missiles will hit the target depending on the details. A defense system reduces that number further.
Better to get the system refined when the stakes are low. When the Houthis miss the airport and they're a lot more likely to hit sand than city. When NK misses some city in SK (not necessarily Seoul because they can hit that with conventional artillery) they're much more likely to hit something we don't want them to hit. Now, the latter situation may not be relevant within the lifetime of this system but having the system be "battle tested" serves to make it even less likely.
This sort of scaled to all defensive and deterrent systems. The more successful they are the more the generals in the war room will say "We can't just do $offensive_thing because it's not likely enough to be effective in the face of $defensive_thing"
Are we really expecting Patriot batteries to work now? Have they changed fundamentally since the 1991 Gulf War? I know they hit a few SCUDs but I don't recall any sort of expectation that it would keep a major population center safe from attack, especially from a smaller warhead.
The Patriot system actually has seen substantial changes since the first Gulf War. The first Gulf War used what are called 'PAC-2' systems. They've since developed and deployed PAC-3 systems. The list of changes is comprehensive. If nothing else, it uses a new missile that was designed from scratch to act in an anti-ballistic missile role (the PAC-2 used a missile designed for aircraft intercept - the two roles have really different end-game requirements). The radar, the intercept software on the missile itself, mission management software have all been modified.
The PAC-2 missile relied on its ground based radar to guide it onto the target, and relied on an explosive warhead to damage the target. The PAC-3 has an integrated radar to guide itself onto target and is capable of hit to kill intercept.
Now, those are all the claims anyways. We'll have to see how useful all these changes actually were.
I just realized that there is more time between now and the Gulf war than there was between ww1 and ww2. I have no idea if missile interceptor technology has made as much progress as from Sopwith to Spitfire, but wow - I hadn't done the math before on just how long this stuff has been in the field.
... Ok I checked wikipedia and apparently the Patriot was first fielded in 1984 - though not used til '91.
Similarly, the time difference from now to the start of the Vietnam war, is nearly the difference between the Wright Brothers flying at Kitty Hawk and Sputnik.
Patriot tech is completely different now vs Gulf War...the issue here is likely that making a high-performing missile defense system and actually operating it properly are two different things. Especially given the Patriot system's integration with various detection platforms. This is not an Apple product that just works out of the box. Combine the technical challenges with the Arab tendency to sweep embarrassing stuff (e.g., training failures) under the carpet, it's not at all surprising to see the fielded system fail in real life.
Why is it so hard to shoot down a missle? I always thought that ballistic missles travel with a very predictable speed and direction.
So hitting them should be an easy task for a guided missle as long as it got enough time to reach it at all (which I think is not the problem here). So the only problem I can see is to disarm the missle during flight but am not sure if that is what is meant here.
Does anybody know why it should be hard to shoot down a ballistic missle?
They're going very fast and even small errors in the estimate of their position and velocity will be enough to miss. Also, the motion is less predictable if they're in the atmosphere.
This doesn't work well for ballistic missiles. A few ounces of shrapnel doesn't knock the missile very far from it's trajectory. You'd have to get lucky to break the fuse, and even then you'd have a big hunk of explosives heading toward the target and making a big crater. Plus a lot of old missiles have such simple fusing systems that you probably won't break them with just a bit of shrapnel anyway.
As I understand it, the only serious "explode the interceptor" proposal was to use nuclear interceptors against ICBMs. That provides a modest radius of non-projectile destruction, and more importantly provides a large radius of fuse/control-disrupting radiation.
So when it comes to "shooting down a Scud near the ground over a city", you're exactly right. Blowing up your interceptor only works when you've got a high-tech target and are willing to make quite a mess yourself to stop the thing.
I did a tour of the Nike missile site in the Marin Headlands / Golden Gate Park once.
They were very careful to "neither confirm nor deny" whether the site ever had nuclear payloads, but they _did_ make a point to tell everyone that the beautiful mechanical targeting computers had Sacramento programmed in as a target, "just in case"...
Not really, I mean, your opponent is the one controlling the size of the thing you're trying to intercept and they're not going to be trying to make things easier on you. The only viable option given that is to go for area saturation and basically play the odds, but that's really expensive because not only do you need lots of interceptors in that case, but each one needs to be capable of getting a kinetic kill since there's no guarantee which one (if any) will actually hit. At some point I imagine the interceptors become a bigger danger to each other than they are to the thing you're trying to intercept.
> Any way to increase the interception surface/volume ?
Yes - the usual way is to fit the interceptor with a nuclear warhead (see Sprint, Spartan and Nike Zeus on the US side - Fakel 51T6, Novator 53T6 and S-300PS/S-300PM on the Soviet side)... But it has sort of fallen out of fashion...
Wouldn't the neutron flux mess with the properties of the nuclear payload? Shielding against a neutron flux from nuclear explosion probably not practical given the sizes warheads.
If I recall correctly the case of the re-entry vehicle tends to be stuff like depleted uranium, which is pretty good protection against neutron flux up until the point where it begins significant breeder contributions. You'd basically have the hit the vehicle anyway to get close enough for that.
Uranium or lead, heavy nuclei that shield well against gamma radiation would do little for neutrons.
Neutrons needs something with light atom like hydrogen - water or maybe polyethylene and lots of it to slow down. So a small nuclear explosion which emits a neutron pulse might work pretty well. It would hellish if it somehow exploded over a population center, though. Didn't get hit by the ICBM (good). Everyone's bones melted (bad).
Light atoms are used to slow down fast neutrons. Thermal neutron absorbers (large neutron capture cross section) like boron, lithium or cadmium is used for shielding.
Li6H is perfect for shielding warhead. Li6H (Lithium-6 hydride) contains hydrogen to slow down neutrons and lithium to absorb them. It has hightest hydrogen content of any hydride, high melting point and can be casted.
The shielding takes some space and the warhead yield is smaller than without shielding. The goal is not to completely block neutron flux but to reduce it to the level where exploding countermeasure must be very close.
Here is a video of the awesome Sprint ABM missile - (0 to Mach 10 in 5 seconds) - it includes a near miss of an ICBM RV and the RV makes the Sprint look slow:
My dad worked on Sprint. That near miss would have been a definite hit since Sprint was armed with an EMP warhead, a small nuclear device with a few kilotons of yield. Dunno how it would have faired against a MIRV.
You may know this already, but Vernor Vinge did a neat short story where an aged Sprint missile (or something very similar) plays an important role: "The Whirligig of Time".
Sprint was amazing as a rather highly refined brute force bit of engineering - 100g launches, etc.
You know how a rocket is sometimes described as a 'controlled explosion'? The concussion from a Sprint launch was severe enough that a large area around the launch pad would be lethal to any unprotected persons present during a launch. It basically explodes out of the silo.
It was described as trying to hit a bullet with another bullet, but in this case both of them are super fast ones. Complications I can think of:
1) ever seen a missile being fired and flowing? It isn't a smooth movement, rather wobbling in +- target direction. I presume this is due to turbulence in the air and resulting corrections by guiding software. Double the issue due to target and pursuer facing random turbulence on their own
2) some SCUDs have some sort of simple 'randomizer' in their flight for exactly these reasons - to confuse simpler defense (ie boat-based gatlink types which fires dumb explosive projectiles) - the target is still in aim, but there are random movements around axis of movement
3) sensors are/were not perfect, non-ideal conditions (clouds, night, cold, humidity, dust), bugs in software etc
It's the velocity that makes things tricky. Imagine trying to hit a bullet with a bullet, you may know where it's being fired from and where it's headed, how fast it's going, the wind speed all other variables but hitting it would still be an impossible task.
