Theodore Postol: Iran's Missiles & Drones Were Underestimated
Glenn Diesen
Mar 31, 2026
MIT Professor and Pentagon advisor Ted Postol explains the extent to which the quantity and quality of Iranian missiles and drones were underestimated, and the consequences of this miscalculation.
Transcript
Welcome back. We are joined today by Theodore Apostol, a professor of science, technology, and national
security policy at MIT. He's an expert in nuclear weapons delivery systems,
missiles, missile defense, and has worked as an adviser at the Pentagon. So, thank you again for coming back on.
Uh the audience are always very very much appreciate the very Yeah. Uh well,
I'm uh I'm very happy to be here. Uh I uh uh my uh discussion today could be a
little fragmented. I literally uh have been putting it together on the fly. Uh
from yesterday, I literally got up at my time in the morning to uh start
putting together the slides. So um um uh you know, so it could be a little fragmented. If I fall asleep during the
talk, I'll be ahead of some of your audience.
It's probably everybody who's following the situation agrees that Israel and of
course the United States has made a tremendous uh strategic blunder that the war is not going well uh for either the
United States or Israel. And in fact, I think um we will find that the war is
going to go worse and worse as time goes on. And um the um the situation is now
uh entirely in favor of uh the um Iranians. They're of course taking tremendous levels of damage by the
bombing campaign um that we um uh that was be that began on February th with
the uh surprised attack of Israel and the United States on Iran. But um as
many of us guessed, I want to underscore it was a guess at least on my part. uh
uh the uh the war would uh rather quickly um turn uh in favor of
Iran and the re basic reasons for that are really there multiple reasons. One of them is simply that Iran is a giant
country and um the damage that is being done is very substantial uh to its uh above ground facilities.
Uh, of course many innocent people are being killed which is of course another issue which is both which is moral and
ethical but um the bigger problem is that Iran's retaliatory capabilities are
mostly underground and it's not simply people sometimes don't understand that being underground
sis is is a very problematic thing because People focus on the ability,
for example, they talk about bunker busters,
but in order for a bunker buster to work, it has to be extremely precisely targeted.
If I build tunnels and I have a a hole in the tunnel and I launch a missile through that tunnel, through that hole,
you don't know where the tunnel may be going. The tunnel could be going in many different directions and there could be
um uh elbows off the tunnel and um and Iran has very cleverly with great
thought and strategic intelligence built uh their facilities in networks of tunnels. So even if you get a tunnel
entrance, you don't necessarily get the facility. And uh this is a real problem
that uh Israel will uh continue to and the United States will continue to face.
It's simply not going to be possible to destroy these underground tunnels. Now,
if we um if we uh look at the the uh capabilities that uh Iran has to retaliate,
it's um it's basically uh has to do with the total number of missiles and the and the accuracy of
these missiles over time. Now, we're not just talking about ballistic missiles. We're talking about um uh you know,
drones. Now, the drones are very uh tend to be um
less of a focus until more recently of most people because they move slowly.
They're not exotic. You know, the technologies in them don't appear to be although the actually um the uh technologies in the drones are
in fact very exotic. Let me give you an example of what I mean here.
um improvised explosive devices which have run havoc with the American invasion in in Iraq for example
are typically uh incorrectly described as low technology devices. They are in fact very high
technology devices because you could you attach a cell phone to this um uh this
um explosive device. The the cell phone is itself an extraordinarily high technology device. Now you may not be
able to build it but you can purchase you can purchase it because it's a commercially available item. And of course, if you can use it, you have an
incredibly sophisticated weapon to use against your adversaries. Now, the drones have turned out to be rather
similar, but in some ways more revolutionary than, for example, the uh
improvised explosive device. The drones uh have the availability of satellite navigation.
