Give us our laser cannons!
Keep telling people that missile defense works, and eventually they're going to start noticing you're not doing too much about defending them from actual missiles.
Residents of a southern Israeli town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Palestinian rocket attacks. And they're suing the national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense.
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But Center director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner seems a little confused about some of the specifics of the laser system. She claims it "shot down Katyushas, Kassams and bombs with 100 percent success." Not quite. Yes, it did zap some 46 targets. But, overall, “its performance was not great,” Penrose C. Albright, a former Pentagon official who helped initiate the project, told The New York Times. “Under certain conditions you can make it work. But under salvo or cloudy conditions, you’ve got problems."
Darshan-Leitner also asserts that the old THEL is "just sitting there in New Mexico... There is a way to take it apart, bring it to Israel and rebuild it. A company [you gotta figure it's Northrop -- ed.] told me that it would take no longer than five or six months. It would cost around 50 million dollars to rebuild it, but there would be unlimited protection." The laser is, in fact, in storage in New Mexico. But that $50 million figure is about a third of what Northrop has said previously it would take to build a laser system. And, as Yiftah S. Shapir, a Tel Aviv University military analyst told The New York Times: "one guerrilla with a rocket launcher could fire 40 Katyushas in less than a minute, easily overwhelming most any defense."
The cost-benefit analysis of these fantastical missile defense systems is one none of their boosters want you to take a look at. The Palestinians are building Qassams out of household plumbing and chemicals and the residents of Israel want to spend (probably) hundreds of millions of dollars for a system that a single guerilla could overwhelm easily. And that's assuming he's kind enough to wait for a bright and sunny day to launch his attacks. Who wins that kind of arms race?
I mean, outside of the guys building the ridiculously expensive and ineffective missile defense system?
