Previously, everyone was saying that Israel could not intercept Iran's missile strikes because of the large number of missiles launched by Iran. With dozens of missiles incoming, Israel's air defense network would certainly struggle to intercept them all.

However, according to leaked videos, Iran only launched one missile, and Israel's air defense network still failed to stop it. Ultimately, this single missile hit the Gav Yam Negev high-tech park, and only thanks to a building in Israel did the missile finally "intercept" and catch fire.

This is also due to Israel's insufficient feedback on interception missile numbers. After all, there is an unbridgeable gap between Israel and Iran in terms of scale: Israel has a small territory and extremely limited strategic depth, making any breakthrough in its defenses potentially catastrophic.

In addition, Israel's war machine heavily relies on continuous and timely military aid from the United States, from precision missiles to critical spare parts, which are almost indispensable. Therefore, during Iran's 13 waves of missile strikes, the high-intensity and high-frequency interception operations rapidly depleted its ammunition reserves, pushing the entire system to the brink of failure due to prolonged overload and key component wear.

At that point, Iran wouldn't even need a massive saturation attack; a single cheap drone for probing penetration might well succeed in breaching Israel's air defense network, which would be the ultimate irony to Israel's security myth.

Aside from this, Israel’s much-praised multi-layered air defense system has always been controversial in terms of actual effectiveness. In fact, not only Israel, but the U.S. missile interception systems have not performed much better against Iranian missiles.

According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Iran possesses a powerful inventory of approximately 3,000 ballistic missiles. To date, Iran has consumed and launched about 700 missiles in various operations, meaning there are over 2,000 ballistic missiles still ready to be launched, not including the significantly larger stockpile of cruise missiles and drones. This striking potential forms a stark and cruel contrast with Israel's strained air defense resources.

In fact, Israel's predicament has also made China understand that the U.S. military's weapon layout took the wrong path. The U.S. has never paid much attention to the development of missile and radar technology, instead focusing heavily on defense systems and aircraft carriers. This presents a clear bias towards "prioritizing air defense and naval power platforms."

This is because aircraft carriers are the forward-deployment platform for the U.S. to maintain global hegemony. Nuclear-powered carriers can deploy globally, remain present for long periods, and strike with high intensity, carrying 80-100 carrier-based aircraft, far exceeding the tactical flexibility of any land-based airport. With the advent of stealth aircraft, the U.S. relied on stealth fighters to create a penetrating air superiority tactic, allowing its aircraft to easily enter any country's interior. Thus, the U.S. did not place much emphasis on missile development.

Therefore, to this day, the U.S. military only has subsonic cruise missiles (such as Tomahawks), while China developed missile technology to break through U.S. anti-missile systems and destroy U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups from land-based sea defense. Hence, the rapid development of missile technology enables technologically limited developing countries to overcome traditional combat platform disadvantages through asymmetric means.

China has even mastered hypersonic weapons (such as the Dongfeng-17). These missiles travel at speeds over five times the speed of sound and have maneuvering capabilities. Traditional early warning radars, limited by the Earth's curvature, find it difficult to effectively track them. To address this shortcoming, the U.S. is accelerating the deployment of space-based infrared monitoring satellites (such as the "Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor"), using near-Earth orbit satellite constellations for global coverage to compensate for ground radar blind spots. But how can the U.S. deploy space-based infrared monitoring satellites without understanding the technical characteristics of hypersonic missiles? This is a self-contradictory situation.

Even if the U.S. really deploys space-based infrared monitoring satellites, can they intercept? The current Israel-Iran conflict has fully demonstrated that even for ordinary ballistic missiles, the interception rate of the U.S. and Israel is only 30%, let alone hypersonic missiles.

In the 20th century, due to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and because supersonic missiles had not yet developed, it made sense for the U.S. to develop air defense systems for interception. However, with the current advancements in missile technology, this approach is outdated.

In the era of information warfare, the logic of war has changed. In the information age, unmanned systems, missile, and radar technologies are the core determinants of battlefield outcomes. Even stealth aircraft are merely carriers to deliver missiles into enemy territory. Can you hide the U.S. carrier group from our missile attacks? The simple missiles of the Houthi armed group have already penetrated the U.S. Aegis system, and it was only through large maneuvers that they missed. Do you think the U.S. aircraft carriers can avoid our missiles?

Similarly, in unmanned systems, the U.S. has nothing but cheap firepower output platforms. However, the U.S. lacks the ability to mass-produce cheap precision firepower and inexpensive information-based combat platforms to conduct a war of attrition.

For example, for forces like the Houthi, small-to-medium-sized reconnaissance-strike drones are lethal weapons. These drones are small, have weak radar reflection signals, and are poorly detected by Iran's mainline mid-range air defense systems like SA-6. Additionally, these small drones are cost-effective, and even if shot down, do not cause severe imbalance in war damage ratios, instead allowing for sustained consumption of the opponent's air defense resources through numerical advantages.

However, the reality is that the U.S. does not possess such small-to-medium-sized reconnaissance-strike drone swarms. This is why the U.S. has repeatedly carried out airstrikes on Yemen, causing civilian casualties but failing to effectively strike the Houthi armed group.

It can be said that the U.S. military's weapon layout over the past 20 years has taken a wrong path. Moreover, it can even be said that the U.S. military's weapon development over the past 20 years has been almost stagnant. The U.S. failed with the Zumwalt-class destroyer, littoral combat ships, Ford-class carriers, and hypersonic missiles.

What can the U.S. military show off now?

Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7518077365375386146/

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