Now the satellite navigation allows the drones to know where they are to typically a few meters in three
dimensions. I say three dimensions because they know their altitude and they and and and they know their ex and
their latitude and longitude. And when I say to a few meters resolution,
I'm talking about drones that are using for example the chi China's bedu system.
the the Beu Chinese system for navigation um typically can you can typically
achieve a few meters resolution with a civilian access to the uh to to the system. uh GPS has a lower resolution
because the the military access is specialized relative to the civilian access and um but the Chinese have made
their system available for higher uh precision and um this is available. The
Chinese receivers can be put on on the drones and they can um uh you know tell
the drones where they are. Now when a drone knows where it's are to meters of precision,
it also knows its direction of motion because it can measure its its movement
by a sequence of of um of of um of measurements. Now, if you know your direction of motion and where you are,
you know, and you and you have satellite data of the kind that we now know the
Russians and the Chinese are now giving uh Iran.
The satellite data tells it the latitude and longitude and altitude.
How much above sea level or at sea level uh any particular target of interest
that is not moving uh is can be to the Iranians.
And uh because of that uh the um uh the um
uh uh the the ability to find a target is very good. This means that if I want
to send an image to the drone, I don't need a lot of data. I just need to send it a crude
image because um the drone knows where it's looking.
So if in the final stages of homing it needs a a more detailed update to
exactly uh home on a target, it only needs a single picture. It really doesn't need um a video of of the
homing. But of course it can have that video because we also have ai the system called Starlink.
Now, Starlink, I'll show you some Starlink receivers just to give people a sense of them. You go out and buy a Starlink receiver for bucks.
I think you can go on Amazon and find one. It's it it's about one foot on the side, weighs much less than a pound,
only requires about or watts of power, which can easily run off a generator on the drone or or a battery.
And um you can get real time video through a video link with with with
Starlink. Now there's no way to turn off the Starlink system unless you turn it off for a whole region because people
buy Starlink uh in order to get the equivalent of cell phone access.
So uh so when I buy a Starlink um uh call a transceiver or modem even if you
want to call it that um I I can put it on the back of a drone or integrated
into the wing of a drone and um once the drone starts uh communicating there's no way for anybody including the people who
operate Starlink to know what I'm doing with that communication system because everything's encrypted. So there's no way to say, "Oh, it's Glenn Don, uh, you
know, flying his drone against that poor radar." It's they they don't know. It's an encrypted communication from from a
one of of a million or so they have so far of of these um mobile um uh transceivers or modems that they've
already sold, selling more at a fantastic rate. So now you have this this ability for drones to get all this
data and that combination is extraordinarily revolutionary in terms of the damage cap damage inflicting
capability those drones now have and that is all in the hands of um of the Iranians. Plus, you have the ability to
build these drones very easily because everything is commercial, including this Starlink uh
modem, which by itself, if you if you just talk about the technology needed to implement this, it's fantastic. It's the
most advanced technology the West can produce.
It doesn't matter. What's what matters is it's commercially available and anybody can use it. That's what matters
and this is now ubiquitous and universally available.
Now just to give you a sense of how my understand I want to be clear I want to give your audience a little bit of a
chance to understand uh how uh my own judgments have evolved over time. This
shows you um the um uh hit points at the um um at the Nevatum air base in Israel.
Uh which um uh- which which occurred in October of
when uh the um when the Iranians um retaliated uh for an Israeli for one of the many
Israeli attacks on them. And uh basically uh from these hit points you can you can
get an estimate of what the actual accuracy of the ballistic missiles are.
Now of course it's for these ballistic missiles. If you have more modern ballistic missiles that are more more accurate,
you don't have an you don't have an estimate for them. But these were the estimates. These were these were the data I had at the time. And at that time
I guessed well it was a it was a pretty good uh estimate actually based on the data that the uh accuracy
of of the ballistic missiles that Iran was using at that time was about a kilometer and we we I don't need to go through all the details this was
discussed. So if this is a kilometer of precision then this shows you sort of if I were aiming at downtown Tel Aviv this
shows you a rough pattern of where um warheads would would fall. So, a lot of
my warheads would fall out of the downtown area given that the downtown area is my target area. Now, if I just improve my accuracy by a factor of two,
I get a meter precision. You see all of a sudden I'm not only uh I'm really
getting more and more and more damage inflicting capability with greater precision with the greater precision.
