Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense

The major issue is that the average person's intuition about the nature of the technical challenges around missile defense, and modern weapon systems broadly, are misinformed and essentially naive. There are serious design problems that need to be addressed when developing these systems, but those problems are almost never raised as the difficulties in public discourse.

For example, kinetic intercept ("bullet hitting a bullet") is surprisingly simple and has been a solved problem for several decades. People think it is hard because they literally imagine shooting down a bullet with another bullet, as if the missile was flying blind. Terminal guidance for these cases is computationally trivial -- modern hypersonic kinetic intercept platforms literally use 80486 class processors as guidance computers. Computers are much faster than the fundamental limitations of physics allow the world to change.

Almost all of the true design challenges are materials engineering problems. State-of-the-art weapon systems often operate at the edge of what is known to be possible with ordinary molecular materials, even highly exotic ones. There are severe restrictions on maneuverability when the system is already operating under material failure. In-atmosphere hypersonic platforms are already undergoing controlled disintegration during flight, even small excess stress will cause catastrophic failure of system components.

There is a second set of challenges around extreme throughput data processing in modern sensor-heavy weapon platforms (e.g. F-35) but these are essentially theoretical computer science or exotic DS&A problems.

Anti-Americanism is cool and intellectual-coded. F35 hysterics is just an instance of that.

Yes, and this has been anticipated for a long time. The US started doing serious R&D work on dealing with autonomous swarm attacks 30-40 years ago. Recent generations of solid state lasers appear to fill that role nicely, since they are very cheap to operate. Some of the US test systems actually use white light, which I did not anticipate, which means that wavelength-selective defenses (e.g. dielectric mirrors) won't be effective.

Yes. Iran had to do something after Israel attacked their embassy, but they didn't want escalate the situation.

The blog post is seriously mistaken to interpret this as "hooray we are all safe from drone attacks!!!"

This is a great article and an excellent breakdown of how what we hear on the news can be so off base.

Just to nitpick, this part stuck out to me:

>Fast forward two decades, and this outlook looks dangerously naive. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s attacks on Israel, and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan or the Philippines show the importance of ballistic missile defense as a way of blocking attacks by invading states. In 2006, in the middle of the War on Terror, it might have seemed inconceivable that just 18 years later, the world would see multiple authoritarian empires waging aggressive, expansionist wars, and that the U.S. and its allies would be playing a beleaguered defense. But here we are.

Hmm, one of those countries' actions is not like the others no? Iran's missle launch was not an invasion of Israel. It was definitely Israel who violated Iranian sovereignty first here, no? With the killing of IRGC commanders in a Syrian consulate. Neither country has attacked Israel recently. The US and Israel have assassinated targets in the country of Iran recently, while the reverse has not been true. Who is really invading who here? And in that sense, Yglesias' point that missile defense is only important if you want to meddle in and invade sovereign nations seems to be correct for the one conflict of these which existed back then (Israel v Middle East) (whatever you may believe about the value of such moves)