The latest Gaza war is only a few days old, but already one
conclusion can be drawn: missile defense works. This is only the latest
vindication for the vision of Ronald Reagan who is emerging as a
consensus pick for one of the all-time great U.S. presidents.
For it was Ronald Reagan who made missile defense a major priority
for the U.S. and our allies. His 1983
speech on the subject was widely
derided as “Star Wars” because he envisioned that some missile would be
intercepted in space. For years critics claimed that it was impossible
to intercept missiles in flight, or that at the very least it would be
prohibitively expensive to do so. But now the U.S. West Coast is
actually protected by a limited ballistic-missile defense system based primarily around satellites,
sea-based Aegis and X-band radars, and Standard Missile-3 interceptors.
We don’t know how the system would work in combat but it has been
vindicated in testing.
The U.S. has also cooperated with numerous allies to develop more
tactical missiles defenses designed to stop rockets, not in their boost
phase, but just before they hit. One of those projects is the Iron Dome
system that Israel launched after the 2006 war in Lebanon, during which
Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with thousands of rockets. Today
Iron Dome, which is still officially listed as experimental, is
operational–and it is blunting Hamas’s missile-offensive against Israel.
According to the Israeli Embassy in Washington: “In the last 4 days:
544 rockets fired from Gaza hit Israel + 302 Iron Dome interceptions =
846 rockets fired at us.” The fact that only 302 of 846 rockets were
intercepted (36 percent) might indicate that Iron Dome is ineffective.
But in fact it is expressly designed to ignore rockets headed for
uninhabited areas. Israeli officials say that 90 percent of the
attempted interceptions have worked, thus providing critical protection
for civilian areas including Tel Aviv, where an Iron Dome battery has
just been moved.
Somewhere, wherever he is now, the Gipper must be smiling.
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