Another technical question that seems very important is whether air defense can counter fifth generation fighters (f-35, j-20). It seems that hezbollah doesn't have this capability, since f-35s keep hitting beirut. Does Iran or Syria have the ability to combat the f-35? Does China or Russia?
If the technology exists and can be sent to lebanon, it would be an absolute game-changer.
Iran has 3000 ballistic missiles. Israel has far fewer arrow interceptor missiles. I'm sure they are being conserved for high value targets like power generation. I can't see how you can make any generalizations based on the hits to nonessential sites. I don't care how many missiles hit the airbase. The Israeli air force was not degrading in any way, even in the hours following the attack. Do you have any data on how often interceptor missiles were fired but missed?
Pls mate try to figure out the Israeli endgame here, since basically all the non-propagandist experts are saying Israel's strategy makes zero sense long term, when the entire situation was obviously entirely manufactured by them long before Oct 7 even. Piece by piece has fallen as planned to act in their favor, and now the Jews will somehow outsmart us all once again but how? Someone with a 11+ inch IQ just needs to bash his head against this thing as all the 8-9 inch guys just don't seem big enough to figure this one out.
"when the entire situation was obviously entirely manufactured by them long before Oct 7 even. Piece by piece has fallen as planned to act in their favor"
I think this is where you're wrong. Israel basically went according to plan from 1948-1980. However, after that, Israel has constantly failed militarily. It lost to hezbollah in 2000, hamas in 2004, hezbollah in 2006, and hamas in 2014. Their proxies also lost in Syria in 2017. In the current war, Israel has bombed gaza but failed to actually defeat hamas on the ground. Their 2024 lebanon invasion is going very poorly although it just started.
Israel is desperate to win a war, because they've been losing non-stop for 50 years.
The US and Israel have been aiding ISIS, Hamas and other radical Muslim groups to power and bloom for various political purposes, only to carpet-bomb them later on, because that's easy to justify. Hamas prevented a two state solution and ultimately made ethnic cleansing possible, ISIS weakened the Assad regime and justified US military intervention, etc. Israel occupied Lebanon for 18 years before being kicked out, and they maintain their annexation of Golan Heights. So I don't know in what kind of fringe mental dimension you can call that "losing".
Granted though, some people might have become increasingly frustrated by the status quo, and lack of occupation and annexation of additional foreign territory since 1982... but that's a rather insane hot-head reason to start wide-scale wars now.
Like there is no defeating Hamas, there is no defeating Hezbollah. However not being able to defeat Hamas makes a lot of sense to Israel, as it serves the highly desirable purpose of reducing Palestinian population, while invading Lebanon just does not. The question is, why such highly intelligent actors working under the table are now seemingly pursuing blatantly nonsensical strategies.
I can tell you why: because we are just too dumb to understand them at present.
You're saying that Israel lost every war since 1980 on purpose so that the all-powerful Palestinian Authority would lose moral legitimacy... I'm sure you think iof is also failing to invade lebanon now on purpose. I'm sure the Israelis are thrilled to lose on purpose again.
Again, let me point out that missle defense is **much** easier if the missle is coming towards you than if it's racing away. Also we don't know how many interceptors those craft were willing to use given the need to retain their own missle defense.
Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles. A US carrier is about 13 billion and the attack against Israel seemed to use about 1 billion dollars worth of missles. And the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles with bigger warheads for carriers run about 10x the price so if that's the kind of attack needed to take out an aircraft carrier it's a decent tradeoff. Especially given the fact that this kind of barrage exposes where the launchers are.
Having said all this, I have serious worries about this approach going forward. As Ukraine is starting to demonstrate it's possible to make decent cruise missles -- ie jet powered drones -- for much cheaper.
The real issue here isn't carriers but the development model of the defense industry. I think the real upshot is that if you adopted a tech industry style fail quick approach and committed to large orders to do economies of scale you should be able to produce decent long range drones/missles for 50k a pop at scale and use software to overcome relatively limited hardware.
