> It actually works pretty well

As long as you don't look at the receipts yes, technically it works very well, in every other aspect it's a massive waste of resource and money.

Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.

The lay public is almost certainly unaware that perfect, nation scale ICBM defense is fucking impossible. At least in the US.

People in Israel are probably more accustomed to what a "High but not perfect" interception rate means.

But people in the US are just really dumb about things. They probably think it just needs "Enough money" or "A breakthrough" as if that's just a magic spell you can cast to get around physics.

However, modern anti-ballistic missile defense systems are effective enough that if you spend enough money you can defeat, with high probability, half to most of the incoming weapons. It involves firing many many interceptors against each incoming threat. It does not scale.

This is why it is generally deployed as a way to blunt, possibly not even defeat a North Korean nuclear attack. Nothing more.

Shorter range ballistic missiles suck. They still have the crazy high velocity terminal phase, but they are way cheaper to produce. I don't think it's possible to defend against them economically.

The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.

There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.

Just last night:

"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."

https://aje.news/b8762y?update=4414645

Not against the fast ballistics.

Is this why they're silencing anyone talking about damages and arresting anyone taking videos/photos ?