By the way, I knew another clown that considered himself to be an ABSOLUTE EXPERT in anti-missile technology, probably worked at your place in MA (who knows, maybe you).
This person told me in the 1980s that there was NO WAY that the United States could design an effective anti-missile system. Just not possible. Absolutely impossible. Stupid to spend one dollar attempting it. Total waste of money. Would not do this country a bit of good.
Obviously that person was also CLUELESS as the point of the system was not to shoot down missiles but to provide a CREDIBLE case that we would not be pushed around by the Soviets - and it worked, and the Soviets folded - in large part because that particular person stayed up there in MA and wasn’t involved in policy making (thank God).
I simply have a problem with people that purport themselves to know everything simply because of their little niche in their career field. I have to work with people like that - they’re always second-guess management decisions, not because they have the same information as management, but because they DON’T.
Iron Dome, along with the rest of the Israeli defensive systems, may or may not prove itself capable of defeating the threat from their neighbors, but I REALLY, REALLY, doubt anyone in this country knows enough to make that call with certainty.
Little eh? I've done R&D, scale up, permitting, full construction project management, and manufacturing engineering in both military and medical markets. In the former, I've made control electronics for both radar systems and power systems for missile actuators (HARM, AMRAAM, and others). I've done both high-end customs and mass production. Simply because I think that the Iron Dome is unsustainable, you go berserk:
Israel will have NO PROBLEM shooting down as many as needed.
This is already shown to be false. The Palis have figured out that if they fire their missiles in salvos the Iron Dome cannot target them all simultaneously.
I don't claim to be an expert. I do know that these Iron Dome missiles are expensive. RAFAEL Advanced defense Systems, producer of the Tamir rocket used in the system estimates their current cost at $50,000 per unit and their steady state cost at $25,000 per unit. Nor is that the total cost of a deployed unit, for which one must add the radar systems, software people, the entire logistical support chain, transportation, and crew maintenance. When you're fighting rockets that cost $1,000 a copy to produce (with additional costs to deploy), and an "army" of thugs amid stratospheric unemployment, it looks like an expensive means of defense.
I also know why they are expensive, because to produce silicon with the properties needed for the frequencies necessary for sufficient target resolution reliably and repeatably is very difficult while gallium arsenide chips are prohibitively expensive because of the air bridges necessary (they're really fragile in assembly). Because of the frequencies, very fine wire (half mil) with very small target pads are used, making automated wire bonding difficult. It's just reality. Fast signal processors and precise actuators with which to respond to control signals are expensive. To reduce costs requires precision to enable open loop control. Precision is expensive. It takes time and money to get the process down because one needs to run sufficient samples to learn where the control variables are and what their acceptable ranges might be. It's just reality. All of that constitutes development costs (contrary to the wishful thinking of both R&D people and management). So while the "true R&D" is usually considered a sunk cost, so is scale up. Yet the life cycle of such products is so short, one seldom gets to the point that sunk costs become negligible. Nor do the cost analyses I see consider the cost of maintaining the batteries during "wait time" as part of the delivered cost per unit. No matter what, it won't be cheap. Nor am I the only engineer who has said so on this thread.
I offered what I know because I feel the responsibility to do so having had that experience, not because I am taking a position. It is a common practice on FR among the professionals here and one of its more valuable attributes. I think you have a problem with people you fear might know more about this than you do. I can't help that.