One way to improve missile defense accuracy would be to use a small nuclear warhead but that's impractical when defending populated areas and anyway your adversary can make new missiles more quickly an cheaply than you can make nuclear bombs.
Modern missiles make things more complicated by using multiple re-entry vehicles, midflight maneuvering, creating a cloud around the warhead to prevent targetting etc.
I don't recall the exact answer (and it looks like others have already supplied info) but I saw someone explain it in detail once and wrap it up with a quote from the Star Trek reboot:
"It's like trying to hit a bullet, with a smaller bullet, while wearing a blindfold, riding a horse."
Atleast with an ICBM you are talking about velocities that are still close to suborbital, ie over a kilometer per second, Quora sets the terminal phase velocity at 30'000 kph (around Mach 30, pi by thumb, of by around 20%)
Hitting something that is moving at Mach 30 towards you is already hard. Especially considering this thing moving towards you is also burning up in the atmosphere, thus you only have that bright spot which will be larger than the actual missile core. However, if it's moving exactly (or almost) at you, it's not impossible but still hard.
If it is not moving towards you but rather along your view, you have to match a significant portion of it's speed, which basically means building a ICBM to hit another ICBM. And going that fast takes a while.
If it's moving away from you, you can always give up.
Missiles go extremely fast. Like stupid fast. Most ABM systems today use hit-to-kill, which means that you actually have to make contact with the missile to kill it. Physically hitting something that small and fast from a long distance away is hard even if you know exactly where it's going to be. Terminal guidance needs to be very accurate, since in the last second the missiles are a mile apart. With an update rate of about 10 hZ, you have to make your final correction that is accurate to about two feet (the diameter of the missile) over about 1/10th of a mile. That's tough.
Most other missile systems (like surface-to-air or air-to-air systems designed to kill planes) have proximity fuses, and don't need direct contact, they just blow up nearby and throw shrapnel into the plane. That's enough to kill a plane, but doesn't work very well to knock a ballistic missile off it's trajectory.
To add to this, the closing speeds are so fast that you would need to detonate explosives far in advance for anything to happen anywhere near the target. If you detonate at the usual anti-aircraft distances (a few meters), the time it takes for the detonator to fire and for the shock wave/chemical reaction to propagate though the explosive mass would leave the shrapnel cloud way behind the target.
Wow, I hadn't actually thought of this. So, I assume that's why you go for hit-to-kill kinetic warheads, then, and just solve the accuracy issue rather than accuracy plus tricky timing issues?
I wouldn't think so. Hit to kill is going to have the same but worse timing issues as a proximity hit since the size is much smaller.
I would guess the real reason is that if the target is ballistic, you need to actually "kill" it, not just wing it like you can with an airplane. If you wing it the warhead will still fall in roughly the same place with a probably intact warhead. To be safe you want to actually destroy the warhead. Worse case it goes off at point of impact, which is better than on the target.
That's part of it. There's also a point where the kinetic energy of impact surpasses the chemical energy of explosives for equivalent mass. This is around Mach 10 as a huge ballpark figure. So with intercepting high mach and ablatively shielded targets like ballistic missiles, it might be better to budget your projectile mass to increasing likelihood of a hit vs attempting to damage via a proximity explosion.
The UK Starstreak [0] missile seems to be trying for a compromise with a combination of relatively high speed (Mach 4.0) kinetic tungsten penetrator with a very small (again, relatively) 450g high explosive charge. It's an odd looking thing, because the sub-munitions aren't faired over at launch so you get this normal looking tube shaped missile with three tiny missiles stuck on the front. It seems they rely on proximity fuzing with time delay, so once the penetrator has breached the aircraft skin, causing a reasonable amount of damage, it waits until it knows its inside and then detonates for maximum effect. I guess three of the penetrators hitting your plane at M4.0 within a ~1.5m group is enough to make you have a very bad day, even if the explosive warheads turn out to be all duds!
Starstreak is a really clever design. They use a neat clutched rotation mechanism with skewed fins to get 2d attitude control via a 1d clutch signal. The US adopted a similar mechanism to build a smart fuse that can be used with existing dumb artillery shells to give them gps guidance at low cost.
Can you explain why the update rate is 10 Hz? It seems orders of magnitude away from current tech, and even from tech of 20 years ago.
Perhaps I misunderstood what the update rate was, but I interpreted as the rate at which the "chaser" can update its trajectory or take action (kind of like the main loop running 10 times a second).
It's only "about" 10 hZ, on that order of magnitude. Indvidually you can have faster components and even though the process is pipelined, the last guidance correction that matters takes the sum total of all component times in the system. The seeker has to see the target is off-axis, then the computer has to calculate the proportional control input, and then the servos actuate the fins.
You also might be overestimating what "current tech" means in military hardware. The PAC-3 Patriots were entered into service from 1995-2000, meaning they were designed with late 1980's technology. The Saudis don't get to have the true top end hardware, the US won't sell their "best stuff" until they have "new best stuff" to beat it.
It depends on what kind of missile you want to hit. A scud is very different from an ICBM, which are both quite different from anti-ship and some of the area denial weapons.
I wonder if the laser weapon systems will go anywhere in the end. Certainly seems easier to target, and cheaper to shoot. But there's still a lot of energy that needs to go into a missile to be certain it's disabled.
An ICBM warhead is going to be a tough target for that. Very fast so you don't have long to heat it and fitted with heat shielding for reentry already.
In perspective: The Russian Satan 2 is indefensible, and also the older SS-N-27 Sizzler shot from very nearby submarines. Not enough time to react on those.
There's really no such thing as an indefensible missile, just like there's no such thing as an impenetrable computer network. Difficult to defend against, those exist. Missiles with an extremely low probability that we can physically intercept, those exist. But defending against a missile starts as soon as a possibility of launch occurs, and you can bet that a lot of people spend a lot of time figuring out how to defend against "indefensible." They aren't perfect, but they aren't going to bat .000 either.
So I understand that it is quite hard to catch a missile when you fly in the same direction as the missle, but couldn't you just intercept the missile by flying towards it and park you own missle in the tradjectory of the incoming missile.
It's still a very small target going very fast. That doesn't become easier to hit if you fly against it's direction of flight and thus have even higher relative speeds.
To add, more specifically to ICBMs, missiles also have counter measures. A common one in nuclear missiles is multiple and decoy warheads. So you really want to hit the missile, and before the warheads deploy. Which really sets a timelimit on when you can hit it. After the warheads deploy, they spread out pretty fast, making it much harder to hit with an explosion instead of kinetic force. Really you only have a few minutes to detect the launch, track, launch, and hit your target (generally the sooner the better). That's a real time crunch, which is one of the reasons they go STUPID fast.
Ballistic missiles are fast, but satellites are faster. In 2008 the US showed that an SM-3 missile can destroy a satellite [1]. this is the same type of missile that is deployed in the Aegis ABM defense system.
Years ago, in my high school Phsyics C class, the teacher gave us an exam which was just the process of calculating how to intercept an (IC)BM. It was a really great exam, leading you through all the steps required, and gave the answer really clearly.