And what we're now seeing is that the more capable and modern Iranian ballistic missiles are um are much more
accurate than even the meters we're seeing here. And there's um some evidence for that. You can even see that
if you have a studied eye. I mean you you have to accept that I have some experience with these matters. Uh here
you can see um uh four frames of an incoming modern advanced
um ballistic missile. Now uh you if you look here you can see that is a reflection off the lens of the camera.
You can tell that because you see that it tracks exactly with the location of the bright um spot
which is the real warhead. Notice that there's a trail uh associated with this
um warhead along with a a tail which is kind of a wake. Uh there's tiny luminous
particles in the wake. But this trail is due to the fact that there's a rocket motor on this warhead. And this rocket
motor is working against the drag of of aerodynamics, aerodynamic drag to keep
this thing at a high speed. It's also keeping it on a stable trajectory. What we were seeing early,
the earlier Iranian ballistic missiles, the these were the less advanced ones.
You could see warheads tumbling. You could see missiles breaking up at high altitude if you know what you're looking for. You know, I can give a talk on
that. It doesn't really matter. But but here you see an extremely stable re-entry trajectory. So what does this
mean? And this means that if I have a a BYU navigational receiver on this and
it's giving me meters of precision in in telling me where my you know my location,
then I'm going to have probably probably many tens or probably a few hundred meters of accuracy when I hit the
ground. The reason I have less accuracy than my knowledge or my position is it's very hard to control the incoming
missile. It's coming in so fast. So typically you'll hear the terminology guidance and control. Guidance refers to
knowing where I am. Control is making sure that my system is not wobbling around when I'm coming in and you know
Mach or Mach So um uh but but what we see here is is a very energetic explosion. Notice that the sky is blue.
The reason if you see later frames it turns red. This indicates that it's a very high energy density in the
explosion. And that's because you're not only seeing the explosive effect of the um of the of the explosives on the
warhead, but you're also seeing the kinetic effect of just the motion. This thing's coming in so fast it gets
converted to kinetic energy. So it gets converted to a an a molten mass of material that's so hot it's radiating
blue light which is hotter than than the light that would be radiated if it's cooler which would be closer to red. So
you can really tell how intense these explosions are. So the net result is they do tremendous amounts of damage.
This is uh uh uh an indication of the damage that was uh done at Dimona only recently.
And um you can see that although this munition seems to have I I can't
unfortunately people insist on putting these um labels on their video frames.
Uh even though we don't we know that the war had landed somewhere in the middle here. You can see the shock wave just
knocked the walls out of all these different uh buildings. And if you were inside these buildings and you were near
a window, you got you got badly you you could have easily been killed or badly
badly injured. And um we don't know what the casualties were. We also don't know what the warning time was. As I'll
explain uh shortly, uh the warning time has essentially disappeared because the
um Iranians have been so successful with the use of drones. I want to underscore drones, not ballistic missiles. The
drones have been able to destroy essentially all of the critical radar systems that the Israelis and Americans
use for the air defenses and the missile defenses. Now, this this is a nonlinear
consequence. By that I mean when I have air defenses, I can shoot down a
significant percentage of your drones assuming I have enough enough interceptors.
um which of course they're running out of. Now, in the case of ballistic missiles, the air defenses have never been able to shoot down a high
percentage of ballistic missiles. My guess, which I think history will eventually tell us, is no more than %
or so intercept rate with with the best of their systems. It's not much more than that. And you can see that again if
you want another discussion I can be happy to do it. You can see that because we know we can identify intercepts. We
we can see them when they occur. And then we can also see they almost never occur. In other words, we have video
after video after video, freeze frame after freeze frame after freeze frame.
Um uh u time-lapse photo after time-lapse photo.
almost none of which show any intercepts. So the conclusion is clear.
You know, there's a very low percentage of intercepts. It's just that simple.
All right. So here's another example of the of the high levels of damage that can be done. And one of the problems
you're now having is that if one of these warheads hits a building, and some percentage of the time they do, it's it's a purely probabilistic event.
But if one of these warheads hits a building, it can take the building down.
