Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile shield was launched on Sunday against Palestinian machine gun fire originating in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, and not against incoming militant rockets, the Israeli army said.
Iron Dome is supposed to detect incoming missiles and rockets and only shoot at projectiles calculated to be a threat to a target.
By letting rockets calculated to hit open ground go through, the Iron Dome ammunition is preserved for real threats.
Gaza-based terrorists or Hezbollah in Lebanon could deplete the Iron Dome magazines by firing machine guns in order to pave the way for rockets to get through, no? I assume the software will be tweaked rather quickly because that's a big flaw.
Remember, just against actual rockets and missiles, the ammunition supply problem for Iron Dome already means that Iron Dome merely buys time to destroy the rocket-launching sites.
And in practice that means the army must move in and take over the rocket-launching sites.
Which is necessary because in 2006 the Israelis hoped that air power would knock out the rockets. But that didn't work in those pre-Iron Dome days.
I know there have been tremendous advances in precision targeting and persistent surveillance since 2006. But I suspect there has been an advance in human ingenuity on the part of Hezbollah to endure that more lethal air power (and artillery fire) with enough success to keep their far-larger rocket supply in business, launching at Israeli targets. Perhaps figuring out that cheap machine gun fire could spoof the software is only one of those clever ways to counter the technology.
This could kind of be like my thoughts on overwhelming the ammunition supply of active protection systems on armored vehicles. Although even in that post I essentially assumed APS wouldn't be triggered by mere machine gun fire, requiring armor at least thick enough to stop that.
UPDATE: When you don't have the launch sites, even absolute aerial supremacy doesn't prevent barrages of missiles at your cities, as the Saudis continue to experience in regard to Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis:
The Houthi movement that controls northern Yemen vowed on Monday to fire more missiles into Saudi Arabia unless it stops bombing the country, after missiles crashed into Riyadh overnight causing casualties in the Saudi capital for the first time.
Saudi defenders hit the incoming missiles but debris still fell to kill one person.
UPDATE: It is possible that an anti-missile malfunctioned and is the source of the debris that caused casualties.
UPDATE: And mind you, that's an old problem of anti-aircraft fire--what goes up must come down. British anti-aircraft fire killed British civilians in World War II and Iraqi anti-aircraft fire killed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, if memory serves.
