On October 7th, 2023, the Hamas terror group, which controls the Gaza Strip, executed its
most ambitious operation against Israel.
In an unprecedented move that came on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas
militants actually invaded Israeli territory, taking the otherwise intelligence-savvy Israelis
completely by surprise.
Thousands of people from Israel and many other countries were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner
by the terrorists.
Crucial to the success of their attack was a barrage of thousands of rockets that flew
into Israeli territory at the time the border incursions were happening.
The barrage consisted of up to 5,000 rockets in a few minutes and was the biggest challenge
yet to Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system.
But what is Iron Dome?
How does it compare to other missile defense systems, like the United States’ Patriot
and NASAMS?
And how did Hamas actually manage to breach the Iron Dome when it has previously proven
incapable of doing so?
Let’s begin.
Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has faced repeated attacks from its enemies in the region
who have denied its right to exist as a state.
These attacks have ranged from the small-scale assaults of lone wolf terrorists to all-out
wars with neighboring countries.
Throughout the years, Israel has frequently been subjected to rocket attacks from Hezbollah,
Hamas, and other terrorist groups in the area.
In the 1990s, a series of rocket strikes across the Lebanese border from Hezbollah convinced
the Israelis that they would need to create a homegrown missile defense system.
The Israelis’ war with Hezbollah in 2006 further convinced them of this need.
Despite skepticism from some in the United States that it could work, the system was
developed by an Israeli company called Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, with American assistance
to the tune of $200 million.
It came online in 2011.
Since then, Iron Dome, which is a mobile system mounted to specialized vehicles, has been
an integral part of Israel’s air defense network.
A naval version designed to protect Israeli ships made its debut in 2017.
So far, there are no foreign users of Iron Dome, though the system is in demand abroad.
According to its maker, Rafael, two Iron Dome systems were delivered to the US Army in 2020.
Ukraine also desires to use Iron Dome as a short-range air defense battery against Russian
missiles and Iranian Shahed drones, which have wreaked havoc on Ukrainian cities and
civilian infrastructure since the invasion of February 2022.
Israel has so far not granted this request, however.
Iron Dome works by a precision radar system.
Its radar detects rockets in the air, determines their trajectory and speed, and automatically
calculates whether they will pose a threat to Israeli population centers.
If they do not pose a threat, the rockets will not be intercepted, which makes sense
since it saves ammunition.
If the rockets do pose a threat, however, Iron Dome will fire two missiles into the
incoming projectile’s path to blow it up in the sky.
These missiles have a length of three meters and a mass of 90 kilograms.
The Israelis originally advertised Iron Dome as being effective against projectiles that
have ranges between four and 70 kilometers, although this range has allegedly expanded.
Israel has ten Iron Dome batteries spread throughout the country, with each battery
capable of defending 155 square kilometers of territory.
These batteries are strategically posted around Israeli towns and cities.
Each Iron Dome launcher comes with a magazine of 20 Tamir interceptor missiles, and a typical
battery includes three to four launchers.
The Israelis claim that Iron Dome is 90% effective, an assessment the US Department of Defense
agrees with.
For example, in the 2014 Israeli-Gaza conflict, nine Iron Dome batteries intercepted 735 out
of 800 rockets that posed a threat to Israeli population centers, backing the claimed effectiveness
rate.
When fighting broke out again in May 2021, Iron Dome successfully intercepted every rocket
fired by Hamas, which amounted to a barrage of over 470.
Near the end of the 2021 iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a whole, Hamas
had fired 4,000 rockets at Israel in total.
Some analyses claim that of the 1,500 of them which were on course for Israeli towns and
cities, Iron Dome destroyed 1,428.
The 2023 rocket attack was much vaster in scale, however, and Israel was unprepared
for it.
Indeed, Iron Dome has proven, so effective that it may have provided the Israelis with
a false sense of security that helped to make the attack on October 7th possible.
Hamas claims that it launched over 5,000 rockets in only 20 minutes in its initial barrage
on October 7th.
Israel claims the number was closer to a range between 2,200 to 3,000.
Either way, it was the most intense rocket attack ever launched into Israel from the
Gaza Strip.
Many of the rockets were destroyed and viral videos of Iron Dome in action against the
Hamas projectiles spread on social media in the aftermath of the attack.
