Posted on 09/09/2020 3:48:36 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
(September 8, 2020 / JNS) The United States’ Raytheon Missiles & Defense company and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems made an unusual announcement in August, stating that they had signed a joint venture to produce Iron Dome weapons systems on American soil.
The new partnership anticipates finalizing a site location, either in Arkansas or Alabama, before the end of the year.
“This will be the first Iron Dome all-up-round facility outside of Israel, and it will help the U.S. Department of Defense and allies across the globe obtain the system for defense of their service members and critical infrastructure,” said Raytheon’s Sam Deneke, vice president of Land Warfare and Air Defense business execution.
The new facility will produce the Iron Dome weapon system, which consists of the Tamir interceptor and launcher, and the Sky Hunter missile, which is a U.S. derivative of Tamir. Both Tamir and Sky Hunter intercept incoming cruise missiles, unmanned aerial systems and short-range targets such as rockets, artillery, mortars and other aerial threats.
Iron Dome is the world’s most widely used air-defense system, with more than 2,500 operational intercepts over Israeli cities since 2011 and a success rate exceeding 90 percent.
‘The correct strategic choice’
Brig. Gen. (res.) Pini Yungman, executive vice president for Air and Missile Defense at Rafael, told JNS that his company’s relationship with Raytheon goes back to 2006, when Rafael won a tender for another breakthrough air-defense system: David’s Sling.
A joint Israeli-American program, the David’s Sling tender was run by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and by Israel’s Missile Defense Organization. Rafael had to find an American partner for the development and production of David’s Sling, recalled Yungman.
(Excerpt) Read more at jns.org ...
I'm interested to learn why AR and AL are the possible production sites. Probably there are Raytheon plants there.
Cool name
Israeli defense contractors are really good!
I’d love to get a look at the equipment used to accurately detect tunnels.
I suspect it consists of a massively powerful computer that crunches data from ground penetrating radar scans using advanced pattern recognition techniques.
Yes, it has some symbolism.
Evidently they have been very successful in finding the tunnels.
Our Jewish allies are smart people. And President Trump is a strong supporter of Israel.
BLM is a threat to the USA and to Israel because of the (so called) Palestinian problem. Antifa is worse but similar.
Years ago I knew a strange Raytheon programmer.
He had aspergers but was the best coder I have ever seen.
I used to take him two McDonalds fish sandwiches w extra tartar sauce...he would wolf ‘em down without saying a word and then he would give me a few minutes of help on whatever coding problems I had.
Aspergers runs in my family, or a better way to say it, what appears to be Aspergers runs in my family.
I’m not much on the definitions used by the psychiatric community. Doctors “practice” medicine, but psychiatrists are in a whole other world.
The term I liked better than Aspergers was “Crypto Sensitivity Syndrone”. A psychiatrist did not coin that description, but a sufferer did.
The problem I see with Iron Dome and other defensive systems is the cost. Last figures I saw pegged the Iron Dome interceptors at $45k each. They are being used to intercept missiles and drones that cost as little as $1,000. For the system to be financially effective the ratio would need to be reversed. Obviously, Iron Dome can be swamped.
Lockheed has a missile assembly plant in Camden AR, dunno about Raytheon.
I have OCD, OCD guys make very meticulous coders.
Can’t bear the thought that my code might have a bug.
I write a lot of code to test my routines under stress...and build hardware for tests, and add watchdog processors to watch the main processor (this mainly in medical devices) because I worry the main processor just might fail someday. The watchdog timer in a uC is not enough to satisfy me...
I count all kinds of stuff constantly, went through a period of a few years where I was afraid to drive. I was too distracted. Almost ran into the ditch once counting a row of mailboxes...lol
I still know how many beeps and the tone and spacing of the beeps of every microwave oven I have ever used...it’s crazy!
The meds used to control it make my head too fuzzy to do good work so I never used them after one trial.
My late Sister also had OCD but mainly it just caused her to do silly stuff like check that the door was locked at night....like several times!
The thing is, Raytheon’s been promising various antimissile systems to the US military for decades and delivered nothing but vaporware. This is likely Raytheon realizing that they really don’t have anything, the military telling Raytheon they need something *now* (especially since we’re hastily retrofitting the Israeli Trophy APS to our tanks instead of waiting another decade or two for the Raytheon QuickKill vaporware system due to lessons learned in Syria) instead of in a nebulous future and the Israelis taking advantage of a US domestic partner to get more US military sales - a USDM production partner means they can get around the BDS idiots.
