
The Iron Dome missile defense system has achieved a nearly 90% success rate - darthgoogle
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.604039
======
dewey
The Iron Dome is a really amazing system, I was volunteering in the Israeli
Army last year and this system was one you really had the feeling is changing
the life for the better for people living in the affected areas. Even if they
were not standing behind Israel politically they were still very grateful that
this system is in place. The problem I see is that it's very expensive to run
(I remember something about 50k/rocket, could be wrong though) while the
rockets they are shooting down are very cheap to manufacture. They also send a
minimum of 2 rockets for every incoming rocket to be on the safe side if I
remember correctly.

Some more information:

[http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2013/09/20/clear-skies-ahead-
mee...](http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2013/09/20/clear-skies-ahead-meet-
soldiers-iron-dome/)

~~~
Kanbab
If a rocket were to land in Tel Aviv and damage a building, it would probably
cause more than $50,000 in damages. Damages to include are property damage,
PTSD of the local population, schools closing, and offices closing.

~~~
madaxe_again
And air strikes in Gaza have killed more than a dozen children this past week
alone. What's your point? That you value bus shelters more than human life?

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Well, maybe if they didn't stand on the roof of a building that Israel warned
them was going to be bombed, that wouldn't have happened:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/middleeast/by-
phone-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/middleeast/by-phone-and-
leaflet-israeli-attackers-warn-gazans.html?_r=0)

If Canada was firing rockets indiscriminately into the US, wouldn't you think
we have a right to defend ourselves?

