
Israel Successfully Test-Fires Magic Wand, Successor to Iron Dome Interceptor - 1337biz
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/408368/20121126/israel-gaza-hamas-hezbollah-magic-wand-interceptor.htm
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ChuckMcM
Its entirely unclear to me if it stabilizes or de-stabilizes an area by
rendering missile attacks ineffective, but it is clear that this has come a
long way from the Patriot batteries in the Gulf War which were not nearly as
effective as one would hope.

Having done a bit of coding in my robotics work to have moving robots attempt
to intercept other moving robots I came to appreciate how hard the tracking
and intercept problem was from an inverse kinematics perspective.

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tptacek
How would it destabilize the area? Hamas and Israel aren't in a missile arms
race.

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BCM43
At risk of getting into a political discussion on HN, they are. If Israel is
able to shoot down missiles, those that want to hit it with missiles will try
to make better missiles, at which point Israel will need to build a better
missile defense system.

It strikes me as quite a bit like our anti-air defenses in the cold war, where
we kept building weapons to shoot down Russian bombers, so they kept building
better bombers. You can see the same thing with insurgent IEDs and US armor in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

That said, I'm not sure that it will further destabilize the region. I'm not
sure how it could make it worse.

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tptacek
In the best-known case of a fraught missile defense scheme (that of the US),
the concern was that the US and Russian/USSR had effective parity in offensive
capability and were thus stalemated (to the betterment of all). An effective
missile defense capability could have broken the nuclear stalemate and made
nuclear strategy once again fluid and unpredictable.

This is simply not the case with Israel. Israel and Hamas do not have military
parity. What prevents Israel from wiping Hamas off the planet is humanitarian
concern (either heartfelt or driven by realpolitik, depending on which Israeli
leader you're thinking of and what you think of Israel in general). I would be
surprised (and delighted) if you found a credible analyst that said otherwise.

Meanwhile, the notion that missile defense drives Hamas to seek ever more
sophisticated missiles seems hollow as well, for a couple reasons: first, it
implies that Hamas wouldn't source the most effective missiles available to
it; next, it implies that there's no strategic benefit to forcing Hamas to
source more expensive missiles (there is: first, it raises Hamas' costs, and
second, it makes it harder for the entities that support Hamas to conceal
their support); next, it implies that the costs to Israel of those more-
sophisticated missiles are higher when what we're really talking about is
Israel simply accepting the cost of less-sophisticated missiles killing their
citizens.

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hoka
I was watching the news last week and was struck by a fact that I didn't
consider:

Iron Dome missiles cost upwards of $50,000 to shoot down rockets costing
~$800. I suppose those $800 rockets could do way more than $50,000 in damage
if they hit an important target, not to mention causing casualties, but man,
that's crazy.

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onetwothreefour
That's basically a monetary DoS. :)

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antihero
Brilliant, I guess this means there will be absolutely no excuse to bomb the
shit out of densely populated Gaza now.

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ck2
One of the biggest fears when the Star Wars program was launched was if it
actually succeeded, there would be little hesitation by the military to be
more aggressive since they would then believe they could survive reprisals.

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tptacek
Israel is probably not restrained by fear of reprisal by Hamas.