It's incredibly hard. I won't repeat sibling comments about how difficult the actual interception is, but will add that you likely have seconds AT BEST for your own launch to take place. You can do guidance mid-air, but miss the window...
As with any X vs Y weapon, the scenario matters a whole lot. If you know where the missile is going and your interceptors are launched from that area you have plenty of time. This is the situation the USN is looking at with the new Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles.
On the other hand, a system to protect the continental United States from incoming missiles from anywhere to anywhere was always fanciful.
There is always cone on uncertainty around the missile position and speed and interceptor position and speed.
Both the missile and interceptor must meet at the same place at the same time. The time window decreases with speed, so timing is everything.
Faster the incoming missile, harder it is to intercept. If the speed delta between incoming missile and interceptor is to high, interceptor can't correct it's course fast enough to hit the missile. Interceptor has inertia and it's deflectors or thrust vectoring can correct it's course only so fast.
Interceptor positioning on the ground is also important.
Why is it so hard to throw a bullseye in a game of darts? You know the weight of the dart and the location of the target. Why don't we hit it every time?
Even if interception is conceptually simple, the speeds and distances involved make it a very challenging problem.
Additionally, you're starting from a false premise that ballistic missiles don't maneuver. Some of them, particularly MIRV ICBMs, are highly maneuverable.
You'd be surprised; that KSA and Israel are strongly co-operating along an anti-Iranian axis is a fairly open secret these days.
With that said, if anybody's going to block a sale like that, it's Israel, not KSA. The Israelis don't trust KSA anywhere nearly enough to trust KSA with domestically developed systems.
Have you been following the Middle East news lately at all? Israel is clearly allied with Saudi camp, and there already have been plenty of almost official visits.
Cant v just catch missiles mid air in a device that can contain explosion and launch it far away into space and let it explode thr or if possible dismantle.
If your question starts with "Can't you just..." the answer is probably "no" because if the answer was "yes" somebody would probably have thought of that already and implemented it.
> missed their target ... A kilometer is a pretty normal miss rate for a Scud
Assume a target of 0.1km x 0.1km, but the missile may hit anywhere in an area of 1km x 1km around the target. That means the area of the target is 1/100 the size of the overall area. They'd have to launch at least 50 Scuds to have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the target.
Can someone tell me if that calculation is way off? It sounds like this attack, other than spreading fear and panic, was very unlikely to work.
Indendence doesn't play into it. Simple example: flipping two coins doesn't give you a (0.5 + 0.5) = 100% chance of getting heads.
The easiest way to solve "at least once"-type questions is invariably by subtracting P(!"at least once") = P("zero hits") from 1.
To do it with addition, you'd have to list all possible outcomes completely. Those would, individually, be far lower probabilities. Example:
P("at least one "six" when rolling two dice")
= P("first not six, second six") + P("first six, second not six") + P("first six, second also six")
= (1/6 * 5/6) + (5/6 * 1/6) + (1/6 * 1/6)
= 11/36
Shorter:
1 - P("never six")
= 1 - P("first not six, second not six")
= 1 - (5/6 * 5/6) = 36/36 - 25/36
= 11/36
The number of possible outcomes you have to list and add together is 2^<number of trials> - 1. For two dices, that's a manageable 2^2 - 1 = 1. For 100 rockets it's 2^100 - 1 = 1.2676506E30 (- 1).
They are independent, and that's exactly why they aren't additive. Flipping a coin two times doesn't give you a 100% chance of getting heads. To expand on the intuition a little - they may well hit the same non-target spot multiple times before they hit the target at least once, in fact that is to be expected.
Intuitively it might make sense to add the probabilities, but it doesn't actually work out that way[0]. The parent used the law of total probability to solve for the probability of hitting at least once because it's simpler:
P(hits >= 1) = 1 - P(hits = 0).
Solving for the left side of the equation directly gets trickier:
I got the feeling that SCUD was always intended to deliver wire-area weapons, such as biological or chemical, and not small explosive warheads. If you're firing area-denial weapons, precision doesn't matter much.
I did a rough outline of what I guessed to be the "valuable target area" of the airport, and it came to 0.15m^2: https://imgur.com/a/t7vhd. Such a target would only need 5 Scuds for even odds.
But, yes: The Scud is terribly (wonderfully) inaccurate.
Yes, I think they are not useful against point targets. In practice, it seems scud missiles have mostly been used against area targets, particularly terror bombing of cities. To get military effects you probably have to fire a lot of them, e.g. Wikipedia mentions
> During the mujahideen attack against Jalalabad, between March and June 1989, three firing batteries manned by Afghan crews advised by Soviets fired approximately 438 missiles in defense of the embattled garrison.
Apart from the error made by adding probabilities, you miss a factor 4 because your max error is only 500m, and a factor of (about (1)) π/4 because you are using a square hit region instead of a circular one, but ballpark, none of them matter.
That airport terminal is quite a bit larger, though, and the size of the blast radius of the explosion will increase the likelihood of doing some damage (significantly so for large blast radiuses. If this warhead carried a nuclear device, a miss by a few hundred meters wouldn’t really be a miss)
(1) I guess proper modeling of the error distribution will make that shape something else than a circle, but I also guess a circle is a much better first approximation than a square.
Finally, that attack may have made economic sense. That scud cost a lot less than the rockets fired at it, and showing the capability of firing at targets that far away will pin down quite a few expensive forces around targets in Saudi Arabia.
I believe the point is to render the airport unsafe to operate commercially. If you manage to hit nearby twice, it's unlikely civilians will want to hang around their gate for 45 minutes.
This is sort of beside the point, but I wanted to point out how great a piece of journalism this is. The integration of maps, video, and pictures is exactly what old print-media organizations can provide online and take advantage of. This is a really compelling narrative that shows real, honest reporting. That's worth noting.
In particular, Union of Concerned Scientists researchers. But they're not really researchers, because they'll never report results that don't support UCS political positions.
Also, "analysts" from Middlebury Institute of International Studies — apparently another nonproliferation shop.[1]
Do you make the same distinction with researchers who work for petroleum firms that hid their findings on anthropogenic climate change or tobacco firms that concealed their findings on the health risks of tobacco consumption?
Sure do. And of course, missile defense is hard so I have no problem believing there may not have been a successful interception (I see no evidence here one way or the other). My point was only that the grandparent is incorrect — this is not good journalism. The journalist took a story ready-made from a bunch of people with an angle. I'm familiar with the practice, as a good friend of mine has won prestigious awards for publishing a ready-made story from an NGO.
You're 100% correct that this was a case of good presentation and not investigation by the reporter.
Questions:
1. Can you point me where to find more info on UCS ignoring results that contradict their political positions?
2. What "angle" does a nonproliferation shop have in this matter?
3. The article attempts to present some evidence (obviously mostly not to a level required for independent, academic confirmation). So when you see you "see no evidence here", are you saying you need to see it presented in greater detail and to a higher standard, or do you think that the evidence is flawed or misrepresented in some way?
I'm curious what's the `"analysts"` is for, even assuming the Middlebury Institute has an angle, how does nonproliferation factor into bias towards this story? Unless you firmly believe nonproliferation wonks have a bias against missile HTK systems, it seems to be a non-sequitur.