That approach will be absolutely devastating and impossible to defend against without your own drone swarms (energy weapons just aren't effective enough at the needed scale especially if the drone tries to manuever).
We don't know impact at the two airbases targeted, nor in other parts of Israel. Military censors prevent reporting on this. IIRC the US Congress even passed a law making it illegal for companies to provide satellite imagery of Israeli targets - please double check this for me.
Don't trust any images of missile damage in Israel, as it's obviously a priority to keep this a secret. Videos on social media, some of them verified by OSINT geolocation, show ~20 hits on Nevatim IIRC.
I agree information is limited. I suspect if there had been extensive damage it would have leaked out just as the information you mention did (showing some damage to buildings and one hanger with a hole in it) but I obviously don't know so I'm not updating a huge amount -- though I do think Israel would have trouble keeping quiet any significant amount of deaths.
But, that obviously can't be evidence for the limitation of air defense. We only know what we know.
Yes a number of missles got through (agree that hits within Nevatim base too close to be excluded but I was talking about video of falling missles not the damage pictures) but given the lack of similar reports elsewhere and the previous attacks the likely explanation is that Iran succeeded in doing exactly what it intended -- overwhelmed the capacity of Israeli air defense in the area. If you can't launch interceptors at the incoming missles you obviously can't shoot them down.
Part of the reason this increases my confidence in the utility of air defense is the reports look exactly like one would expect if this attack -- plus depletion from the last one -- meant Israel ran out of interceptors or launchers to defend that area (I know each patriot battery only covers about 15km ..radius I think and works better closer to the launcher).
Missle defense working poorly should have meant similar fraction of missles getting through everywhere and similar fraction as the last attack.
If your claim is just that the number of interceptors available can be overwhelmed of course that's true but this event is totally uninformative about that -- we can just count the launch tubes in the carrier group.
Though the navy has started placing SM (forget number but ones capable of doing missle intercept) on planes so the air defense patrols can contribute so that bumps up capacity a bit -- but that just brings us back to tradeoffs. Any remotely dangerous enemy can always take out pretty much any asset within range if they devote enough resources to it. Question is whether the amount is large enough to make that system an effective way to spend the dollars and lives in the conflict.
Missles large enough to substantially damage and with the capability to be given in flight guidedance to the current location of the moving carrier and then intelligently execute final approach despite potential jamming limiting them to a slow channel [1] are still quite expensive. And just as the interceptors and launch tubes are limited so too are the enemy's offensive missles and launchers and using them on one target reveals them to prevent them from being used against another. Maybe that's still a decent tradeoff, I just don't know but this evidence isn't particularly relevant to that.
--
Though I am constantly puzzled why those missles still cost so much. The military really needs to adopt a different procurement model since it should be possible to mass produce cheapish missles with a common control architecture. They are slowly moving to this but I'm constantly horrified by the stories about lockhead etc retaining proprietary control over all the software and systems and charging billions and taking decades to do what a decent tech startup could deliver in a court years for 10s of millions. But it doesn't seem to be a us only problem.
--
1: Pet peeve of mine is people assuming that jamming can block communication. Assuming the folks building the tech aren't idiots -- and you aren't so close you can completely overwhelm the receiver's ability to discriminate -- Shannon's noisy channel theorem (and extensions) tells us the fraction of bandwidth available after jamming by a given power.
"Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles. A US carrier is about 13 billion and the attack against Israel seemed to use about 1 billion dollars worth of missles."
Almost all of the missiles hit. This is very clear if you watch any of the videos. Iran estimated 90% hit. I also heard in the last attack that iran spent 50m and Israel spent 1b to defend. I'd need to see some calculations to be convinced that the new attack cost 1b.
The missles flew hundreds of miles. Unless the video was taken from a satellite how can that possibly tell you the percentage of missles that hit?
Also missle defense isn't stupid. They purposefully don't target missles whose flight path isn't going to hit anything of value. That just burns money.
