The independent Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance released a detailed and highly critical analysis of the failure of U.S. technology to keep up with the threat posed by low-flying cruise missiles and drones, as evidenced by Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities last September.
“Iran demonstrated an effective use of a raid strategy with multiple, over 20, fixed-wing Shahed series drones and Quds-1 cruise missiles flying as low as 100 feet above the ground to precisely pinpoint the same spot on multiple Saudi Arabian oil refineries in their destruction, overwhelming the defense designs and capabilities of the missile defense systems currently deployed in the Middle East,” reads the MDAA analysis.
The U.S. response — to deploy three more Patriot missile batteries, along with a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery and four Sentinel radars — is wholly inadequate to the threat, writes MDAA’s Riki Ellison.
“These missile defense systems were not intended to defend against targets over the horizon flying low to the earth in 360 degrees towards the defending area, as the curvature of the Earth’s surface limits a land-based radar’s coverage where the radars lose roughly 5% of coverage from the surface for every 10 miles out,” Ellison writes.
Part of the solution, he argues, is developing persistent overhead sensors for fixed sites that can provide both better and over-the-horizon detection and tracking to warn and target low-flying, fixed-wing drones and cruise missiles.
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