Weekly Commentary: Iron Dome Used For Dangerously Wrong Concept
Dr. Aaron Lerner 17 November 2018

Here is what I wrote on January 27, 2008 as Israel raced to complete the
Iron Dome project:

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There are two fundamentally different visions of the purpose of a rocket
defense umbrella:

Concept #1: The enemy can be essentially allowed to fire rockets 24/7 at
Israeli targets because they are intercepted.

Concept #2: The IDF can carry out operations against the enemy with the
enemy's ability to retaliate against Israel's civilian population
dramatically limited.

In the first case, life is still pretty miserable for Israelis with rockets
blowing up all the time and the enemy taking advantage of the Israeli
avoidance of ground activity to develop answers to the Israeli equipment
(e.g. shoot enough rockets at the same time that are aimed well enough that
most of them will in fact land inside a populated area so that the Israeli
umbrella temporarily runs out of supplies).
###

Unfortunately, Israel opted for Concept #1.

And judging from the talking heads - with the exception of Naftali Bennett
and a few others - the approach appears to be to continue to engage in an
incredibly expensive gizmo development and deployment race with our enemies
rather than destroying the gizmos already in Gaza and Lebanon and preventing
new gizmos from being deployed there.

And the costs are indeed incredibly expensive.

We are trying to defend basically all of urban Israel with systems designed
to defend strategic locations with relatively small footprints.

In money terms - we are on the path to spending many tens of billions of
dollars on systems that may temporarily allow us to continue ignoring Hamas
and Hizbullah when the cost of literally demolishing the gizmos now in Gaza
and Lebanon and their gizmo production capability is only a fraction of
this.

Let's be clear about this gizmo race.

At every level of technology, the cost of gizmos that can shield Israel's
urban areas will always be magnitudes greater than the cost of the offensive
gizmos.

That's "shield Israel's urban areas" rather than limiting the deployment to
protecting critical strategic locations.

Hamas spends ten million - we spend a billion.

Hamas spends fifty million - we spend half our current defense budget.

And it only gets worse.

Today, when it appears that we still have the gizmos to defend our critical
strategic locations as we do what must be done in Gaza and Lebanon, is the
time to urgently and quickly plan and execute the operations to wipe out the
gizmos which we have postponed for over a decade.
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