So, if you're in Israel and you have a an armored room in your apartment,
which you know, which we're, you know,
if you if you have a specialized room within your apartment that's got steel doors and special reinforced um walls,
uh, and you're not foolish enough, you you take shelter, the odds are very high you won't be injured even with this kind
of damage. But if that building comes down,
you're going to go down with it. You're going to be buried. So what's happening in Israel now? Uh this I know this was
reported by some of your earlier interviewees and it's, you know, I've confirmed it independently.
What you have now is people having to go down out of the building to underground shelters because those are reinforced enough that if the building collapses,
you can uh you can survive. It'll protect you from the rubble, you know,
from the collapsing structure. So that is a tremendous stress on you because
two, three, four or five times a night you have to be you're awakened and you have to go down to a shelter because you
can't assume that what your building's not going to be hit. It's a low probability event as an individual. But
uh you know if you're in that situ you know it's easy for me to say you know it's like I joke with my military friends. I say, 'Well, you know, it's
hard to hit an aircraft carrier. But I always because I'm because I want to be respectful to them because they are the guys who are out there. I always say,
but of course I'm not on the carrier and I you know, you know, so you can't take it for granted and you won't. I know for
sure my from my own attitudes, I would definitely I'd be down in the shelter.
So the fact that there's a low probability it would hit doesn't mean and that is going that's having a tremendous stress on on Israeli society.
So uh here's just an example of dam.
This is from Gaza actually. And um and um this just shows you internal
damage uh to an Israeli home that was probably probably several hundred meters a
fraction of a kilometer away from a detonation of a um of a ballistic missile warhead.
So this is not minor damage. I mean you're you're not dead. your apartment.
Well, you could be dead if you were near the window. If you weren't wise and went into your shelter, but uh but you know,
this is not the kind of damage you can routinely uh accept unless you have a shelter and
you don't want to ignore the possibility that this thing could have slam hit your building and that apartment would be
just be rubble at the bottom of the building. So again, uh these kinds of levels of damage are um are very large and and and and very much a problem.
So So now uh we let's get to the problem of drones.
The drones are different. They um they are uh somewhat uh low low tech uh vehicles.
Uh the um this is an example of an Iranian it's it's called a a shahed drone. I I called you know I miss this
is the same very close to uh the uh Russian Gen uh uh
uh Gen drone which is based on the same design. Yeah. right now uh the Russians,
Ukrainians,
uh obviously Iranians who invented the the first design, Turks and Americans all have drone models that look very much like this vehicle.
So, and the reason is simple. It's very easy to implement, extremely inexpensive,
and it's very hard to shoot down.
Again, let me say it's easy to shoot down if I have a a surface-to-air missile, but the surface-to-air missile,
for example, if the surface air missile is a um uh a um an Iron Dome
interceptor, which is essentially essentially useless against ballistic missiles. Iron Dome is a total failure
against ballistic missiles, but it's very capable against drones. If it if you're going to shoot it against drones or cruise missiles, it's going to do
it's going to have a very high intercept rate. Probably close to one. So So I wouldn't even shoot two of these things at a drone. I'd shoot one at a drone,
but the thing probably cost a half million dollars. Israelis claim it's $but that's nonsense.
Nobody knows how to build one of these things for $
maybe $or $if you're very if you're very clever at building that, but even that I doubt. So, you're talking about a half million dollar interceptor.
If you're talking about a Patriot,
you're talking about a million to million interceptor, depending on whether it's a Patriot Pack Patriot
Advanced Capability interceptor, or a Patriot Advanced Capability interceptor. That's a $million
interceptor. that's against a $drone, you know, and and probably these drones are cheaper than that because
what you're building them by mass amounts,
um they they are going to be uh a lot cheaper. So,
here's an example of one of these underground tunnels.
Now, um this is an Iranian underground tunnel, and you can see photos of all these underground tunnels all over the
place. Now, just to give you an example of how difficult these tunnels can be to work with, to work against if you're trying to shoot, you could cut a hole in
this tunnel someplace. You wouldn't have the drones there, and you can have a ballistic missile that you're launching through that hole.