This is not intended to be a brigade, but i have to agree with the other poster in saying that this is not necessarily good journalism, per se, but it is definitely a great presentation. In terms of good journalism, it may be time to start setting up bots that build articles, as it is getting so hard to trust that people are actually A) reporting all facts relevant and available and B) capable of providing worthwhile analysis.
Strongly agree! And it didn't need any of the fancy features (broken scrolling, huge images and tiny snippets of text) people think they need these days. Instead what they need is good fundamentals like this.
That was all over the Russian media about a month ago when it happened. Not sure if it's coincidence or not if the decision to buy Russian defense systems was influenced by this event.
The core design problem with using the Patriot missile system for ABM applications is that its terminal guidance system fundamentally isn't designed for it. It uses radar for terminal guidance because it was adapted from anti-aircraft applications. That this works at all is impressive, in a "dancing bear" sense, you wouldn't expect the discrimination to be good enough for the purpose.
All purpose-built ABM systems use infrared imagers for terminal guidance with classifiers that pick out both the target and desired point of impact on the target. These are vastly more effective but we also don't sell them to foreign countries AFAIK.
The materials tech is pretty amazing, and they've been building it since the early 90s. At least in the past, they were using sapphire crystals and diamond films that have tiny cooling conduits drilled through them with lasers so that you can run (IIRC) liquid helium through the crystals as a coolant.
Even in this configuration, the ablation and thermal loading due to hypersonic transit through the atmosphere has proven to be so high that the optical window is covered in ablative shielding for the first part of the flight, where the terminal guidance package is not much use anyway. Once the missile is within terminal range, the ablative shield is removed and it switches to homing mode. Early tests didn't have the ablation shield, and the damage to the optical window was sufficiently high that the imager lost effectiveness.
The performance envelope within atmosphere of the rocket motors they use for ABM is high enough that it really pushes materials engineering to the breaking point.
> sapphire crystals and diamond films that have tiny cooling conduits drilled through them with lasers so that you can run (IIRC) liquid helium through the crystals
That is probably about cooling the sensor. High-sensitivity IR sensors need to be cooled so thermal noise from the sensor itself doesn't wash out a weak IR signal.
Fighter aircraft provide liquid nitrogen to captive IR missiles.
IMO, this article is designed to get readers attention with a technical bent, but is used to reinforce the Saudi Lobby position.
An interest research that shows the number of times in the past 70 years the NY Times has depicted various Saudi dictator as reformist [0]
Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me is the most bizarre choice word by Thomas Friedman in his op-ed [1]. As a writer, I'm so surprised he would even use such a word or the NY Times op-ed editors would actually allow that.
BTW, there seem to be an orchestrated media Blitzkrieg to show the new Saudi Ruler. Who is basically follow the same playbook as Saddam Hossein did (eliminating all possible opposition) or Stalin for that matter as a moderate person or country. Saudi Arabia, and other moderate Arab states would also welcome a more engaged U.S. into their backyard [2]
Calling Saudi Arabia a "moderate" country is a bit of stretch
This confuses me a bit, is he not more moderate than his predecessors? They've had some movement on women's rights with ability to drive and run for office.
Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current improvement.
The NYT article about M.B.S did sound like a general improvement in direction.
He is an improvement on some social issues, but Friedman credits him for his anti corruption drive, which is a joke. M.B.S is every bit as corrupt as those he’s arrested.
> Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current improvement.
Apparently MBS was been behind the devastating involvement of KSA in Yemen from well before his taking power.
And Booze Allen Hamilton has been providing guidance along the way - at least there appears to be hope for some social issues and a reduction of religious extremism.
Not all problems are going to be solved quickly at least this appears to be trending a better direction.
I’m not dismissing the terrible things the country does, but it does seem like MBS is at least better about social issues and religious extremism.
The alternative framing for this article is "Maybe we should think twice about war with North Korea, since missile defense isn't as reliable as people are claiming"
Lol. When I saw the headline I though this was a rehash of the Gulf War "intercepts" that did fail. If 20+ years later Patriot is still failing at the same task ... much is wrong with the procurement system. As a kid I was on the ground during the first gulf war. We thought these things were working. They put pieces of them in hotel lobbies on plinths. Only years later did we learn that all those explosions in the sky were meaningless, that the scuds were not being intercepted but rather simply missed their targets.
The article has issues. The plume is irrelevant. The cited pic from syria looks similar but that has more to do with wind and temperature than similarities in warhead. Conclusions based on the launch angle of the patriots may also be incorrect as there the outbound patriots need not follow a strait line. The best intercept for their warhead might not be a head-on approach. We don't know if they turned mid-flight to intercept, which they can do.
And don't criticize patriot for firing five times. This thing was coming down as several objects on very similar trajectories. Each missile might have been targeting a different inbound part, any one of which might be the warhead. If 4/5ths of the inbound objects were intercepted, but the one that wasn't turned out to be the warhead, it wasn't a total failure.
O.o The NYT is framing this as Saudi being attacked? The Saudi forces are executing a genocide in Yemen backed by US military targeting, weapons, and mid-air refueling (some of this was stopped but not all of it). This is on the back of Thomas Friedman's laughable piece on MBS (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-...). Is the Times executing a propaganda campaign? Sickening.
I think it's a semantic difference between "attacking" and "defending". For some, attacking means the first party to engage in violence. Regardless, this was an act of violence even if it was preceded by other acts of violence.
At the strategic level offensive and defense refers to the side which has positive war aims. That is, Attackers are trying to change the current state in their favor (e.g. seizing territory or regime change) whereas defenders are attempting to resist this change (i.e. maintaining the status quo). This can sometimes be complex as both sides in a war may have positive strategic aims.
The article is about a missile fired at Saudi Arabia. Is every article like this obliged to insert an amount of irrelevant filler equivalent to which side is worse by some arbitrary definition?
I'm not the GP commenter, but I strongly agree. Friedman's column [0] was the most obvious propaganda piece I've ever seen in a serious publication. It both blew me away for its shamelessness and also sickened me when I read it, permanently ended my trust in Friedman, greatly reduced my trust in all NYT columnists, and hurt my trust in the NYT in general. Here are a few obvious problems:
1. "Arab Spring": The Arab Spring was a grassroots movement for democracy, self-determination for the citizens. That's the complete opposite of a dictator - in a monarchy even - consolidating power. That difference is the foundation of the United States in particular and democracies world-wide. It's double-speak, as absurd as calling the NSA an open source organization.
2. "only a fool would not root for it": Friedman is far too experienced and sophisticated to fall for the promises and hopes of the latest "benign" despot who is at the stage of consolidating power. It's standard operating procedure for dictators at this stage: Promise a lot to everyone, especially to the West (apparently via Friedman), [EDIT: and liberalize] in order to neutralize potential threats - 'he says great things; he's liberalizing; let's wait and see what happens!'. Once power is consolidated, you can do whatever you want; the "benign" part is forgotten, the freedoms taken away. It never turns out differently. Why not let the citizens vote on your power if you are so benign and they love you so much? EDIT: Only if the citizens have the power to protect their freedoms, through voting, will the freedoms be maintained - I defy you to find a counter-example.
3. "his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail — the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton — until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day": In fact, you do see it every day a new dictator consolidates power. It's so standard that I could have told you it would happen: They imprison their enemies and force them to confess or just convict them (summarily or via show trial); corruption is a popular charge in these situations for its propaganda value with the public and the West - look at Xi in China for a recent example. There are no independent courts, trials, rule of law, or justice.
