Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
Hmm, yeah, I thought about getting into stuff like this. I think I'll leave it for you to comment on, though - there are a lot of factors in play here and I think it's sometimes easy to overestimate the strategic benefits. A rational response from Hamas might indeed be to give up on rockets as more than a method of shutting down the southern Israeli economy for a few days... yet it also might be to develop tactics and weapons that exploit weaknesses in Iron Dome - e.g. firing in large salvos, improving targeting accuracy to use up interceptors, etc.
Like with the case of the Brits though, this effectively reduces the number of targets they can attack at one time if they have to staturate a particular target with missiles to stand a chance of getting a hit. I assume the point of the rocket strategy is to make life unpleasent enough for ordinary Israeli's living in the target area that it will cause Israel to stop doing whatever it is Hamas doesn't want them doing - basic terrorism. Iron Dome effectively negates this tactic. They might still be able pull of a successful attack if Iron Dome doesn't work, or they come up with tactics that can work around it, but that's hardly going to have Israeli's living in terror of being rocketed.

Other factors come into play. In order to pull off a saturation attack, they have to have two things: accuracy and coordination. i.e. they're going to have to be accurate enough to put all the missiles into one area in order to overwhelm particular iron dome battery, and they have to be coordinated enough to do it all at the same time. Given that a) 2/3s of the missiles manage to come down in the middle of nowhere in a country as small as Israel and B) half those things are fired off by small groups that Hamas can't even control for political reasons I am not confident this is something Hamas will be able to achieve.

They could fire better missiles, but that then means increasing expense of the missiles in question and a corresponding drop in the number of missiles they can fire, never mind the difficulty of obtaining them. And of course the Israeli's can simply upgrade their own system. If it comes down to a technical arms race between Hamas an Israel there really is only one winner.

Some warhead designs are more delicate than others, true. However, with a NCB warhead, even a warhead failing to appropriately detonante, the dispersal of the dangerous material in the air over a populated area can still be quite destructive. You might not flatten a city, but you can definitely kill a bunch of people and render parts of it uninhabitable. When Iraq was lobbing Scuds at Israel in 1991, the Patriot interceptors did indeed engage nearly every target, but they were unable to damage them sufficiently to keep them from hitting Tel Aviv. Now, the warheads were conventional and thus largely ineffective, but if one of those had been filled with a neurotoxin, it wouldn't really matter if the warhead was that damaged. The dispersal mechanism would have been suboptimal, of course, but it still could have done a lot of damage. The Patriot needed to fully destroy the incoming threat high enough in the atmosphere to limit the amount of dangerous materials that made it to the target.

I don't really get into the details because that would probably be a bit overtechnical for me (some warhead designs are more 'survivable', but it's complex), but definitely worth some discussion in the thread.
Fun fact: The Russian system uses or used (not sure which) 10kt nuclear warheads... it didn't need to be that accurate.