The Israel-Palestine conflict is long standing agenda on the world stage. This conflict has taken its toll over the years as it has been continued for over 20 years. The feud doesn't seem to end. I won't show an opinion on whether Palestine or Israel is the angel here. As the internet is a funny place. But this conflict has led to the invention of a groundbreaking defense system. The iron dome. Today, I'll talk about the story of the iron dome and how it's becoming one of the indispensable part of defense for many countries, along with some of its visible weaknesses too.
The first iron dome may have been deployed all the way back in 2011, but it got its worldwide fame almost a decade later. Last year, 2021. Last year, as you all know, Israel had a stiff fight with Hamas. Hamas were launching missiles off the Gaza strip, while Israel were busy defending their land from those rockets. The feud started back in the 90s. Especially since when the USA were funding Israel to effectively oust and mistreat the Palestinians off their lands. And putting their own administration. Since then, Israel has suffered attacks from two different fronts. One in Lebanon, and the other from the Gaza strip. Since the 90s, Lebanon and the Gaza strip has been the launchpad for thousands of military grade missiles in towards Israel. The range that these two places cover, is almost the entirety of Israel, if not full. This range includes the three biggest cities in Israel too. But with no practical missile defense system, Israel had to go to war with these two sides to stop them.
The 2006 Lebanon war was such an occurrence. Israel are known for their high tech defense and security systems. And keeping that fame to them, they deployed their first new missile defense system in 2011. Which is the iron dome. The USA has active participation in the creation of this system. This system gives their government enough time to think about what they should do, instead of making a hasty decision. These iron domes can intercept up to 1000 projectiles at a certain time. Makes it very capable. It is also smart enough to calculate the detonation location of a missile and to determine whether that location is at or close to a military base or a city. The iron dome only fires an interceptor rocket when it deems that the incoming projectile can cause damage. Pretty smart. These interceptor missiles are called 'Tamir Interceptor Missile'. And just one of these cost 100000$ to manufacture. So you can acutely imagine how costly it would be to mass produce these rockets.
This is where the iron dome's biggest flaw comes to surface. It is obnoxiously expensive to maintain. Over the last ten years, rockets fired from Hamas or Lebanon are now in number, lower than what the iron dome could handle. That's why this flaw wasn't fully disclosed. But now, especially in 2021, Hamas have fired more missiles than ever before. And the iron dome could only keep up with so many.
As a matter of fact those missiles from Hamas cost barely 1000-2000$ whereas the iron dome missiles cost 100000$, it is very viable for Israel's opponents to just hurt their economy instead of civilian lives or infrastructure. But regardless, the iron dome is famous for its 95% or so success rate. Making it appealing for countries around the world to buy from Israel. Azerbaijan has used it in their war against Armenia. Nato, USA, India have also bought iron dome systems from Israel. It is safe to say, we will see a mass use of this state of the art missile defense system in the future.
