I've not heard anything about anti-missile missiles, like the Patriot that we heard so much about in the first Gulf War. Are they ineffective, or what?
The Patriots are deployed in Haifa....remember, they were barely responsive to the Scuds from Iraq 15 years ago....which had a higher arc in the sky and longer time to be targeted.
The rockets that Hezbollah is firing are like dumb cruise missiles. They fly lower on the horizon, and emit no radar or electronic signatures. The enhancements made have extended the range, and they have packed the explosives with fragments (think pachinko balls) that shoot in every direction on detonation.
From the description in Haifa...some number of victims were not near the explosion, but were hit by the flying metals balls.
Also, these rockets are launched based on the compass.....pointing them to the heading where the target is at, and dialing in how long they are to burn....for the estimated distance.
They say 1000 rockets fired, there is a low rate of kill, with only a couple dozen dead Israelis.
What I want to see is how many Hezzies have been sent away.
Patriot uses a two tiered acquisition sytem. Early warning assets, NORAD, for example, detect the launch, and feed a window to individual batteries to look through to acquire an inbound target.
Small short range rockets are not thermally productive enough to exceed the triggering thresholds on early warning sensors, and therefore Patriot does not know where to look.
There are timing issues as well. Patriot launchers do not slew very quickly, and they are generally used in temporarily fixed arrays, with each launcher responsible for a specific segment of the threat axis.
For these reasons, Patriot is classified as a Theater Ballistic Missile Defense system. It is also a Point Defense System, as opposed to an Area Defense System.
To counter the kind of rockets generally in use by Hezbollah, up until recently anyway, you'd use more of a counterbattery system, like what we use to find and suppress enemy artillery batteries.
If things get ugly, then Patriot will become a factor, and this is a development you don't look forward to. I had hoped that Arrow IV, Israel's advanced Ballistic Missile Defense System, would be online before Iran crossed the line into open aggression, and this may still happen.
In fact, this one variable, the threat of Arrow IV coming online, eventually, may be partly responsible for Iran's elevated levels of aggression now. With impending UNSC sanctions, Iran is less likely to be able to threaten Israeli nuclear facilities as time goes by.