And if they did mostly hit Iranian missles must be absolute shit given there was one death -- in the west bank -- a few damaged office buildings and one hole in a hanger. When even a few Ukranian or Rusdian missles find their targets the devastation is pretty extensive. If 90% of the 180 missles launched had found their targets Israel's air force should be in smoking ruins not continuing strikes in Lebanon seemingly on schedule.
We saw in the videos that there were barely any interceptions. Interceptions over jordan or iraq using arrow missiles? Maybe, but I doubt there were many.
I think Iran's goal was to demonstrate the ability to strike military equipment without escalating. I understand that most people are begging iran to focus more on getting kills rather than showing pinpoint strikes on military equipment.
Any interceptions that happened should have happened far far outside any of those videos -- usually kms away in both horizontal vertical for long range ballastic missles like this. Ideally the incoming missles aren't destroyed right on top of the target if you can help it. More low flying cruise missles or glide vehicles may get intercepted later but this attack was mostly ballistic missiles.
This looks exactly like I'd expect an attack that overwhelmed the available interceptor capacity to look like. If the video showed a bunch of interceptors trying to take out these incoming projectiles and failing *that* is evidence of missle interception failing. This looks like evidence that Israel doesn't have hundreds of interceptor launchers stationed around every base (it would be cost prohibitive).
"Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles."
I mean it could be true...but it does raise the question of why the world powers continue to produce/purchase expensive surface ships. Is there some sort of conspiracy between rival powers not to take advantage of this fact and save some money?
China is building out their own fleet of aircraft carriers. If they are sitting ducks why?
I think there is a big difference between "sitting duck" and plausibly going to be struck when targeted by an overwhelming attack.
But I agree that in the near future -- once someone does a bit better with the software on cheap drones -- it will be possible to overwhelm the defenses on carriers with drone swarms. I just don't believe that **missle** defense is particularly ineffective the way you suggest. Missle defense, particularly in the more advantageous situation of defending ships with/near the defending launchers seems like it's reasonably effective. If 10 million dollar Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles were the only concern I'm not convinced the economic tradeoff is particularly poor.
But yes, with a bit of good software cheap drones are likely going to be able to simply overwhelm that defense. And even less advanced countries will be able to field such swarms.
But this is a problem that goes beyond naval combat. Cheap drones with good software that allow for intelligent independent targeting threaten all military assets down to the individual squad. The only way to defend against this economically is going to be drone swarms of your own.
"I mean it could be true...but it does raise the question of why the world powers continue to produce/purchase expensive surface ships."
In the case of the United States, there is tremendous wealth to be had.
"China is building out their own fleet of aircraft carriers. If they are sitting ducks why?"
My understanding is that China's strategy involves the production of a limited number of aircraft carriers, which are intended to serve as stand-off assets rather than tools for projecting hegemonic power.
I'm a wordcel but there are real hard problems presented here. If whoever has similar missiles can burn them down from say 50k feet, that is more plasma and need a heat seeker. Obviously the Iranians were glowing all the way down. I have not heard about their terminal velocity. Plasma cuts both ways.
Really the only way to go was the Reagan Star Wars space based systems but that is a lift and may be treaty banned.
Another technical question that seems very important is whether air defense can counter fifth generation fighters (f-35, j-20). It seems that hezbollah doesn't have this capability, since f-35s keep hitting beirut. Does Iran or Syria have the ability to combat the f-35? Does China or Russia?
If the technology exists and can be sent to lebanon, it would be an absolute game-changer.
Iran has 3000 ballistic missiles. Israel has far fewer arrow interceptor missiles. I'm sure they are being conserved for high value targets like power generation. I can't see how you can make any generalizations based on the hits to nonessential sites. I don't care how many missiles hit the airbase. The Israeli air force was not degrading in any way, even in the hours following the attack. Do you have any data on how often interceptor missiles were fired but missed?