And on top of the hole, you can put a um a very thin layer of plastic surface,
fiberglass or something like that. And on top of that fiberglass, you can you can cover it with sand.
So when you look down from an airplane or even from the ground, you know, walking around, you
you you you don't even know there's a hole to a tunnel there.
I was in Vietnam as a visitor fortunately and I was standing next to literally a foot away
from a hole into an underground tunnel that the Vietnamese had been using against the Americans during the war.
And this uh fortunately friendly because I was visiting uh Vietnamese uh u guide
popped out of the ground. I had no idea that the hole was so close to me. When he went back down, I couldn't find a
hole even though I had been standing next to it. I mean, it's very hard to to identify these holes. And you put the
missile there and you just fly through the cover.
And um now, let's say I know the hole is there. So, I come with my one of my bunker buster bombs because I I'm into
bunker buster bombs. And I just drop it through that hole. And I do a lot of damage locally, but I don't know that
there aren't tunnels running all around this thing. I mean, you know, I could have tunnels coming off with holes, you
know, and I can seal those tunnels to blast and then I can reuse them at some
later time. And this is what we're dealing with from ballistic missiles,
too. These a lot of these ballistic missiles are being launched from underground.
So now the ballistic missiles are less accurate, but they have much bigger warheads and they're doing tremendous
general damage. So it's a very bad situation from the point of view both the Israelis and the Americans. Here's another example of these things stacked.
Now you see you see these uh drones are stacked in these canisters here. But look at this back here.
It's probably God knows how many canisters and look at these tunnel this tunnel going on. You don't know what other tunnels are going elsewhere. So
this is the kind of complex you're never going to be able to destroy, you know,
even even if you had nuclear weapons and you went after them, you you would not be able to destroy them. You'd be able to destroy larger areas of them, but you
would definitely not be able to destroy them. And here here's again you know these things being and um so so the
situation is extremely bad from the point of view of the Americans and the Israelis.
So um so we're now in a situation where um the
drone can be uh you can you you can put a navigation system on the drone. Now,
there's several systems available. The obvious system to use at this time, I
think, is um uh is a uh Starlink because you go out, you go to Amazon, you buy
yourself a Starlink receiver. So, let me show you what one of these things look like.
Uh here's a Starlink receiver in the wing of a drone. Now, you can see that uh this is the receiver here. Again,
notice that this section which has been broken off, see it's filled with styrofoam and it's got a very thin
um non- metallic surface. This thing has a very very low radar reflectivity.
It's also and the the styrofoam which fills the cavity gives it good physical rigidity. So I don't, you know, I don't
need to have a thick uh cover and so you have a thin cover that's hardly reflecting of radar and um and and I
have rigidity from very cheap materials which are light and ubiquitous and adequate for making the drone strong
enough to to be aeron aerodynamically functional. So um so the radar
cross-section of this of this vehicle is probably around ths of a square meter. It could be a few hundreds of a square meter. It could be a little less.
You know radar cross-sections are sensitive to the orient but but it's very low. And just to give you a sense of what a hundredth of a square meter
radar cross-section is, this is equivalent to the radar cross-section from a bird.
So the radar when it looks out sees birds. If it's a good enough if it's a very good radar, it sees birds. It also
sees drones. How do you tell the drone from a bird? Now you can tell the drone from a bird because it's traveling faster.
But the bird is traveling fast enough very often that it's going to look enough like a drone that separating the
two can be quite a trick. Using s signal processing allows theoretically allows you to separate the
two, but it really requires that the radar have certain properties that are extremely difficult to build into a radar. I won't get into radar theory,
but uh it's not easy to separate these two two moving targets.
Uh here's that radar receiver next to a rather cute dog.
So you see it's very small. Um, you get it in in a pizza box. So, if someone's
ordering pizza boxes around you, you better watch out. They may be ordering uh they may be getting their pizzas.
It's not pizzas, but uh uh but uh um Starlink uh transceivers. If you want to
look at what this thing looks like um from the top there, that's what it looks like from the bottom. You can see it.
