Er…whoops? Tfw a $3m surface-to-air missile malfunctions and falls in your back yard 😬 #Saudi pic.twitter.com/TZQKLFG8qE — Haidar Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) March 25, 2018 Intercepting ballistic missiles is hard! Especially if for some reason, like your first shot missing or not detecting the target until late in the day or the fire-control centre not being able…
Read More finally, a post with rocketsHere’s a translation of the Israeli Defence Forces’ new strategic concept, from the Belfer Centre at Kennedy School of Government. From the section on “Characteristics of the Operating Environment”: Increased threat of fire on the home front (volume, pace, accuracy, size of the payload, survivability) and an attempt to create a strategic threat against national…
Read More Wild speculation rides again!So an Indian TV crew managed to film a Hamas rocket team doing their thing. First of all, wow. That’s the use of the gazebo in urban warfare, right there. More seriously, I reckon the launch site is in dead ground from two or three sides, covered from view by the buildings and trees, unless…
Read More Watch an actual Hamas rocket launch, with #combatgazeboI started planning this post asking why Palestinian rockets seemed to be steadily increasing in range, but not improving in accuracy. Although nobody publishes circular-error probable figures for these things, various indicators suggested that they were still essentially random weapons. For example, there were no or few reports of them hitting valuable infrastructure or politically…
Read More Wild speculation on a highly controversial subjectSo, Boris Chertok‘s Rockets and People. This is a really amazing book, if you can find the time for it, as it weighs in at four volumes of 800 pages each and the NASA PDFs are a bit wank on the Kindle. Chertok started out as an electrician at basically the first ever Soviet aircraft…
Read More Billions for rockets, not one cent for ground-based checkoutHere’s something interesting. Andrew Krepinevich is quoted by the AOL News (!) blog criticising various aspects of US strategy, which is what he does. But this quote popped out of the background for me: “The American military is losing some critical sources of advantage that it’s enjoyed over the last twenty years. One is the…
Read More Guided?Did the UK and France get around the Missile Technology Control Regime in order to sell Saudi Arabia the Stormshadow air-launched cruise missile just by draining off some of the fuel to get the range under a key number? This should probably get more publicity than it has.
Read More at last, a post with rocketsAdam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn’t defeat the Israelis…
Read More 2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrongThere’s a new strategy blog about, this time a French one. They have an interesting discussion about the suggestion/rumour/story that Hezbollah might be trying to acquire Scud missiles. They’re dubious about it, although open to the suggestion that the organisation might be developing its own inter-service politics, with the big rocket people perhaps constituting the…
Read More French bloggers, Scud missiles, etcVia Airminded, find your local V2 rocket strike. London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Tehran have what in common? That’s right, it’s the list of cities that have been subjected to attack from space. Then, why not go here and look up how big a hole it made? Someone’s photographed and flickr’d a whole…
Read More there are, however, rockets in this post