Can you tell me with a straight face that if militants were to stop shooting
rockets from Gaza, Israel would actually continue striking?

~~~
waps
Asking lefties to side with Israel isn't going to work for several reasons,
but the main ones are :

1) Israel started out as a "free" communist state (the Kibbutzim system) and
over a few decades the people en masse freely abandoned it to create what
pretty much is the cutthroat almost purely capitalist society that it is
today.

It is the poster child for the idea that voluntary socialism doesn't work.
It's existence at this point is an offence to the ideas that guide the
international leftist movements.

Israel's evolution is the reason that socialists worldwide aren't satisfied to
create the option for people to be socialist, but want to have the state force
socialism on everyone.

The fun thing is, there is one single thing islam and the west agree on, and
that's cutthroat capitalism. In fact, islam's sharia is significantly more
cutthroat than western capitalism, including for example slavery. You'd think
lefties would have a huge problem with an extreme capitalist party. Hell,
you'd think Americans would have more problems with religions pushing slavery.

2) Israel creates a hard-to-deny "western ideology" idea of superiority (not
that Israel is all that western). Compare any property of Israel. Without
resources, without much area, without much means it has achieved so much
success it's not funny :

(a) a democratic state, surrounded by dictatorships (Egypt and Saudi)

(b) large, functional cities with an actual economy in that region (meaning
not just foreign contractors drilling for oil and slaves, or just a sea of
people wholly dependant on foreign food aid)

(c) the population actually has decent lives

(d) freedom of religion (maybe this ought to be higher up the list). Actual
significant, prosperous pockets of pretty much every religion.

(e) can actually survive without external sponsorship (e.g. the US pays more
to a Gaza inhabitant than it pays to an unemployed person inside the United
States ... that's the worst example, of course, but the US pays per-capita
recurring amounts for every person in every country bordering Israel except
Syria and Lebanon (where it's mostly done by other states).

3) Israel is an easy scapegoat for the very bad relations between the west and
islam. What everyone forgets is that there has only ever been open war between
the west and islam for ~1400 years, and then low-level terrorist/insurgent
warfare in the 20th century that's easier to ignore.

Israel is obviously not the cause of this conflict, but it combines this
unfortunate position for both parties :

(a) for muslims it's the ultimate offence, an open, country-sized, big font
note on every map saying "western freedom-of-religion culture is superior to
islam !". A western state controlling one of the "holy" cities of islam. The
central "reason" for islam is that allah promises muslims will conquer the
world. Well, they can't even conquer Jerusalem ... They literally are unable
to impose sharia law on one of the places it was created.

Needless to say, muslims give zero consideration to the fact that it's also a
holy city of Judaism and Christianity.

The crime of Israel, in the eyes of moslems, is not the victims it's defensive
campaigns caused, it's not the lost territory, it's is that it shows you can
resist islam, right in the middle of it's heartland.

Think of it like if there was a successful communist mini-state controlling a
few neighbourhoods of Washington DC, that the US constantly, unsuccessfully,
tries to sabotage using any and all means. That's how Israel appears to middle
eastern moslems.

(b) for western states it's the demonstration of what is needed to live with
moslem neighbors. That the situation is effectively unchanged from the 19th
century : the only way to survive moslem neighbors is to constantly be ready
to start a military campaign at the drop of a hat.

The moslem way of fighting makes following human rights, the separation of
civilians and soldiers, nonsense. Islam dictates that every moslem is a
soldier, or has to contribute to the war on "dar al harb", meaning they have
to contribute to fighting some non-muslims. The big problem this causes is
that moslem soldiers pose as civilians (because that's how "the prophet"
fought), then suddenly take out weapons in a crowded marketplace and start
fighting.

Contrast the Christian (meaning canon law) way of fighting is : you send an
envoy to the enemy, stating "date such-and-such, we fight here-and-here, we
will not touch your forces in area A, you will not touch our forces in area B,
and whoever wins gets to take city X", this is negotiated until both parties
agree and then hostilities open. Surprise attacks against civilians, raids and
insurgent attacks, moslems' basic strategy (whether you're talking about the
prophet's wars or recent stuff), is utterly out of the question and considered
a moral abomination.

Obviously canon law is about as successful regulating war as sharia law was,
or any other law really, once the guns start blasting, but it generally does
govern the start of conflicts. The best example of "but the law says" versus
warfare in my mind is the Spartacus campaign in the Roman Empire. That's a
story that you start reading very hopeful, everyone starting with good
intentions, everyone out to improve everyone's life and everyone agreeing to
abide by a legal system (even if that legal system is somewhat ...) and you
are literally terrified at the end. It doesn't happen because one side behaves
badly (they do behave badly, of course, just for good reasons). Everything
that happens is sort-of reasonable given the situation, yet it ends in a
torture massacre, and a global repeal of some freedoms in the Roman Empire.

This means that military bases are the central feature of every moslem town,
and everyone is a soldier. It means schools, mosques, shops and rocket
launching facilities are one and the same thing. (Mosque, incidentally,
translates to "fortress". Historically mosques were fortresses first, and had
several other functions. In historical mosques you will find markets, slave
markets (recognizable by the fashion-show like podia), weapons inventory, food
inventory, stables, schools, soldier's bunk rooms, walls, siege weapons, ...
The prayer room (masjid, not mosque. There do exist masjids that aren't
mosques, mostly in non-sunni brands of islam).

Western states do not want to get into this fight, and Israel is a constant
reminder that if one side in a conflict decides you're in a fight, then you're
in a fight. If one side decides to destroy some legal right, there is a
massive cost on the other side to maintain it. Freedom of religion, civilian
versus military separation, economic freedom, freedom of movement,
immigration, ... all of these cannot be sustained in a real conflict. The west
simply hasn't gotten in a real conflict for more than a generation, so nobody
seems to remember what happened to legal rights in America during WWII.

In strategic reality, Israel is a lightning rod : it's getting attacked by
moslems, who would otherwise be attacking other things (they have for 1500
years, never stopped). In public opinion, it's a stark and public reminder
that there has never been even a single decade of peace with the moslem world,
there have only been periods where muslims were utterly defeated in most
regions, with conflicts limited to border regions. It's a reminder because
it's an offence to moslems and so moslems won't stop attracting attention to
it, where the conflicts islam gets into everywhere else, Sudan, Mali, China,
Pakistan, India, Azerbajan, Iran, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Zanzibar, Kenia,
Somalia, ... sort of fade into the background.

What people don't realize is the stakes of this conflict : if the conflict
escalates (moslems don't have to win to achieve this) much of the 20th century
social advances will have to be at least temporarily reversed. Since the
alternative is destruction, they will be, because when it comes right down to
it, survival and freedom from raids is more important than pretty much
anything else, including things like due process, democracy, ... There is no
way islam's strategy can work, but it can destroy a lot before it is defeated.
Sadly, if the conflict escalates, some of these rights will be lost for a long
time.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _[Iron Dome] has been activated to intercept about 27 percent of the
> approximately 180 rockets fired between Monday night and midday Wednesday._

Measure what you manage. The system's success rate for attempted targets is a
valid measure. But it is also a dangerous one on which to solely rely. A
devious commander, seeking only to maximize this metric, would limit Iron Dome
interceptions to only those strikes which he is supremely confident it can
successfully intercept.

May I suggest a complimentary statistic of people injured, and property
damaged, per missile fired from Palestinian territory _regardless of whether
Iron Dome engages or not_. This measures, in the long run, both (a) how
effective Iron Dome is when it engages and (b) how good Iron Dome is at
deciding whether or not to engage. B is missing today. I think it is a crucial
component to manage.

------
dodyg
I live in Cairo. I cannot help but to compare that this is the third day of
the Israel strikes on Gaza and so far 70 people have been killed. This is how
many people that we lost in Egypt last year on a single 'mildy bad' chaotic
day.

Living in the Middle East makes you numb to this common killings.

------
crisnoble
Interesting, the BBC reports different stats:

"The military said its Iron Dome missile defence system had intercepted 21 of
the 82 rockets fired on Wednesday, including three above Tel Aviv, three over
Ashkelon and three over Ashdod."

source: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-
east-28240137](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28240137)