There are attachments to it, but you just pull the attachment off. That's that's a link for the power, which is maybe about watts. You know, a
battery can easily provide that or power that you'd have from an engine in a drone. And uh you know, it's basically
uh allows you to have a TV camera on the drone. So, here's an example of a drone that has a TV camera on it.
Now, the TV camera is no use unless you can transmit the signal up into space to a Starlink
um satellite. The Starlink satellite sends the um data through a through an
through a laser link to other satellites. That laser link eventually delivers a signal to someone on the
ground who can see what's happening. And as the um drone uh homes on the target,
they can send commands to the drone to give it, you know, perfect precision.
So So now, um let's not even bother with this. So So if you want to see what one of these
drones can do in damage, it's not close to as powerful uh as as a ballistic
missile warhead. It's maybe kg, kg to kg. But that's a lot of damage
if you if you can point it directly at objects and um so uh here are examples of damage
done by by you know drones. So it's not something you would ignore. So if you were in a safe apartment in this second
floor unit, uh you would probably be killed because the building would collapse.
So if you this is from uh I think this is actually from Ukraine but but the point is it could be Israel and um and a
safe room is not adequate. So even against drones safe rooms are not necessarily adequate. You really want to
go to a basement shelter where where the walls where the ceilings and and structures not going to collapse on you.
So this means that if you're sheltering in place in place means a basement somewhere a strong fortified shelter and
that's you know that is disrupting your life in a very major way. Here's of course an apartment building that was
hit and um by a drone. All right. So how have these drones been used more
effectively? And by more effectively I mean they have been destroying radars and those radars are really important.
The um um the radars are the eyes and ears of a defense system. If you don't
have eyes and ears you cannot intercept anything.
When I am attacking your your country, the first thing I want to do is destroy the
radars. I don't even care about the interceptors. Although, it turns out we're running out of interceptors, too.
But I don't care about the interceptors because if you don't have a radar to track to find and track the adversary,
you can't do anything. So um so what happens um next is um here's an example
of what happened in Bahrain. You can see there were two radars. These are these are almost certainly air defense
radars. They're not missile defense radars. They're they're too small or they're too specialized. They're in ray domes. And you can see both of them were
destroyed. I don't know whether this happened February th or March nd or rd, but it happened very shortly after
the war began. So, here is a here's an example again to let your audience understand what I
understand and when I understand it because I want them to understand that I don't claim a visionary uh understanding
of the situation. When I saw this, I said, "These guys have got the problem under control. It's not obvious that they would have the ability to home,
although there was evidence that they could do that earlier, but I wasn't sure they had it. And it's not obvious that they could have the precision that they
shave, but this demonstrated it." And once they show that they have this precision, the problem is only getting the data.
Where are these radars? Well, I know where those radars are because I have a satellite from China or Russia that's giving me detailed location information.
So, when that drone comes in, it knows exactly where it is and it knows when it's when its direction is looking in
this direction. It's going to see this radar dome when it starts looking. So,
it's not a big problem. It's not searching everywhere. It's got the target in its in its view. So, all it has to do is make very minor adjustments
to hit it. And we can see it was totally successful.
Here is an example of larger warheads or maybe multiple drones hitting a facility. My guess is this is multiple drones hitting hitting these buildings.
sBut, you know, the death of a thousand cuts is is still a death. And um remember the drones uh you know let's
say there were three or four drones that were used there. You're talking about $worth of drones. A ballistic missile is going to cost you a couple of
million dollars. You you got these things. If there's no air defense and there's no way to shoot down the
drone. That's the big deal. Once the air defenses are destroyed, you're in very big trouble. Here's an example of a
THAAD radar that was destroyed. This is I looked all over. I finally found a photograph. Um, this radar is a masterpiece of modern radar technology.
You can buy it for the with the bargain price of $million.
All right. It's a man standing next to it would be so tall. So, it's a very small radar. It can see it can see a
launch of a ballistic missile uh from uh Iran at kilometers range. So this is an incredibly capable miss uh radar.
The power it can generate, the low noise capability of its amplifier system is in
extraordinary, but they took it out with a $drone.