Pls mate try to figure out the Israeli endgame here, since basically all the non-propagandist experts are saying Israel's strategy makes zero sense long term, when the entire situation was obviously entirely manufactured by them long before Oct 7 even. Piece by piece has fallen as planned to act in their favor, and now the Jews will somehow outsmart us all once again but how? Someone with a 11+ inch IQ just needs to bash his head against this thing as all the 8-9 inch guys just don't seem big enough to figure this one out.
"when the entire situation was obviously entirely manufactured by them long before Oct 7 even. Piece by piece has fallen as planned to act in their favor"
I think this is where you're wrong. Israel basically went according to plan from 1948-1980. However, after that, Israel has constantly failed militarily. It lost to hezbollah in 2000, hamas in 2004, hezbollah in 2006, and hamas in 2014. Their proxies also lost in Syria in 2017. In the current war, Israel has bombed gaza but failed to actually defeat hamas on the ground. Their 2024 lebanon invasion is going very poorly although it just started.
Israel is desperate to win a war, because they've been losing non-stop for 50 years.
You don't even know what you are talking about.
The US and Israel have been aiding ISIS, Hamas and other radical Muslim groups to power and bloom for various political purposes, only to carpet-bomb them later on, because that's easy to justify. Hamas prevented a two state solution and ultimately made ethnic cleansing possible, ISIS weakened the Assad regime and justified US military intervention, etc. Israel occupied Lebanon for 18 years before being kicked out, and they maintain their annexation of Golan Heights. So I don't know in what kind of fringe mental dimension you can call that "losing".
Granted though, some people might have become increasingly frustrated by the status quo, and lack of occupation and annexation of additional foreign territory since 1982... but that's a rather insane hot-head reason to start wide-scale wars now.
Like there is no defeating Hamas, there is no defeating Hezbollah. However not being able to defeat Hamas makes a lot of sense to Israel, as it serves the highly desirable purpose of reducing Palestinian population, while invading Lebanon just does not. The question is, why such highly intelligent actors working under the table are now seemingly pursuing blatantly nonsensical strategies.
I can tell you why: because we are just too dumb to understand them at present.
You're saying that Israel lost every war since 1980 on purpose so that the all-powerful Palestinian Authority would lose moral legitimacy... I'm sure you think iof is also failing to invade lebanon now on purpose. I'm sure the Israelis are thrilled to lose on purpose again.
Please take your schizophrenia medicine.
Dude that's like tier 2 level BS. Where is the high IQ audience?
Steve, you have changed your usual subject matter. I enjoyed it, thanks.
"And if America gets involved, all bets are off." Makes you want to vote for Kamala, doesn't it.
The brainless one.
Again, let me point out that missle defense is **much** easier if the missle is coming towards you than if it's racing away. Also we don't know how many interceptors those craft were willing to use given the need to retain their own missle defense.
Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles. A US carrier is about 13 billion and the attack against Israel seemed to use about 1 billion dollars worth of missles. And the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles with bigger warheads for carriers run about 10x the price so if that's the kind of attack needed to take out an aircraft carrier it's a decent tradeoff. Especially given the fact that this kind of barrage exposes where the launchers are.
Having said all this, I have serious worries about this approach going forward. As Ukraine is starting to demonstrate it's possible to make decent cruise missles -- ie jet powered drones -- for much cheaper.
The real issue here isn't carriers but the development model of the defense industry. I think the real upshot is that if you adopted a tech industry style fail quick approach and committed to large orders to do economies of scale you should be able to produce decent long range drones/missles for 50k a pop at scale and use software to overcome relatively limited hardware.
That approach will be absolutely devastating and impossible to defend against without your own drone swarms (energy weapons just aren't effective enough at the needed scale especially if the drone tries to manuever).
