The Iron Dome - 90% Accuracy BS

[FlyingClayDisk]

So I came across this video of tons of bombs raining down on Tel Aviv tonight. Why do they say the iron dome is 90% accurate? In this video, it looks like it has about 10% accuracy, as bombs are reaching their targets. Please help this dummy understand. Make sure and watch the entire 4 minute video. It escalates as it progresses.

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALi80XzuBOk]

The 90% claims are likely a lot of bravado and propaganda for the most part (as others have noted as well).  However, remember that missile defense includes a variety of different technologies and tactics, so you're not going to see patriot batteries go up and directly take out 9/10 incoming missiles directly (as many people expect to see).  Countermeasures include things like electronic jamming systems, optical jamming systems, fragmentation systems, decoys, close-in weapons systems, anti-projectile artillery and various other systems are also employed.  When you combine all these systems you can create a fairly effective defense over a selected area against certain types of offensive weapons.  You don't have to impact and detonate an incoming missile directly; many times you can use kinetic and/or fragmentation weapons to disrupt, disable or destroy an incoming missile just by detonating something near it.  In the case of the close-in systems; these work by simply sending a wall of explosive rounds in the general vicinity of the incoming missile trajectory.  The tactics are to disrupt or destroy incoming missiles before they can arm and detonate.  There can still be an issue of dealing with unexploded ordnance after the fact, but at least you don't have missiles detonating in population centers.

So, when you add all these things together you might get defensive averages up over 50% somewhere, but I would say 90% is pretty overly optimistic.

The more important strategic point in this discussion is how long you can sustain such a defense.  You might get high percentages early in an attack, but as successive waves of attacks come in those percentages drop rapidly simply because you run out of defensive munitions.

Lastly just some data points for reference.  People commonly hear about "Patriot" missile batteries, but it's important to understand these aren't like 1-2 missiles on a truck which can just travel anywhere.  A Patriot "battery" is a whole system which includes (3-4) platoons of personnel along with officers to operate, command and control vehicles, multiple radars, and upwards of (6) missile batteries each capable of firing up to (16) missiles.  It sounds like a lot, but you don't just fire one missile at a time, and once you fire all the missiles on a given launcher it takes a couple whole platoons of personnel a couple hours to re-arm the system (assuming you have the munitions and service vehicles there to do it).  A single battery costs on the order of $2 billion (yes, 'billion') dollars, and requires (60-100) personnel to operate.  So, you can see how this is not something you could sustain for long duration / multiple wave attacks...over a vast area.  Now, this is only one type of defense, and there are other less expensive and more numerous systems, but they're also not as effective.  This is just one example (which is frequently bantered about in the media).  So, there's quite a bit of strategy in how you deploy and utilize these systems.  And, it's not like you have (50) of these systems just laying around (the cost alone would be stratospheric)