The barrage was large enough and occurred in a short enough period of time to overwhelm
the vaunted missile defense system, as many of the Hamas rockets made it through Israel’s
shield and struck population centers.
Some of the penetrating Hamas rockets hit targets as far away as Tel Aviv.
This surprised many people who had gotten used to the missile defense system’s effectiveness.
However, the success of Hamas’ attack did not come as a surprise to some experts.
Despite its excellent reputation and heretofore high success rate, these experts noticed significant
flaws in the system.
Because Iron Dome’s Tamir interceptor missile has a warhead a third of the way down the
projectile’s length, as opposed to in its nose, it must approach an incoming rocket
from the front, coming at an arc where the two projectiles wind up flying roughly parallel
to one another.
From there, the missile will detonate and eject a shower of steel rods out of its sides
to trigger the warhead inside the enemy rocket and in turn, destroy the target in mid-flight.
This is why Tamir missiles are programmed to approach their target rocket in pairs.
It ensures that there is more coverage from the detonation’s spray pattern.
On the other hand, if the Tamir approaches an incoming rocket from its side, nose-first,
the spray pattern from detonation will completely miss its target.
Richard Lloyd, a warhead designer, wrote a classified 28-page report in 2014 claiming
that Iron Dome would be completely ineffective if its geometry of engagement was wrong.
Further, he claimed that Palestinian rockets were a hard ask for Iron Dome to destroy,
because according to him, even if intercepted successfully, their method of construction
made them resistant to such neutralization.
This is because their warheads are made with thick steel cases and are based on insensitive
TNT explosives.
Theodore Postol, a missile defense expert and physicist at MIT with previous experience
on the Patriot system, also examined Iron Dome in 2014.
Using footage and video of the smoke pattern left by Iron Dome missiles, Postol claimed
that 80-90% of the interceptors did not approach their targets at an effective angle, and as
a result, their detonations did not succeed in knocking the enemy rockets out of the sky.
The Israelis dispute Lloyd and in particular, Postol’s findings, claiming that the videos
the latter analyzed could not be used as an accurate measurement of double or single explosions
(IE: weather Iron Dome’s interceptors had successfully destroyed the incoming rocket
or not).
Iron Dome’s heretofore excellent track record in preventing terrorist rockets from impacting
Israeli population centers lends one to question Postol’s claims.
Regardless, Hamas’ October 7th attack proved that Iron Dome has its limits.
It, like all other missile and air defense systems, can only counter a certain number
of enemy projectiles at any given time.
If the enemy barrage comes in a sufficiently high quantity, Iron Dome will be overwhelmed.
Some military experts believe that if Hezbollah gets involved in the war between Israel and
Hamas, the former will be facing even higher-intensity barrages with more sophisticated projectiles.
Iron Dome’s missiles are expensive, too, costing between $40,000 and $50,000 per interception.
This is a relatively modest price tag compared to other missile defense systems out there.
However, as Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terror groups have thousands of much cheaper rockets
to use, the expenses of Iron Dome still tend to add up.
This expense is one reason why Israel is currently developing laser weapons to shoot down enemy
projectiles.
This will come much cheaper, at a cost of $2 per shot, and laser weapons would be a
much more effective way to counter the types of drones that Hamas militants used in its
border incursion operation.
The laser system will not replace Iron Dome, but rather supplement it, according to the
Israelis.
With Iron Dome in hot demand, one might ask how it compares to other missile defense systems
out there, like NASAMS and Patriot?
NASAMS, short for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, is a joint development between
Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace company and the United States’ Raytheon, officially
known as RTX Technologies since July 2023.
Like Iron Dome, it is a missile defense system.
However, it does not have the same mission.
NASAMS is specialized to solving a different problem than Iron Dome is.
Israel’s Iron Dome system is specifically designed to face off against short range rockets
and drones.
This makes sense because that is the threat level that Israel is typically subjected to.
Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terror groups do not have access to cruise or ballistic
missiles, so Iron Dome is specially designed to defend against these short range threats.
NASAMS, on the other hand, was designed to counter state-based threats.
Unlike terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, state actors typically have access to more
powerful and longer range projectiles, so NASAMS’ mission includes interception of
cruise and ballistic missiles.