We don't know impact at the two airbases targeted, nor in other parts of Israel. Military censors prevent reporting on this. IIRC the US Congress even passed a law making it illegal for companies to provide satellite imagery of Israeli targets - please double check this for me.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/16/1212889717/satellite-images-us-israel-gaza
Here's an example of satellite imagery with the two airbases digitally obfuscated:
https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1841790267935850686
Don't trust any images of missile damage in Israel, as it's obviously a priority to keep this a secret. Videos on social media, some of them verified by OSINT geolocation, show ~20 hits on Nevatim IIRC.
I agree information is limited. I suspect if there had been extensive damage it would have leaked out just as the information you mention did (showing some damage to buildings and one hanger with a hole in it) but I obviously don't know so I'm not updating a huge amount -- though I do think Israel would have trouble keeping quiet any significant amount of deaths.
But, that obviously can't be evidence for the limitation of air defense. We only know what we know.
See update!
32 hits at Nevatim...
Iran probably used a mix of missiles types, so we don't know best CEP for their most modern missiles.
Yes a number of missles got through (agree that hits within Nevatim base too close to be excluded but I was talking about video of falling missles not the damage pictures) but given the lack of similar reports elsewhere and the previous attacks the likely explanation is that Iran succeeded in doing exactly what it intended -- overwhelmed the capacity of Israeli air defense in the area. If you can't launch interceptors at the incoming missles you obviously can't shoot them down.
Part of the reason this increases my confidence in the utility of air defense is the reports look exactly like one would expect if this attack -- plus depletion from the last one -- meant Israel ran out of interceptors or launchers to defend that area (I know each patriot battery only covers about 15km ..radius I think and works better closer to the launcher).
Missle defense working poorly should have meant similar fraction of missles getting through everywhere and similar fraction as the last attack.
Count how many interceptors a carrier group has on its destroyers. How many can it fire vs a salvo that arrives in a 20s interval? Etc.
If your claim is just that the number of interceptors available can be overwhelmed of course that's true but this event is totally uninformative about that -- we can just count the launch tubes in the carrier group.
Though the navy has started placing SM (forget number but ones capable of doing missle intercept) on planes so the air defense patrols can contribute so that bumps up capacity a bit -- but that just brings us back to tradeoffs. Any remotely dangerous enemy can always take out pretty much any asset within range if they devote enough resources to it. Question is whether the amount is large enough to make that system an effective way to spend the dollars and lives in the conflict.
Missles large enough to substantially damage and with the capability to be given in flight guidedance to the current location of the moving carrier and then intelligently execute final approach despite potential jamming limiting them to a slow channel [1] are still quite expensive. And just as the interceptors and launch tubes are limited so too are the enemy's offensive missles and launchers and using them on one target reveals them to prevent them from being used against another. Maybe that's still a decent tradeoff, I just don't know but this evidence isn't particularly relevant to that.
--
Though I am constantly puzzled why those missles still cost so much. The military really needs to adopt a different procurement model since it should be possible to mass produce cheapish missles with a common control architecture. They are slowly moving to this but I'm constantly horrified by the stories about lockhead etc retaining proprietary control over all the software and systems and charging billions and taking decades to do what a decent tech startup could deliver in a court years for 10s of millions. But it doesn't seem to be a us only problem.
--
1: Pet peeve of mine is people assuming that jamming can block communication. Assuming the folks building the tech aren't idiots -- and you aren't so close you can completely overwhelm the receiver's ability to discriminate -- Shannon's noisy channel theorem (and extensions) tells us the fraction of bandwidth available after jamming by a given power.
"Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles. A US carrier is about 13 billion and the attack against Israel seemed to use about 1 billion dollars worth of missles."
Almost all of the missiles hit. This is very clear if you watch any of the videos. Iran estimated 90% hit. I also heard in the last attack that iran spent 50m and Israel spent 1b to defend. I'd need to see some calculations to be convinced that the new attack cost 1b.
The missles flew hundreds of miles. Unless the video was taken from a satellite how can that possibly tell you the percentage of missles that hit?
