Ted Postol’s Analysis of Iran’s Missile Attack on Israel

I HAVE RECEIVED PERMISSION FROM TED POSTOL TO PUBLISH THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL HE WROTE IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A FRIEND ASKING FOR HIS ASTUTE ANALYSIS OF IRAN’S DRONE AND MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL. Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.

BEGIN TED POSTOL ANALYSIS:

I apologize for not getting back to you sooner with answers to your questions. I have been spending time trying to find any video data from the Iranian attacks on Israel that might be informative.

I have attached three video clips derived from some of the sources I found and have put them together in a way that will hopefully be helpful to you and your colleagues.

The first of these video clips is titled:

Real-Time & Slo Mo of Raw Video Clip of April 14, 2024 Iran Attack On Israel In Umm Al-Fahm P33_480_.mp4 (3.4 MB)

This clip shows two long-range Iranian missiles passing through the atmosphere, impacting, and exploding in Israel. The incoming missiles are bright spots in the video because they are traveling at a high enough speed (Mach 10 to 13) to be incandescent from atmospheric heating. For now, I will only give you several important highlights, but there is a lot more that can be derived from this particular video.

The video is cut into four sections.

The first section is simply the video as it appears in real time. The time-sequence is roughly 13 seconds long. The soundtrack has four sharp sounds like “gunfire,” which are simply the sounds from the ground-explosions delayed in time due to the speed of sound being much slower than the speed of light. Note that you can see only two ground-explosions, but the sound indicates there are two additional ground-explosions that occurred outside the field-of-view of the camera.

The second section is simply the first section repeated at one third speed, so you have a better chance of observing details.

The following two sections are simply a repeat of section 1 and section 2.

There are many other videos of unengaged ballistic missiles arriving, but all of them cut off before the warheads reach the ground. This is almost certainly due to Israeli classification rules that do not allow the press to publish videos of ground-explosions.

The second video clip titled:

Damage to Israeli Air Base In April 14, 2023 Iran Attack_480_.mp4 (2.8 MB)

This clip shows some of the ground damage at one of the two Israeli airbases that were the direct targets of these ballistic missile attacks. The first sequence shows a crater that was probably from a 200 to 400 kilogram explosive warhead. There are also photographs of lower levels of damage and smaller craters that may possibly be from drones that were not intercepted. The drones are known to have 50 kg warheads and would thereby produce much lower levels of ground damage and smaller craters.

A very interesting section of the video shows the Israelis repairing a runway, which must have been hit by a munition, requiring that the airbase to quickly fill in the crater and cover it with fast-annealing concrete.

All military airports have this capability as it is expected that runways will be attacked so as to limit the ability for the airbase to handle combat aircraft for taking off and landing.

The last 10 seconds of the video shows a ballistic missile arriving, and no interceptors in the air attempting to engage it. If you look carefully at the dark sky immediately above the building the warhead passes behind, you should be able to see one or more faint flashes in the sky. These faint flashes are indications of intense light from a ground explosion that is being reflected by particles in the sky.

The third video titled:

Israeli Drone Shootdowns on April 14, 2024 (Normal and Slo Mo-P35)240.mp4 (1.1 MB)

This video shows aircraft “gun camera” images of drones and cruise missiles that are being shot down with air-to-air missiles.

The gun camera images show cruise missiles:

1.png 2.png
and drones:
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The cruise missiles travel at a speed of roughly 500 to 600 km/h while the drones travel at a much slower speed, about 220 to 250 km/h.

The videos show an extremely important fact.

All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles.

The workhorse air-to-air missile of the United States Air Force is a AIM-9x Sidewinder.

The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000.

The cost of a drone is perhaps 10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is probably about $100,000.

An extremely important fact released by the Israeli government is that the cost of defending Israel from this particular Iranian attack was about $1.3 billion!

The implications of this single number are substantial.

This indicates that the cost of defending from waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary.

The actual scale of the attack is summarized according to CNN in the image below:

The clear and unambiguous evidence from all of the videos of ballistic missiles arriving over Israel show that Iron Dome interceptors were essentially not used in any attempts to engage the ballistic missiles.

The decision to not even try to engage the long-range Iranian ballistic missiles is completely sound.