4. "It’s “ludicrous,” he [the dictator] said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab." Accepted without question by Friedman, who apparently was born the morning of the interview.
5. "Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive." What a surprise! As the new King is rounding up people and consolidating power, nobody told the NYT columnist that they objected. Only in dictatorships is there universal effusive support for anything. Did Friedman talk to the imprisoned people or their families?
6. "While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”" Those ridiculous foreigners, worried about trivial nonsense like the rule of law, independent courts, and justice for the accused. Just let the King decide who is guilty; that whole American Revolution was a mistake.
7. "to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation — whence it diverted in 1979." First, Friedman buys the framing from the dictator's propaganda: This is the normal state of it, to which the King will return it. I didn't see anyone mention that natural state of things before, in many years of reading about it. Also, this is obviously a play for Western support for his dictatorship. If Friedman is serious, how ...
There is nothing at all in that article which supports your statement about the framing. In fact the article doesn’t use the word “attack” at all. It’s an investigation into the technology of the missile defence system.
I don't completely agree that NYT has framed this as Saudis being attacked, but I did find this sentence strange:
> "The findings show that the Iranian-backed Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war."
Shifting the balance in the war? Not even remotely true and is quite simply impossible while the Saudis have all the help from the US.
The way the Saudi's have been behaving is atrocious and indefensible.
But the ability of the Houthis to strike Riyadh is a pretty significant development. If they show the ability to keep doing it consistently it will certainly change how the war is going.
its an excellent piece of journalism. The author and his helpers have done alot of researching and produced a very informative article. How one can accuse this for propaganda I don't know. Are you a russian troll or something?
It's in large part the choice of topic rather than the details of the article. They could have chosen to highlight how Yemeni defenses work in light of a US backed Saudi bombing campaign.
The NYT has always banged the drum for war. They backed the candidate gagging to get stuck in in Syria remember. Trump getting in instead set them back but only by a year or two, they'll get their war eventually.
You should take another glance at the article. It's actually quite good (in the topic, not the one you linked, I share your distaste for Thomas Friedman).
It doesn't say anything about the situation in Yemen, it's just a solid investigative piece about whether the missile was actually intercepted.
I've read a few stories about the lack of confidence in America's missile defense systems. We have THAAD missile [0] in Asia as a counter punch to North Korea but from what I've read confidence in the system is pretty low.
Israel's Iron Dome [1] system seems to be effective but I would assume there are differences in the system and proximity of Palestine to Israel and the missiles fired that allow it to be so effective.
As a further point, the fact that our missile defense systems are so poor just emphasizes how reckless our approach to North Korea is, their missile technology is getting better and better while our defense system is unproven and yet top Trump administration officials talk about war as if it's not a big deal. Truly scary stuff.
I think Iron Dome has a high success rate due to the type of missile. Mostly 80mm unguided 'Katyusha' and 122mm 'Qassam' unguided rockets, which are destroyed by multiple interceptor missiles with proximity fuzed explosive warheads.
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
Yes, this was my thought too. Rockets fired at Israel are generally cheap, short-range subsonic jobs, not substantially harder to shoot down than a World War 2-era V-1 buzz bomb. Medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles reach speeds of many thousands of miles per hour, making them much harder targets to intercept.
>Rockets fired at Israel are generally cheap, short-range subsonic jobs,
not exactly. Most seems to be manufactured either in Iran or China and a follow on or similar development off basic USSR/Russian systems, like Grad, Uragan, Smerch - these rockets have speed anywhere between 2M and 3M. It is outside of capabilities of many air defense systems on the merit of the speed alone. Add to that multiple rockets in a salvo. Iron Dome being capable of dealing with that is a very huge achievement.
The 'Qassam' are the low-end of Hamas rockets, and they are locally made low quality stuff. The rest is imported military grade production.
>The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)
Judging by the distance and the name Katyusha, it is probably
Grad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad) rockets as by looks and function it most closer resembles Katyusha. The Grad is 122mm and it is the starting system in that type of weaponry and its rocket speed is ~700m/s. The higher-end, 200mm and 300mm, systems fly a bit faster and much farther (typically Chinese versions are even faster and longer range than original Russian).
The Katyushas can't hit Tel Aviv. From Gaza, the only system that can threaten Tel Aviv is the Fajr-5, which were fired at it for the first time in 2012. The linked chart [0] shows that most Katyusha/Quassam rockets have a maximum of ~30km range, whereas the Fajr-5 can make the ~75km to hit Tel Aviv. The warning time given is 60-90s (i.e. from when the air raid sirens sound to impact or interception) so with a margin of error on the slow side, they do 75km in 2m which is ~2250 km/h or Mach 1.8, definitely supersonic. I think I was wrong about the smaller rockets though, which are subsonic.
I have nothing at all to say in favor of the Trump approach other than that talking about not-war with North Korea is truly scary stuff as well, as their capabilities are increasing by leaps and bounds. There just seem to be no good answers there.
The key feature of Iron Dome is it won't try to intercept rockets that aren't going to hit a populated area, which means the Israelis don't go broke shooting $100k interceptors at $50 rockets that were going to hit anything anyway.
It's a tool designed to deal with the unique situation in which the Israelis find themselves. It's not any better at intercepting modern guided ballistic missiles than other systems.
Patriot doesn't work, Thaad doesn't work. The only ABMs worth a damn are the Israeli Arrow, Russian S500, and perhaps Aster 30 BMD when that enters service. The Americans have always relied on fighters for strategic air defence, and now those chickens are coming home to roost.
Aegis and SM-3 seem to be working for some forms of missile defense, including some BMDs.
It's a hard problem space and a lot of the apparent success/failure is really a matter of choices and tradeoffs made by the 'customers' who specify the design constraints.
Aegis + Aegis Ashore definitely seems to have potential. Assuming a Nork threat you would want to intercept mid-trajectory if you could, and that means pre-positioning your platform in the mid-Pacific. If you are intercepting on the terminal phase then things are pretty desperate...
I read somewhere it has a ~50% success rate. So it seems if the logic is this simple, it works, you just need to launch 3 missiles at the target to be confident about getting an intercept.
According to a comment elsewhere on this page, the PAC-3 interceptor has a 19/22 (= 86%) success rate in tests. But in the article we are commenting on right now, they fired 5 interceptors at the target, and apparently all of them missed! The article hints that the issue might have been that the system misclassified the targets and hit the booster instead of the warhead.
The moral is that you can't be sure that the success rate is independent, there can be systematic errors that affect all of the interceptors at the same time.
Anyone know what generation missiles were fired? The PAC2 can really only hit aircraft... sometimes. PAC3 was a massive upgrade and does hit-to-kill instead blast fragmentation
given that warhead in those Iranian designs does separate on re-entry and given the state of the engine block, specifically 1. the lower half seems to have been broken into a number of pieces while still in the air as the spread of the pieces indicates and 2. the upper part only deformed as result of hitting the ground - it seems that the Patriot directly hit the engine block into the lower half. Basically the engine block played the decoy role, or may be the Patriot was going for the warhead and missed, and with the engine block flying at some distance behind and slightly off course it just was hit accidentally.
I remember when the conspiracy folks at Reddit claimed the Saudis shot the missile by themselves from the airport to justify or silence the crackdown on the family. So it looks like they were wrong, again.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadI like the general subject, and I'd love to hear more about it, but this is not good. It's just going to encourage more launches -- and perhaps more deaths.