And um if we look at probably what happened on the it's hard to tell what is what here but it looks like this
attack took out ancillary equipment. For example, uh what you see here here
behind this you can see another structure that's probably the generator system uh for for the uh system. It's
it's got a gener it's got megawatts of power to get in order to run this thing.
So here is a billion-dollar radar. This is what's called the ultra high-frequency radar. This would this is in Qar. Uh I
won't have time as uh well I can this this radar was critical because this
radar cues the THAD radars. This radar is bigger,
has much longer range capability, can search much larger areas of sky very
quickly. So what it does is it searches a large area of sky very quickly and it says something's there. So I go and tell
fa you can only search a small area of sky look here and you are the thad you can look here and you can look here and
you can look here. So when I lose that radar, all of a sudden these THAD radars, they have to search large areas of the sky. They they become much less
capable. They don't necessarily disappear, but they can only search at shorter range. If they can only search at shorter range because they they have
to drop their range to search, then um then I have less warning. And what we're now getting reports from in Israel is
people attacks occur and and people sometimes don't even receive warning.
Uh they were receiving people were reporting that they were receiving sometimes one or two s of warning. I can tell you where that's coming from.
That's coming from the Greenpine radars that are associated with the Arrow missile defense, the Israeli arrow
missile defense. Those radars should be able to see incoming ballistic missiles at about km range and that's about that's about s of warning. Now,
if those radars are taken out and I've heard some reports that a green pine radar or maybe several of them have been damaged, you have no warning.
Typical air defense radar is not going to be able to see these things coming in. Even a Patriot radar is going to have maybe a kilometer range. So, a
Patriot radar might have a chance of seeing these incoming objects um uh
maybe before they arrive, or because the range is not adequate. And the Patriot Raiders, of course, they're also under attack. So,
um so life is this is just a picture from this. You can see that this face has been destro there. Two other faces.
They didn't even bother. Why bother attacking them? They're looking in the wrong direction.
Here is a ra an actual drone attack. Uh this is on the second of these two radars that you saw in the other
picture. Here's the drone. It's a it's a Delta wing drone and it's coming in. Um
if you look at the whole video, you you can see that it was at a very it was at a somewhat high altitude at a distance and it came in and it gets larger and
larger and it starts diving. My guess is it was at very low altitude.
None of these radars could could see at at low altitude.
Probably there were birds, ships, you know, uh uh even small waves creating
what's called clutter. And this drone was not seen until it began to climb in high altitude. Once it climbed to higher altitude, you had a .
You don't you can't launch an interceptor in a . You just don't have time. You have to track this thing.
You have to So, so here's the drone coming in. And of course, bang. You don't see actually here you can see a
little bit of light because this is the last frame as this drone struck the center. And here's the explosion. So,
very, very severe damage was done in this case. And it doesn't matter how severe. The radar is no longer functioning.
Here's an example of of a defense system that was mounted near uh or on uh
uh the um the American embassy in in in in um in Baghdad. It's a small system.
It's basically a gun-like system for shooting at uh easy targets like a drone. And the drone just came in and hit it.
So now the system is you know unless you have others of these systems you're not defended.
So I'm not going to talk too much about how these systems work because uh it's uh so the key technology that we're left with are satellites in space.
Those technologies are still available and basically the way they work is they see the rocket plume. Once the rocket motor turns off,
then um you can't see the missile.
You're only looking at the rocket plume against the bright background of the Earth. So these systems are remarkably capable.
They can see through clouds. They work at wavelengths where you can see through clouds and you you can't actually see.
It's like the clouds are like the clouds uh refract, you know, they they they scatter the signal. So, it's like
looking through frosted glass, but here's a signal in the infrared where you can see that there's a missile
that just rises above. So, you can tell even when there's clouds that a missile is being launched. So, this is a very good warning system, but it doesn't give
you tracking data. So, I know there's a launch from Iran. I can't tell I can
roughly tell it's going toward Israel. I I can I have enough precision data. It's very unprecise, but I can tell it's
going south or west or east. Not much better than that, but enough. If it's going south, it's going toward Israel. I
don't know where in Israel. I don't know if it's going to hit, Beera, Dimona, uh you know, you know, Tel Aviv. So, what
do I do? I have no choice but to issue a warning to the whole country.