~~~
FeeTinesAMady
Iron Dome works by calculating the trajectory of incoming rockets and leaving
them alone if they're going to hit an unpopulated area, so that doesn't
necessarily contradict the given statistic.

------
bronxbomber92
An MIT professor on NPR radio earlier this evening reported that the Iron Dome
missile defense systems has achieved a less than 5% success rate. Him or the
article must be wrong, but who?

~~~
mkal_tsr
IIRC the MIT prof. only counted those that hit the missile head-on, not from
behind or the side as there is the possibility of any onboard warhead
surviving.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-
east-21751766](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-21751766)

------
hadoukenio
The problem is that if it's such a wild success, it may lead to other forms of
attacks e.g. suicide bombers which were more effective might become trendy
again.

~~~
Demeno
[I hope not to turn this political] Israeli here, as far as I know suicide
bombings didn't drop in popularity, they just became much harder to carry out
since construction of the fence. Shooting rockets over the fence is just much
easier these days...

------
justizin
"A senior Israel Defense Forces officer said Wednesday that the number of
rockets to hit Israel can be expected to rise."

In other words, Israel is not planning to de-escalate their illegal occupation
- in fact it sounds likely they're planning to invade the gaza strip, which
they have been bombing quite actively in recent days and hours.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _In other words, Israel is not planning to de-escalate their illegal
> occupation_

This is a complex issue involving diverse viewpoints. One may find it
enriching to consider the differing views and values that go into such a
misunderstanding. I've learned a lot about myself and human nature by
contemplating and modelling geopolitics.

Referring to the situation as an "illegal occupation" is harsh. And ambiguous.
This is an international conflict; there are no laws which gain automatic
primacy.

Further, your conclusion - as stated - appears tenuous. A military
spokesperson pointing at rising attacks could signify many things. Domestic
support could be waning. Or the enthusiasm of an offshore balancer. It could
also signify increased militarism in Gaza, independent of IDF activity.
Granted, it could also mean preparations for IDF escalation. But you need to
produce more concrete evidence, not vitriol, to back up that hypothesis.

~~~
madaxe_again
It's utterly unambiguous. Familiar with the Stern gang?

More attacks would be a result of Israeli air strikes and Netanyahu egging on
a ground offensive.

I'm sorry that you've been brainwashed, but you're the warmongers here, not
the oppressed Palestinians.

~~~
thescrewdriver
> I'm sorry that you've been brainwashed, but you're the warmongers here, not
> the oppressed Palestinians.

Of course Hamas is a completely innocent, never having murdered anyone ever...
You're so busy pointing fingers at one side that you're blinded to the faults
of the other...

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Thank you! How could anyone say that Hamas is not guilty of anything? As
mentioned in a comment above: if Hamas stopped shooting rockets, I'd have a
really hard time believing that Israel would not stop their assault, the
government has said several times that they are simply responding to rocket
fire.

"We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more
than they hate us." -Golda Meir

------
pling
So all you need is 10 missiles to win against the statistics?

~~~
justizin
rockets are not missiles, fyi. less than one percent of one percent of one
percent of all rockets fired into israel ever result in casualties, while at
least 15 children have been killed in palestine in the past couple of days by
F-16 strikes.

barbara walters, of course, showed footage of carnage in palestine under the
supposition that it was in israel.

 _puke_

~~~
onion2k
The problem with fighting a war based in religion and hate, on both sides, is
that any rational person would stop firing rockets with odds like that.

~~~
lostlogin
Are you referring to the odds of a rocket getting through to Israel, or the
odds of killing Palestinian children.

~~~
andreasvc
I take him to be referring to the odds of Palestinian missiles being
intercepted, and the retaliation resulting in casualties.

