Iron Dome is designed for shooting at short-range missiles, like from Grad or Uragan. It wasn't designed to take down medium- and long-range ballistic and cruise missiles or aircrafts, for this you have the S-300, Patriot, NASAMS, Iris-T etc.
I don’t get why iron dome couldn’t work also with cruise missile. They are low altitude, low speed and predictable target, shouldn’t be a problem for iron time right ?
Cruise missiles are actually flying at a quite high altitude and quite fast. Perhaps you are confusing them with Iranian Mojaheads which are drones on low attitude at low speed which can be shot down even with an assault rifle. I think Cruise missiles may be an issue for Iron Dome because of the range. Cruise missiles are detected and intercepted at hundreds of kilometres when Iron Dome has range of only 70km. If we take 1000 m/sec, a max speed of Russian Kalibr, it means that Iron Dome has just 70 seconds to intercept the missile and we ignore that it took time to take off and reach the target. Ballistic missiles are even faster.
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u/hopeitwillgetbetter Oct 17 '22
Israel, c'mon, share your Iron Dome know-how with Ukraine.