Free World Air-Space Defense Must Defeat Super Fast and Very Slow

On Oct. 13, a Hezbollah-launched unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) evaded Israel's air and space defense system. The slow suicide bomb struck a troop mess hall on an Israeli base about 40 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border.

In this attack, Hezbollah launched two drones -- "wingmen," in airpower slang. Israeli defenders shot one down over the Mediterranean Sea. The explosive drone "that got through" killed four Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and injured over 60.

Four soldiers dead. That's the largest number of Israeli troops lost in an air or space weapon attack on a target within Israel since the Hamas atrocities and Iran's proxy war on Israel began in October 2023.

The drone was a propeller-powered one-way bomb -- a cheap long-range killer.

Aerial drones have a deadly -- and sneaky -- combat record. The U.S. Predator drone looked like the prank mating of a toy propeller airplane and a bald duck, not a potent emblem of American 21st-century hyper-war. Despite its slow speed, it caught terrorists in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq by surprise. They didn't anticipate its computer brain, digital nerves and crosshair robotic eyes connected to CIA operators pulling the trigger.

The Iranian drone Hezbollah used was the smart and digitally programmable equivalent of a Nazi Germany V-1 buzz bomb -- a one-way suicide missile.

Why did it get through Israel's sophisticated air and space defense system? According to a couple of wire service reports quasi-quoting Israeli sources, Hezbollah used the wingman drone and a rocket barrage to confuse Israeli defenses.

But being small and slow can be a plus. In 1987 a (West) German teen in a single-engine Cessna evaded Soviet Russian air defenses.

Recall, in 1983 Soviet fighters shot down (South) Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it accidentally entered Russian airspace. Two hundred sixty-nine human beings died.

1987: The teenager, Mathias Rust, flew from Finland and landed his aircraft near Red Square. He was detected, but his detectors dismissed his plane as a nuisance or -- a bird?

My tactical, operational and strategic point: Rust's air defense-evading Cessna is an odyssey akin to deadly 2024 one-way drones.

Iranian prop drones fly slowly. Many are made of plastic/ceramic components, hence a weak radar reflection. Flying low makes their target trajectory tough to estimate.

The background headline to this column is Israel's fabulous success in air-space defense. Since April -- after Iran's first ballistic missile and long-range drone attack on Israel -- I've written two columns examining the Israeli air-space antimissile and antiaircraft systems.

These expensive, complex but so necessary defensive systems work. On Oct. 1, Iran fired some 180 missiles into Israeli territory. The missile attack was defeated, like the April 13-14 attack, when Iran fired 350 to 370 long-range drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

The "fast movers" -- ballistic missiles -- and slower systems -- cruise missiles and long-range drones -- were detected and shot down.

The April and October Israeli successes should be U.S. 2024 presidential election issues. For over two decades, often-hysterical opposition from the American political left stalled deployment of an operational missile shield. Their hysteria was a fossil rite drawing on their Cold War opposition to President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

In 2003, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi opined: "The United States does not need a multi-billion-dollar national missile defense against the possibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile. What we need is a strong nonproliferation policy with other nations to combat the most serious threat to our national security."

Sad -- very dead wrong.

Thanks to American and Israeli antimissile programs, we can stop the fast movers.

We can stop the short-range slow movers. Aircraft and space "look-down/shoot-down" platforms -- including balloons and helicopters -- can detect. Acoustic systems can hear drone engines. Thermal detectors identify engine heat. Drone versus drone -- not so sci-fi. Cheap anti-drone drone squadrons can loiter for weeks, then perform "suicide" interception of attackers.

Ukraine uses .50-caliber machine guns directed by human eyes. If it sounds World War II -- the drone still goes down.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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