The Iron Dome interceptor would have a good chance of intercepting either a cruise missile or a drone that had leaked through the very substantial aircraft implemented air-defense system.

This almost certainly means that the bulk of the $1.3 billion cost of the defense was almost certainly expended on shooting down drones and cruise missiles with fighter aircraft launching air-to-air missiles against targets.

Since there is essentially no evidence of long-range ballistic missiles being engaged by Iron Dome, it could only mean that they were not engaged at all, or there were attempts to engage them with the Arrow and David’s sling defense systems.

The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes, indicates that whatever the effects of David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective.

Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems.

An additional observation that is relevant to the situation of Israel relative to South Korea is illustrated in the two maps below:

The maps indicate that the drones and cruise missiles had to travel distances of 1300 to 1500 km from Iran to Israel, and roughly 2000 km from Yemen to Israel.

This transit requires many hours allowing for fighter aircraft to engage drones and cruise missiles. There are now reports that the US Navy provided airborne warning and control systems (AWACS, specifically, Navy E-2 Hawkeyes)) which were extremely effective in vectoring fighter aircraft to targets that they could then quickly acquire and destroy.

Such an opportunity would be much more limited in the case of similar types of mass attacks from North Korea against South Korea. AWACS will certainly be tremendously helpful in the case of defending South Korea from this type of attack, but the engagement-rate limitations of combat aircraft against very large numbers of drones and cruise missiles would make the effectiveness of this kind of combat-air defense much lower than was the case for the Israeli defense against Iran.

Another very serious problem that analysts will need to consider is that commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones that have limited but usefull capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them.

On September 14, 2019 Iranian produced cruise missiles were used to attack the Abqaiq Oil Facility in Saudi Arabia. The nature of the damage to the facility indicated that the cruise missiles had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance.

I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability. The proof of this conclusion is in the satellite photograph below:

as can be seen from this satellite image produced by the company Digital Globe and paid for and released by the US government. It shows that four cruise missiles struck four oil processing tanks at Abqaiq at essentially the same point on each of the tanks. Such precision could not possibly be achieved with GPS guidance alone.

In order to convince myself that my conclusion that the optical homing could be done with nothing more than satellite data, I stimulated the homing process by taking the satellite image of a single isolated oil processing tank,

I then performed a well-known procedure called “image cross-correlation” on the original satellite images of the tanks.

The correlation “functions” that were produced by this very simple computer experiment are shown below,

And the results are projected onto an actual satellite photograph of the tanks, showing that the correlation methodology provides very high precision in identifying the central location on a tank that is to be hit.

Since the optical and computational systems needed to perform these correlations in near-real-time on a homing missile are well within the capabilities of commercial cameras and computer chips (NVidia chips are well up to the job), it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones.

The implications of this are clear.

The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.

It is certainly possible to shoot down drones and cruise missiles with antiaircraft guns, although these systems will be of limited range and will need to be relatively close to targets they are defending.

At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability. So far, even Iron Dome has been a failure against artillery rockets, which are of quite short range and are of quite simple and inexpensive.

The Israelis claim an outrageous cost per Iron Dome interceptor of between $60,000 and $80,000 an interceptor. It seems that this claim must be untrue.

Similarly sophisticated interceptors, whether they are the Javelin antitank missile, which costs about $200,000 each or the AIM-9x air-to-air missile are tremendously more expensive.

The Israelis Iron Dome system has been to a very good first approximation completely funded by the US government. Any consideration for purchasing the system must be accompanied by proof it can work in combat and by accurate cost estimates of the different components.

Only then should any consideration be given to whether or not purchase Iron Dome.

I have a lot more I can say about these issues, but I fear I have probably already overwhelmed you with details that raise many more questions that I am not sure I can answer.

Those people who advocate buying these active defenses should be asked to provide data that shows what I have collected herein and elsewhere is not supported by the facts.

Anyone who advocates a defense approach for their country should be able to show that they have a fully reasoned argument, which includes information about the effectiveness of the strategy and its affordability.

Wishful thinking, like what has happened in Ukraine, will at best be a recipe for tremendous expenditures for little capability.

I would welcome to hear the arguments of those who want to make such purchases. I am open to learning and to obtaining data that could lead me to a different conclusion.