In an interview for Newsweek, Thomas Karako, the Director of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies’ Missile Defense Project, compared the two systems: “The NASAMS would
be a more capable system.
It’s a little bit more tailored to the cruise missile defense problem, whereas the Iron
Dome would be a little bit more on the lower end, still very capable, for a different problem
set.”
NASAMS made its debut in 1997.
The system comes with an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel Radar that can identify targets up to 75 kilometers
away in coverage of 360 degrees, although the range would decrease if natural obstructions,
such as mountains, get in the way.
The radar is also equipped with counter-electronic warfare capabilities.
NASAMS fires more expensive missiles than Israel’s Tamir fired from the Iron Dome
system.
Since the debut of NASAMS 2 in 2000, the system typically contains a battery that includes
12 missile launchers, with each launcher carrying a magazine of six missiles.
A fully loaded NASAMS battery can engage 70 targets at the same time.
The latest variant, NASAMS 3, has an arsenal that includes surface-launched variants of
the venerable AIM-9X Sidewinder for shorter-range threats, the IRIS-T infrared homing air-to-air
missile, effective for medium-range targets up to 25 kilometers away, and the AIM-120
and AIM-120 AMRAAM-ER missiles that can hit targets up to 105 kilometers away.
The AIM-120 is equipped with a shrapnel array directional warhead that is detonated either
by active radar or a fuse upon contact with an enemy projectile.
These missiles do not need to fly parallel to their target like Iron Dome’s Tamir missiles
do, which gives them more room for error.
It is not yet known whether NASAMS will be able to work with longer-range missiles in
development, such as the 200-kilometer AIM-260 JATM from Lockheed Martin, which is scheduled
to make its debut at the end of 2023.
However, it would be more surprising if it would not be able to fire this weapon.
NASAMS has a design with open architecture in mind.
This makes it adaptable to modern technologies even though the basis of the system is close
to 30 years old.
Another example of the system’s flexibility occurred in March 2022, when Raytheon successfully
tested the High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HEWLS) in conjunction with NASAMS, showing
interoperability between the two.
The live-fire exercise had the laser get cues from the NASAMS Fire Distribution Center.
HEWLS used the system to track and destroy a series of nine drones at various distances.
With these tests, NASAMS is rapidly becoming just as much of an anti-drone system as it
is a missile defense system, much as the Israelis hope the Iron Dome to become.
NASAMS is designed as an intermediate range missile defense system that can engage targets
at low and medium altitudes under any weather conditions.
However, it can also integrate itself with systems designed to engage longer-range and
higher altitude targets, like the Patriot system.
The Patriot missile defense system was first designed in the 1970s and made its debut in
the early 1980s.
Although this makes it a venerable platform, it has been upgraded repeatedly since then.
Patriot is short for Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target.
The Patriot is the US Army’s primary air and missile defense system, capable of intercepting
targets at long ranges and high altitudes.
Typical Patriot batteries range from six to eight platforms, with each individual component
carrying a magazine of four interceptor missiles.
Patriot systems are mounted on M983 trucks and each launching system carries an onboard
15 kilowatt generator.
The Patriot can come with multiple types of radar systems.
These are the AN/MPQ-53, AN/MPQ-65, or AN/MPQ-65A.
One of the things that distinguish the Patriot from its missile and air defense peers is
that its radar can combine surveillance, tracking, and engagement capacities in one unit.
The current version of the Patriot can fire two types of missiles: PAC-2 and PAC-3.
The PAC-2 is an evolution of the Patriot system’s original PAC-1 missile.
The PAC-2 Guidance Enhanced Missile originated in the 1990s and features better propulsion
than its predecessor and a modernized blast fragmentation warhead.
PAC-2 uses a Track-Via-Missile guidance system in its terminal phase.
After being command-guided near the target, the PAC-2 passively tracks it, as the Patriot’s
radar system highlights the enemy projectile.
When the target is within range, the PAC-2 detonates.
This missile has a range of 160 kilometers and a maximum altitude of 25.
PAC-2 Patriot batteries use the AN/MPQ-53 radar, which was the world’s first phased-array
air defense type of radar.
The PAC-3 missile is a vast departure from its predecessors.
This missile is smaller, two-thirds lighter, and unlike the PAC-2, it is designed to directly
impact an incoming threat, rather than use a blast-fragmentation warhead from a close
distance.