Part of that is understanding the weaknesses of the existing systems and working to improve them. Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are ineffective.
Unfortunately life is not a linear program and we often don't find maxima at the extremes.
This raises an interesting question: is there evidence that anti-missile systems have actually deterred missile attacks?
The Iron Dome system has a (disputed) success rate vastly higher than the Patriot system, but I can't find evidence that missile attacks against Israel have substantially declined in response to its deployment. Perhaps better organized entities like national militaries would react more thoroughly, but that also raises the specter of a displacement effect that fails to save lives.
I definitely agree with you that "improving defenses" and "promoting defenses as deterrents" may be conflicting aims, but I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place.
I find it fascinating this HN thing we do where we skim over a comment, decide whether author agrees with us or not politically, and then pile on.
I didn't say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect. The topic was not part of my comment. At all. My only point was a simple and pragmatic one: if you have a stockpile of missiles, and you shoot one? Having somebody give you a moment-by-moment account of what happened on that missile's journey is a quite valuable thing that you will use the next time you shoot one of your missiles.
My comment had zero to do with missile defense (aside from noting my interest in the subject). It was just pointing out that in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
I'm not going to comment on missile defense. Not relevant to the point I was making.
You said this but then failed to cite anything from the article remotely supporting your claim.
> in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.
Saudi Arabia is not us. Hell, I don't even like KSA, an autocratic regime with a value system completely antithetical to ours but yeah, with a boatload of oil.
Governments are obviously made up of people, just like corporations, but they seem to become an entity unto themselves. I see this often when Europeans talk about policy initiatives in the US (and vice versa by Americans when discussing mass immigration in Europe). While KSA does not (yet) enjoy a mutual defense pact with the USA on paper, neither does Israel. And yet, in certain circumstances, an attack on Haifa is an attack on the West. I don't particularly like Bibi and his buddies, but that doesn't change the strategic geopolitical situation in the slightest.
So the KSA is sometimes an extension of the US, for better or for worse, which is what i think the commenter you were responding to was implying.
I don't have any idea what your politics are, and neither the conflict (Houthis vs. Saudi government) nor the news story align neatly with a political position. I considered the Trump section basically incidental, especially since even US government officials are split on the details of the story.
You did not say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect, but you said that writing an article about the failure of an anti-missile systems "..is just going to encourage more launches". That's only true if damage reports and anti-missile news influence launch decisions; I think I (and the other people responding to you) made a completely obvious inference.
There's also serious equivocation here, buried under "you". If you mean "the KSA had an obvious incentive to say they shot the missile down", I agree. But the top-level comment was about "irresponsible journalism" which you suggested might literally kill people. Again, that's only true if this story undermined a deterrent effect, and "the New York Times" is certainly not the same "you" as "the Saudi Government".
Deterrence itself is such a tricky animal. Does my act of open carrying a firearm discourage ne'er-do-wells from initiating crime? Put another way, it is hard to tell the efficacy of using a safety helmet because we generally have poor statistics about the people who do not get hurt at all precisely because they were wearing a helmet (...because they don't go to hospital or morgue). I recognize that this is a bit of a bird hop from the topic at hand.
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
Iron Dome is a realistic reaction to short-range, unguided rockets which can be intercepted with proximity explosives; it's entirely suitable for defending Tel Aviv against the West Bank.
At a nuclear level, the Safeguard system may have been a reasonable variant of Patriot defenses to stop ICBM attacks, I wouldn't really know.
But in the gap between the two, defenders have to shoot down guided, high-velocity conventional warheads near the target site using near-impact or impact interceptors. That's pretty much the worst possible position to be in, and as far as I can see no ABM system is actually effective at it.
I keep seeing the role of editor missing in mainstream news. This is the kind of article that could have been published with judicious editing without ending up a bomb damage assessment for terrorists.
I don't think you get to point out how important the topic is and get a free pass regarding impact. Articles like this have consequences.
Better to get the system refined when the stakes are low. When the Houthis miss the airport and they're a lot more likely to hit sand than city. When NK misses some city in SK (not necessarily Seoul because they can hit that with conventional artillery) they're much more likely to hit something we don't want them to hit. Now, the latter situation may not be relevant within the lifetime of this system but having the system be "battle tested" serves to make it even less likely.
This sort of scaled to all defensive and deterrent systems. The more successful they are the more the generals in the war room will say "We can't just do $offensive_thing because it's not likely enough to be effective in the face of $defensive_thing"
Yes they have. The PAC-3 missile is completely different from the hack job PAC-2/GEM they rushed into the field in '91.
The PAC-2 missile relied on its ground based radar to guide it onto the target, and relied on an explosive warhead to damage the target. The PAC-3 has an integrated radar to guide itself onto target and is capable of hit to kill intercept.
Now, those are all the claims anyways. We'll have to see how useful all these changes actually were.
The PAC-3 is based on the SDI ERINT, a missile which itself failed several tests and then finally passed a rigged test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#E...
... Ok I checked wikipedia and apparently the Patriot was first fielded in 1984 - though not used til '91.
So hitting them should be an easy task for a guided missle as long as it got enough time to reach it at all (which I think is not the problem here). So the only problem I can see is to disarm the missle during flight but am not sure if that is what is meant here.
Does anybody know why it should be hard to shoot down a ballistic missle?
So when it comes to "shooting down a Scud near the ground over a city", you're exactly right. Blowing up your interceptor only works when you've got a high-tech target and are willing to make quite a mess yourself to stop the thing.
They were very careful to "neither confirm nor deny" whether the site ever had nuclear payloads, but they _did_ make a point to tell everyone that the beautiful mechanical targeting computers had Sacramento programmed in as a target, "just in case"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlE1BdOAfVc
Yes - the usual way is to fit the interceptor with a nuclear warhead (see Sprint, Spartan and Nike Zeus on the US side - Fakel 51T6, Novator 53T6 and S-300PS/S-300PM on the Soviet side)... But it has sort of fallen out of fashion...
Radiation hardening the warhead against this type of attack would make it less effective.
Neutrons needs something with light atom like hydrogen - water or maybe polyethylene and lots of it to slow down. So a small nuclear explosion which emits a neutron pulse might work pretty well. It would hellish if it somehow exploded over a population center, though. Didn't get hit by the ICBM (good). Everyone's bones melted (bad).
Li6H is perfect for shielding warhead. Li6H (Lithium-6 hydride) contains hydrogen to slow down neutrons and lithium to absorb them. It has hightest hydrogen content of any hydride, high melting point and can be casted.
The shielding takes some space and the warhead yield is smaller than without shielding. The goal is not to completely block neutron flux but to reduce it to the level where exploding countermeasure must be very close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
Edit: Sprint was meant to defend against ICBMs - but the idea is the same, ballistic missile warheads are going very fast and really aren't that big.
It was cancelled after the ABM treaty.
You know how a rocket is sometimes described as a 'controlled explosion'? The concussion from a Sprint launch was severe enough that a large area around the launch pad would be lethal to any unprotected persons present during a launch. It basically explodes out of the silo.