Well, if I issue a warning to the whole country, everybody is getting out of bed and going to shelters.
This has a tremendous psychological impact over time. You know, spend a few nights getting up three or four times a night and see how you feel about it. So,
um I won't go into the satellite details.
So, um so the the effectiveness of these drones is certainly going to increase in time here. Uh the Royal United Services
Institute just came out a few days ago with a very interesting study where they projected how soon based on what their estimates
of consumption of interceptors are that the different uh defense and offensive systems would be. It's a bigger study
than this. What I did is I took one of their um uh one of their tables, which was much longer than this, and I just I
just extracted Israeli defensive systems because we're talking about the defense of Israel at the moment, at least this
the the pressure that's going to be on the Israeli government from these attacks. And what they're saying, it's
their estimate, so we can't say for sure, but according to them, at the rate that arrow interceptors are being depleted,
Israel is it the um the um uh Israel is going to run out of interceptors the
th of March. Who knows if they're already out of it or not.
and um uh early April, David Sling. Of course, in my view, neither of these
systems matter much because they're not intercepting much anyway there against ballistic missiles. The
THAAD system is already not operating because the THAAD radars have already been destroyed. So, I don't even know why they give THAAD uh you know days
before depletion because it's not functioning. SAD no longer exists.
Iron Dome exists at some level against drones. Iron Dome is useless against ballistic missiles.
So the ballistic missiles are coming in essentially unhindered. But against drones, the Iron Domes may or may not.
In fact, I had a conversation with a very dear friend of mine, an Israeli,
and I asked them, I said, "Why the hell didn't the Israeli military put the Iron Dome interceptors on the air defense systems?
They know. They have to know that they can't shoot down ballistic missiles.
Defend your air defense assets, the assets you're that are going to be attacked by drones." And he said to me, he says,
They just didn't think I mean this guy and this guy is one of the smartest people you know he's a brilliant guy very decent per incidentally he's
against the government u but um but uh you know you know and he's he's he's
clued into the system because you know he he's he's he's an active soldier and he says
you know they didn't think they weren't thinking then they have air-to-air missiles well you Air-to-air missiles are almost useless.
An airplane can only be airborne a certain amount of time. The drones can be coming at any time. You still have to find the drone. So, you need a radar
system to cue the airplane. So, you really don't have much in the way of capability.
I'm not going to talk about the BYU system for the moment, if you don't mind.
But uh what what these air defense systems do need are surveillance and tracking capabilities. And that's what the
sUkrainians are supposedly bringing uh to the to the game there. You know, there have been talk I think it's unlikely
that the Ukrainian defenses are going to have any utility at all. And the reason is you don't have air defense radars.
Now, what you can use are things like acoustic detection. The drones are noisy. So, here's an example. This is a street detector.
You don't have the benefit of our uh of American society where we have gunshots on our streets routinely.
You you're just too civilized the doorway there. Uh but but here are three these are three uh receive uh you know
microphones and by doing time delay time difference of arrival I can use an array
like this hanging from a pole to tell the direction uh of a um the direction from which a
gunshot is coming from because the gunshot is very distinct and I can measure the time at which the impulse occurred and the time
and I can triangulate to its lo and so if I have several of the if I have these on street polls in in your favorite
neighborhoods I can tell where gunshots occur and so I can direct the police uh to uh to areas where things are
happening. This is not a new idea just to give you a sense here is what uh was
done during World War I. These are these are air defense acoustic sensors and
they would be used to um um uh to tell you know to look for airplanes which of
course made a fair amount of noise. This these are the kinds of systems you you can now build. There are variants of these kinds of systems already in
existence, but that's about the best you will be able to do against these drones.
And the propagation of the sound in ear in air is going to make it extremely
difficult to to be able to track these drones even if you can occasionally track them. So basically, here's here's
a wonderful example of one of these systems. This is and you can build an electronic version of this with soldiers on the ground.
And I highly recommend a very, you know,
this is what you want to give your soldiers because soldiers are being killed by these drones all over the place.