Israel has openly acknowledged that a pure munition cost analysis doesn’t look good, but they point out that if the $1000 missile or drone is allowed to land in a populated area, it will cause far more than $45K in damage. They have some case studies where if the sub-$10K missile was allowed to land, it would have caused over a million dollars in damage to people, businesses and structures, so they believe the cost actually works out for them. There’s also the political and morale benefits, on which a price sometimes can’t be placed.
While I agree, a 1k munition can cause huge amounts of damage, there is an upper bound to the budget that buys the Iron Dome missiles. Eventually, they will run out.
There needs to be a cheaper way.
One possibility is peace. (I hope you didn’t have a mouth full of coffee when you read that.) Trump has forced the Muslim would to take Israel seriously and for that he deserves a Nobel Prize.* This will seriously impact the ability of the “Palestinians” to carry out their forever war against Israel. You will probably see the UAE and others turning over their intelligence files to Israel as the friendship with Israel will be far more valuable to the UAE and others than making political points with terrorists.
* Giving Trump the Nobel Prize will go a long way to reestablish the Nobel Prize as something other than a liberal play thing. Doing so, however, may cause numerous liberals to commit suicide. (A two-fer in my book.)
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Nothing but vaporware? Patriot GEM-T, SM-6, SM-3, EKV, NCADE (in development)... Hardly vaporware.
There are cheaper ways, and peace is one of them - worth noting that one reason peace has become increasingly possible of late is that the old hardliners that fought Israel in the last half of the 1900s are all dying off or simply losing power; succeeding generations are generally not as hardcore and increasingly see the fight against Israel as stupid - especially in the age of the Internet, where it becomes easier to learn about things and meet people on the other side of the globe. Xenophobia is less of a factor in the case regarding Israel.
Other cheaper cases not involving peace are things like lasers - but those have engineering problems to overcome and waiting for them is not worthwhile when you need to keep your people safe. So missiles for now, lasers when ready. Which the Israelis are also working on: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/17/how-realistic-is-israels-tactical-laser-breakthrough/
Tell me again how Raytheon has delivered QuickKill? It’s vaporware. Most of what you list is based on old programs - Raytheon has promised but not delivered any new tactical missile defense/APS systems for at least the last 15 years.
For the better part of two decades, US troops rode around unprotected by APS (and dying) because Raytheon kept promising that they’d get QuickKill and then QuickKill 2.0 to work so the Army didn’t need to buy Trophy or any other APS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Kill
EKV - didn’t work as advertised, had to be redesigned, whole program cancelled and started over. Vaporware. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/08/21/dod-tanks-redesigned-kill-vehicle-program-for-homeland-defense-interceptor/
GEM-T - Questions about whether *any* of the Patriot systems work as advertised in the real world: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/28/patriot-missiles-are-made-in-america-and-fail-everywhere/
Damn, I thought it was me. I don't count things while driving, but if doing things by hand, I count. Slicing tomatoes. Shoveling dirt. Tossing mulch. Picking vegetables. Anything that is repetitive, I count. Weird thing, is oftentimes I don't start with the number one.
From information I’ve picked up on via numerous open sources, the Iron Dome can discriminate between incoming weapons that will impact a protected target versus landing in an empty field. Thus it can hold fire to conserve magazine depth.
I have no idea what the $$$ per ID round is but let’s use your $45K each and go a step further as I think that usually 2 or 3 ID rounds are shot at each target. So, the high end of $135K of ID rounds are expended on the incoming $1K target. Now consider the friendly target. A civilian home, a military target? In addition to the people at risk, these targets if struck have their own value as well. I think that in virtually all cases, their value is well in excess of the $135K of ID munitions assumed.
Another assumed aspect of the ID system is that ballistic weapons such as mortar, artillery and rockets will have their full ballistic path calculated such that the origin of firing is known. This means that a counter battery targeting order can be transmitted and possibly fired while the incoming is still in the air.
From information I’ve picked up on via numerous open sources, the Iron Dome can discriminate between incoming weapons that will impact a protected target versus landing in an empty field. Thus it can hold fire to conserve magazine depth.
I have no idea what the $$$ per ID round is but let’s use your $45K each and go a step further as I think that usually 2 or 3 ID rounds are shot at each target. So, the high end of $135K of ID rounds are expended on the incoming $1K target. Now consider the friendly target. A civilian home, a military target? In addition to the people at risk, these targets if struck have their own value as well. I think that in virtually all cases, their value is well in excess of the $135K of ID munitions assumed.
Another assumed aspect of the ID system is that ballistic weapons such as mortar, artillery and rockets will have their full ballistic path calculated such that the origin of firing is known. This means that a counter battery targeting order can be transmitted and possibly fired while the incoming is still in the air.
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