1) ever seen a missile being fired and flowing? It isn't a smooth movement, rather wobbling in +- target direction. I presume this is due to turbulence in the air and resulting corrections by guiding software. Double the issue due to target and pursuer facing random turbulence on their own
2) some SCUDs have some sort of simple 'randomizer' in their flight for exactly these reasons - to confuse simpler defense (ie boat-based gatlink types which fires dumb explosive projectiles) - the target is still in aim, but there are random movements around axis of movement
3) sensors are/were not perfect, non-ideal conditions (clouds, night, cold, humidity, dust), bugs in software etc
One way to improve missile defense accuracy would be to use a small nuclear warhead but that's impractical when defending populated areas and anyway your adversary can make new missiles more quickly an cheaply than you can make nuclear bombs.
Modern missiles make things more complicated by using multiple re-entry vehicles, midflight maneuvering, creating a cloud around the warhead to prevent targetting etc.
"It's like trying to hit a bullet, with a smaller bullet, while wearing a blindfold, riding a horse."
Hitting something that is moving at Mach 30 towards you is already hard. Especially considering this thing moving towards you is also burning up in the atmosphere, thus you only have that bright spot which will be larger than the actual missile core. However, if it's moving exactly (or almost) at you, it's not impossible but still hard.
If it is not moving towards you but rather along your view, you have to match a significant portion of it's speed, which basically means building a ICBM to hit another ICBM. And going that fast takes a while.
If it's moving away from you, you can always give up.
Most other missile systems (like surface-to-air or air-to-air systems designed to kill planes) have proximity fuses, and don't need direct contact, they just blow up nearby and throw shrapnel into the plane. That's enough to kill a plane, but doesn't work very well to knock a ballistic missile off it's trajectory.
I would guess the real reason is that if the target is ballistic, you need to actually "kill" it, not just wing it like you can with an airplane. If you wing it the warhead will still fall in roughly the same place with a probably intact warhead. To be safe you want to actually destroy the warhead. Worse case it goes off at point of impact, which is better than on the target.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak
Perhaps I misunderstood what the update rate was, but I interpreted as the rate at which the "chaser" can update its trajectory or take action (kind of like the main loop running 10 times a second).
You also might be overestimating what "current tech" means in military hardware. The PAC-3 Patriots were entered into service from 1995-2000, meaning they were designed with late 1980's technology. The Saudis don't get to have the true top end hardware, the US won't sell their "best stuff" until they have "new best stuff" to beat it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System
Why is that not possible?
Tldr: kinetic force is definitely the way to go.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3#A...
It's incredibly hard. I won't repeat sibling comments about how difficult the actual interception is, but will add that you likely have seconds AT BEST for your own launch to take place. You can do guidance mid-air, but miss the window...
On the other hand, a system to protect the continental United States from incoming missiles from anywhere to anywhere was always fanciful.
Both the missile and interceptor must meet at the same place at the same time. The time window decreases with speed, so timing is everything.
Faster the incoming missile, harder it is to intercept. If the speed delta between incoming missile and interceptor is to high, interceptor can't correct it's course fast enough to hit the missile. Interceptor has inertia and it's deflectors or thrust vectoring can correct it's course only so fast.
Interceptor positioning on the ground is also important.
Even if interception is conceptually simple, the speeds and distances involved make it a very challenging problem.
Additionally, you're starting from a false premise that ballistic missiles don't maneuver. Some of them, particularly MIRV ICBMs, are highly maneuverable.
With that said, if anybody's going to block a sale like that, it's Israel, not KSA. The Israelis don't trust KSA anywhere nearly enough to trust KSA with domestically developed systems.
And you are wrong about the war including every other Arab country. It would only include Iran.
SA is trying to counter Iran, and they want that badly enough to work with Israel to accomplish it.
Other Arab countries aren't going to get involved.
Assume a target of 0.1km x 0.1km, but the missile may hit anywhere in an area of 1km x 1km around the target. That means the area of the target is 1/100 the size of the overall area. They'd have to launch at least 50 Scuds to have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the target.
Can someone tell me if that calculation is way off? It sounds like this attack, other than spreading fear and panic, was very unlikely to work.
Think of it like flipping coins. For a given coin flip, 50% odds of heads and 50% odds of tails.
But if you flip the coin 100000000 times there's still a tiny outside chance of tails coming up every time.
As you flip more coins, the odds of getting a heads on at least one of them will asymptotically approach 100%, but it will never get there.
The easiest way to solve "at least once"-type questions is invariably by subtracting P(!"at least once") = P("zero hits") from 1.
To do it with addition, you'd have to list all possible outcomes completely. Those would, individually, be far lower probabilities. Example:
Shorter: The number of possible outcomes you have to list and add together is 2^<number of trials> - 1. For two dices, that's a manageable 2^2 - 1 = 1. For 100 rockets it's 2^100 - 1 = 1.2676506E30 (- 1).But, yes: The Scud is terribly (wonderfully) inaccurate.
> During the mujahideen attack against Jalalabad, between March and June 1989, three firing batteries manned by Afghan crews advised by Soviets fired approximately 438 missiles in defense of the embattled garrison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud#Operational_use
That airport terminal is quite a bit larger, though, and the size of the blast radius of the explosion will increase the likelihood of doing some damage (significantly so for large blast radiuses. If this warhead carried a nuclear device, a miss by a few hundred meters wouldn’t really be a miss)
(1) I guess proper modeling of the error distribution will make that shape something else than a circle, but I also guess a circle is a much better first approximation than a square.
Finally, that attack may have made economic sense. That scud cost a lot less than the rockets fired at it, and showing the capability of firing at targets that far away will pin down quite a few expensive forces around targets in Saudi Arabia.
Also, "analysts" from Middlebury Institute of International Studies — apparently another nonproliferation shop.[1]
And finally, anonymous "U.S. officials".
[1] http://www.miis.edu/about/newsroom/experts/jlewis
If so, I applaud your sense of equity.
Questions:
1. Can you point me where to find more info on UCS ignoring results that contradict their political positions?
2. What "angle" does a nonproliferation shop have in this matter?
3. The article attempts to present some evidence (obviously mostly not to a level required for independent, academic confirmation). So when you see you "see no evidence here", are you saying you need to see it presented in greater detail and to a higher standard, or do you think that the evidence is flawed or misrepresented in some way?
- buying S-400 from Russia for 3 billions
- buying THAAD from USA for 15 billions
S-400 is totally unproven system.
All purpose-built ABM systems use infrared imagers for terminal guidance with classifiers that pick out both the target and desired point of impact on the target. These are vastly more effective but we also don't sell them to foreign countries AFAIK.
What kind of optical window for the IR imager gets used for this application?
Even in this configuration, the ablation and thermal loading due to hypersonic transit through the atmosphere has proven to be so high that the optical window is covered in ablative shielding for the first part of the flight, where the terminal guidance package is not much use anyway. Once the missile is within terminal range, the ablative shield is removed and it switches to homing mode. Early tests didn't have the ablation shield, and the damage to the optical window was sufficiently high that the imager lost effectiveness.
The performance envelope within atmosphere of the rocket motors they use for ABM is high enough that it really pushes materials engineering to the breaking point.
Citations, pleeeeassse! I neeeeed it!
https://youtu.be/0z0l0NsMduQ?t=233
Fighter aircraft provide liquid nitrogen to captive IR missiles.