To do this, the PAC-2 must not only be more precise, but more maneuverable.
It has an array of 180 solid-fueled attitude control monitors to improve its mobility in
flight.
Reportedly, the PAC-3 can defend an area seven times greater than the PAC-2.
This is partially because of the radar system the PAC-3 relies on – the AN/MPQ-65 and
its digitized upgrade, the AN/MPQ-65A, which has a range increase of 30% over its predecessor.
Because the PAC-3 has less room for error than the PAC-2, its radar guidance must be
more precise as well.
A new radar is also being developed for the Patriot called the Lower Tier Air and Missile
Defense System.
Surprisingly, the Patriot’s current radars do not have 360-degree coverage.
LTAMDS will correct this deficiency.
It is an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system featuring gallium nitride
(GaN) power amplifiers, which is the same kind of technology that will be used for the
radars in the United States coming sixth generation jet fighters: the Air Force’s Next Generation
Air Dominance (NGAD) and the Navy’s F/A-XX.
These power amplifiers will offer the Patriot higher jamming resistance, better efficiency,
and beam agility.
The Patriot system made its debut in 1991 during the Gulf War and was deployed to protect
Israel and Saudi Arabia from Iraq’s SCUD ballistic missiles.
The system did not work as well against these missiles as hoped, however, with the PAC-2
interceptors occasionally failing to destroy them.
The lessons from the conflict paved the way for the PAC-3’s development.
The Patriot proved much more effective in the invasion of Iraq the following decade.
The Patriot system is also capable of destroying drones, as Israel demonstrated when it used
the interceptors to destroy Hamas targets.
Syrian drones and an Su-24 plane were shot down in repeated engagements between 2017
and 2018 by Israelis using the Patriot system.
More recently, the Ukrainians used the Patriot system to destroy a Russian Kinzahl hypersonic
ballistic missile that Vladimir Putin once touted as “invincible,” proving that this
air defense system is still capable of matching the most modern weapons.
The Patriot might be old, but its upgrades and demonstrated capability show it is still
a force to be reckoned with, and its new radar system will make it comparable to some of
the world’s most modern military programs.
As we can see through these comparisons, missile and air defense systems are not one-size fits
all.
Each system will have its own specialized mission.
Iron Dome is designed to counter the types of rocket attacks from terror groups that
Israel has been plagued with for decades, and this is a job that it does very well.
NASAMS is a mid-range, mid-altitude system good for destroying cruise missiles in particular
– projectiles that tend to fly in a straight line with constant propulsion and remain at
low altitudes on their way to their targets, as opposed to ballistic missiles that fly
in much higher arcs.
The Patriot system, meanwhile, is excellent for targeting much longer range threats like
ballistic missiles.
Missile and air defense systems have improved dramatically over the last century.
During World War II, the British were helpless to defend London against repeat German V-2
attacks.
These early ballistic missiles simply moved too fast and too high into the atmosphere
for the existing anti-aircraft systems to be of any use against.
Now missile defense systems can shoot down dozens of targets at multiple altitudes at
once.
With laser technology coming online to assist them at a much cheaper price per shot, these
defensive assets are set to become even more powerful in the coming years.
However, no matter how good these air defenses become, their success will always be a matter
of math – how much ammunition or energy do they have available compared to the incoming
enemy weapons?
On October 7th in Israel, Hamas used enough cheap rockets to overwhelm the much more expensive
Iron Dome.
Like all defensive systems before them, modern air defenses are there to raise the costs
of an attack, not to stop it.
All will eventually fail in the face of an attacker if that attacker has the will and
resources to see the operation through.
How determined Israel’s attackers are in this latest renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict remains to be seen.
With Hezbollah allegedly having a rocket and missile stockpile up to 150,000 with the range
to strike all throughout Israeli territory, Iron Dome would be poised to face by far its
toughest challenge yet, should the conflict expand.
Israel would need to call on other air defense systems, like its Patriot batteries and David’s
Sling.
What do you think about these missile defense systems?
Have the Israelis relied too much on Iron Dome, to the point that they got too complacent
about the true extent of Hamas’ capabilities?
What is the future of air and missile defense in general with hypersonic glide vehicles
and drone swarms about to take to the battlefield?
Make sure to let us know in the comments.
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