Also missle defense isn't stupid. They purposefully don't target missles whose flight path isn't going to hit anything of value. That just burns money.
And if they did mostly hit Iranian missles must be absolute shit given there was one death -- in the west bank -- a few damaged office buildings and one hole in a hanger. When even a few Ukranian or Rusdian missles find their targets the devastation is pretty extensive. If 90% of the 180 missles launched had found their targets Israel's air force should be in smoking ruins not continuing strikes in Lebanon seemingly on schedule.
We saw in the videos that there were barely any interceptions. Interceptions over jordan or iraq using arrow missiles? Maybe, but I doubt there were many.
I think Iran's goal was to demonstrate the ability to strike military equipment without escalating. I understand that most people are begging iran to focus more on getting kills rather than showing pinpoint strikes on military equipment.
Any interceptions that happened should have happened far far outside any of those videos -- usually kms away in both horizontal vertical for long range ballastic missles like this. Ideally the incoming missles aren't destroyed right on top of the target if you can help it. More low flying cruise missles or glide vehicles may get intercepted later but this attack was mostly ballistic missiles.
This looks exactly like I'd expect an attack that overwhelmed the available interceptor capacity to look like. If the video showed a bunch of interceptors trying to take out these incoming projectiles and failing *that* is evidence of missle interception failing. This looks like evidence that Israel doesn't have hundreds of interceptor launchers stationed around every base (it would be cost prohibitive).
"Given how few missles did impact successfully in a much larger area to defend this attack made me less concerned about US carrier vulnerability to missles."
All surface ships are sitting ducks.
I mean it could be true...but it does raise the question of why the world powers continue to produce/purchase expensive surface ships. Is there some sort of conspiracy between rival powers not to take advantage of this fact and save some money?
China is building out their own fleet of aircraft carriers. If they are sitting ducks why?
Aircraft carriers are very versatile in any context except an all-out peer conflict.
They can be used to intimidate weaker countries, for example.
However, as drone and missile tech continue to improve even weak countries (Yemen) can threaten aircraft carriers.
https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1834272413908967822
I think there is a big difference between "sitting duck" and plausibly going to be struck when targeted by an overwhelming attack.
But I agree that in the near future -- once someone does a bit better with the software on cheap drones -- it will be possible to overwhelm the defenses on carriers with drone swarms. I just don't believe that **missle** defense is particularly ineffective the way you suggest. Missle defense, particularly in the more advantageous situation of defending ships with/near the defending launchers seems like it's reasonably effective. If 10 million dollar Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles were the only concern I'm not convinced the economic tradeoff is particularly poor.
But yes, with a bit of good software cheap drones are likely going to be able to simply overwhelm that defense. And even less advanced countries will be able to field such swarms.
But this is a problem that goes beyond naval combat. Cheap drones with good software that allow for intelligent independent targeting threaten all military assets down to the individual squad. The only way to defend against this economically is going to be drone swarms of your own.
"I think there is a big difference between "sitting duck" and plausibly going to be struck when targeted by an overwhelming attack."
Once surface ships hit blue water they are sitting ducks.
"I mean it could be true...but it does raise the question of why the world powers continue to produce/purchase expensive surface ships."
In the case of the United States, there is tremendous wealth to be had.
"China is building out their own fleet of aircraft carriers. If they are sitting ducks why?"
My understanding is that China's strategy involves the production of a limited number of aircraft carriers, which are intended to serve as stand-off assets rather than tools for projecting hegemonic power.
I'm a wordcel but there are real hard problems presented here. If whoever has similar missiles can burn them down from say 50k feet, that is more plasma and need a heat seeker. Obviously the Iranians were glowing all the way down. I have not heard about their terminal velocity. Plasma cuts both ways.
Really the only way to go was the Reagan Star Wars space based systems but that is a lift and may be treaty banned.
"Really the only way to go was the Reagan Star Wars space based systems but that is a lift and may be treaty banned."
That system was a boondoggle and would be useless against hypersonic missiles.