An interest research that shows the number of times in the past 70 years the NY Times has depicted various Saudi dictator as reformist [0]
Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me is the most bizarre choice word by Thomas Friedman in his op-ed [1]. As a writer, I'm so surprised he would even use such a word or the NY Times op-ed editors would actually allow that.
BTW, there seem to be an orchestrated media Blitzkrieg to show the new Saudi Ruler. Who is basically follow the same playbook as Saddam Hossein did (eliminating all possible opposition) or Stalin for that matter as a moderate person or country. Saudi Arabia, and other moderate Arab states would also welcome a more engaged U.S. into their backyard [2] Calling Saudi Arabia a "moderate" country is a bit of stretch
[0] http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34727/Seventy-Years-of-the-...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/11/28/how-obama-a...
Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current improvement.
The NYT article about M.B.S did sound like a general improvement in direction.
Apparently MBS was been behind the devastating involvement of KSA in Yemen from well before his taking power.
Not all problems are going to be solved quickly at least this appears to be trending a better direction.
I’m not dismissing the terrible things the country does, but it does seem like MBS is at least better about social issues and religious extremism.
“Mussolini made the trains run on time”
The article has issues. The plume is irrelevant. The cited pic from syria looks similar but that has more to do with wind and temperature than similarities in warhead. Conclusions based on the launch angle of the patriots may also be incorrect as there the outbound patriots need not follow a strait line. The best intercept for their warhead might not be a head-on approach. We don't know if they turned mid-flight to intercept, which they can do.
And don't criticize patriot for firing five times. This thing was coming down as several objects on very similar trajectories. Each missile might have been targeting a different inbound part, any one of which might be the warhead. If 4/5ths of the inbound objects were intercepted, but the one that wasn't turned out to be the warhead, it wasn't a total failure.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/29/very-bad-men-trump-the-s...
1. "Arab Spring": The Arab Spring was a grassroots movement for democracy, self-determination for the citizens. That's the complete opposite of a dictator - in a monarchy even - consolidating power. That difference is the foundation of the United States in particular and democracies world-wide. It's double-speak, as absurd as calling the NSA an open source organization.
2. "only a fool would not root for it": Friedman is far too experienced and sophisticated to fall for the promises and hopes of the latest "benign" despot who is at the stage of consolidating power. It's standard operating procedure for dictators at this stage: Promise a lot to everyone, especially to the West (apparently via Friedman), [EDIT: and liberalize] in order to neutralize potential threats - 'he says great things; he's liberalizing; let's wait and see what happens!'. Once power is consolidated, you can do whatever you want; the "benign" part is forgotten, the freedoms taken away. It never turns out differently. Why not let the citizens vote on your power if you are so benign and they love you so much? EDIT: Only if the citizens have the power to protect their freedoms, through voting, will the freedoms be maintained - I defy you to find a counter-example.
3. "his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail — the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton — until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day": In fact, you do see it every day a new dictator consolidates power. It's so standard that I could have told you it would happen: They imprison their enemies and force them to confess or just convict them (summarily or via show trial); corruption is a popular charge in these situations for its propaganda value with the public and the West - look at Xi in China for a recent example. There are no independent courts, trials, rule of law, or justice.
4. "It’s “ludicrous,” he [the dictator] said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab." Accepted without question by Friedman, who apparently was born the morning of the interview.
5. "Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive." What a surprise! As the new King is rounding up people and consolidating power, nobody told the NYT columnist that they objected. Only in dictatorships is there universal effusive support for anything. Did Friedman talk to the imprisoned people or their families?
6. "While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”" Those ridiculous foreigners, worried about trivial nonsense like the rule of law, independent courts, and justice for the accused. Just let the King decide who is guilty; that whole American Revolution was a mistake.
7. "to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation — whence it diverted in 1979." First, Friedman buys the framing from the dictator's propaganda: This is the normal state of it, to which the King will return it. I didn't see anyone mention that natural state of things before, in many years of reading about it. Also, this is obviously a play for Western support for his dictatorship. If Friedman is serious, how ...
To call it sickening seems a stretch.
> "The findings show that the Iranian-backed Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war."
Shifting the balance in the war? Not even remotely true and is quite simply impossible while the Saudis have all the help from the US.
But the ability of the Houthis to strike Riyadh is a pretty significant development. If they show the ability to keep doing it consistently it will certainly change how the war is going.
Since the missile is an Iranian missile, it would seem that Iran contributed to the attack.
What Yemeni defenses? There are none, and there is no story about it.
The NY Times has covered the outrageous Saudi behavior extensively.
"Saudis Try to Starve Yemen Into Submission" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/saudi-arabia-yeme...
"Yemen’s War Is a Tragedy. Is It Also a Crime?" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/world/middleeast/yemen-cr...
"2 Paths for Yemen’s War-Scarred Children: Combat, or Marriage" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/world/middleeast/yemen-wa...
"‘It’s a Slow Death’: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/23/world/middlee...
"U.S. Fingerprints on Attacks Obliterating Yemen’s Economy" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/world/middleeast/yemen-sa...
I could keep going. Trying to characterize them as excusing the Saudis somehow seems to misrepresent their reporting.
It doesn't say anything about the situation in Yemen, it's just a solid investigative piece about whether the missile was actually intercepted.
Israel's Iron Dome [1] system seems to be effective but I would assume there are differences in the system and proximity of Palestine to Israel and the missiles fired that allow it to be so effective.
As a further point, the fact that our missile defense systems are so poor just emphasizes how reckless our approach to North Korea is, their missile technology is getting better and better while our defense system is unproven and yet top Trump administration officials talk about war as if it's not a big deal. Truly scary stuff.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.
not exactly. Most seems to be manufactured either in Iran or China and a follow on or similar development off basic USSR/Russian systems, like Grad, Uragan, Smerch - these rockets have speed anywhere between 2M and 3M. It is outside of capabilities of many air defense systems on the merit of the speed alone. Add to that multiple rockets in a salvo. Iron Dome being capable of dealing with that is a very huge achievement.
There are bigger ones than that of course, but the smaller ones are certainly subsonic.
"The Qassam's speed in the air is 200 meters per second." (= ~750km/h)[1]
The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/news/iron-dome-system-found-to-be-he...
The 'Qassam' are the low-end of Hamas rockets, and they are locally made low quality stuff. The rest is imported military grade production.
>The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)
Judging by the distance and the name Katyusha, it is probably Grad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad) rockets as by looks and function it most closer resembles Katyusha. The Grad is 122mm and it is the starting system in that type of weaponry and its rocket speed is ~700m/s. The higher-end, 200mm and 300mm, systems fly a bit faster and much farther (typically Chinese versions are even faster and longer range than original Russian).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
It's a tool designed to deal with the unique situation in which the Israelis find themselves. It's not any better at intercepting modern guided ballistic missiles than other systems.
1. Iron Dome for near range. 2. David's Sling (or Magic Wand) for Medium Range 3. Arrow for long range.
All 3 systems have been demonstrated to work in demonstrations. Iron dome has worked many times in combat.
Since the missile attacking Saudi Arabia was a ballistic missile, Iron Dome wouldn't apply.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/17/north-korean-missiles-what-s...
It's a hard problem space and a lot of the apparent success/failure is really a matter of choices and tradeoffs made by the 'customers' who specify the design constraints.
The actual tests are 100% successful. Do some basic research please. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
The moral is that you can't be sure that the success rate is independent, there can be systematic errors that affect all of the interceptors at the same time.