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Technically Speaking — Why Now?
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Technically Speaking

With the exception of whatever they used against that Israeli ship, Hezbollah has been firing rockets at Israel. They have no guidance systems. They are aimed like artillery pieces with the direction they are pointed, the angle at which they are fired, and time their rocket engines last determining where they hit. They are affected by weather. They are not precision guided weapons.

Israel is using a variety of weapons, but most of them have guidance systems. Whether they are powered [missiles], or unpowered [smart bombs] almost all are hitting exactly what the individual who fired them intended.

The Israel aircraft may also be firing rockets, but those are used in “line of sight” attacks against a specific target.

2 comments

1 Steve Bates { 08.04.06 at 10:23 pm }

I know I am a bad person for thinking of this, but a phrase from an old Tom Lehrer song came to mind immediately: ” ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Parts of this war are complex, and involve millennia of past conflict. Other parts, just like unguided rockets, are as simple and predictable as gravity. Or maybe inertia is a better analogy: action, reaction; action, reaction; … Why Israel cannot see how disadvantageous its position is, is a mystery to me.

2 Bryan { 08.04.06 at 11:41 pm }

There isn’t much all of the new technology can do about work-a-day Newtonian physics. If the other side is going to be cheap and use crude weapons with nothing to jamb or lock on to, you are going to get hit.

The US and Israel have great defenses against all of the modern stuff, but these WWII rockets are flying through the safety net.