Editor’s Notes: In this episode, Glenn Diesen is joined by Theodore Postol, a professor emeritus at MIT and former advisor to the Pentagon, to discuss the shifting technological landscape of the conflict between Israel, the U.S., and Iran. Postol argues that Western forces have significantly underestimated Iran’s retaliatory capabilities, particularly their advanced drone technology and highly accurate ballistic missiles. He details how Iran has utilized commercially available high-tech components, such as Starlink and satellite navigation, to turn inexpensive drones into precision weapons capable of dismantling sophisticated air defense radars. Ultimately, Postol explores the strategic implications of these developments, suggesting that the traditional air defense systems relied upon by Israel and the United States are increasingly vulnerable to this “revolutionary” style of warfare. (March 31, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
GLENN DIESEN: Welcome back. We are joined today by Theodore Postol, 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. The audience are always very, very much appreciated.
THEODORE POSTOL: Well, I’m very happy to be here. My discussion today could be a little fragmented. I literally have been putting it together on the fly, from yesterday. I literally got up at five thirty my time in the morning to start putting together the slides. So it could be a little fragmented. If I fall asleep during the talk, I’ll be ahead of some of your audience.
The Strategic Situation: A Blunder for Israel and the United States
THEODORE POSTOL: It’s probably everybody who’s following the situation agrees that Israel and, of course, the United States has made a tremendous strategic blunder, that the war is not going well for either the United States or Israel. And in fact, I think we will find that the war is going to go worse and worse as time goes on. And the situation is now entirely in favor of the Iranians.
They’re, of course, taking tremendous levels of damage by the bombing campaign that began on February twenty eighth with the surprise attack of Israel and the United States on Iran. But as many of us guessed — I want to underscore, it was a guess, at least on my part — the war would rather quickly turn in favor of Iran. And the basic reasons for that are really, there are multiple reasons.
One of them is simply that Iran is a giant country, and the damage that is being done is very substantial to its above ground facilities. Of course, many innocent people are being killed, which is, of course, another issue, which is both moral and ethical.
But 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 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 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 elbows off the tunnel. And Iran is very cleverly, with great thought and strategic intelligence, built their facilities in networks of tunnels. So even if you get a tunnel entrance, you don’t necessarily get the facility. And this is a real problem that Israel and the United States will continue to face. It’s simply not going to be possible to destroy these underground tunnels.
Iran’s Retaliatory Capabilities: Missiles and Drones
THEODORE POSTOL: Now if we look at the capabilities that Iran has to retaliate, it basically has to do with the total number of missiles and the accuracy of these missiles over time. Now we’re not just talking about ballistic missiles. We’re talking about drones.
Now the drones tend to be less of a focus — until more recently — of most people, because they move slowly. They’re not exotic. The technologies in them don’t appear to be — although actually, the technologies in the drones are in fact very exotic.
Let me give you an example of what I mean here. Improvised explosive devices, which have run havoc with the American invasion in Iraq, for example, are typically incorrectly described as low technology devices. They are in fact very high technology devices, because you attach a cell phone to this explosive device. The cell phone is itself an extraordinarily high technology device. Now you may not be able to build it, but 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 improvised explosive device.
The Role of Satellite Navigation and Starlink
THEODORE POSTOL: The drones 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 know their latitude and longitude.
And when I say to a few meters resolution, I’m talking about drones that are using, for example, China’s Beidou system. The Beidou Chinese system for navigation typically can achieve a few meters resolution with civilian access to the system. GPS has a lower resolution because the military access is specialized relative to the civilian access. But the Chinese have made their system available for higher precision. And this is available. The Chinese receivers can be put on the drones, and they can tell the drones where they are.
Now when the drone knows where it is to meters of precision, it also knows its direction of motion because it can measure its movement by a sequence of measurements.
Now if you know your direction of motion and where you are, and you have satellite data of the kind that we now know the Russians and the Chinese are now giving Iran, the satellite data tells it the latitude and longitude and altitude — how much above sea level, or at sea level — any particular target of interest that is not moving. And because of that, 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 the drone knows where it’s looking. So if in the final stages of homing, it needs a more detailed update to exactly home on a target, it only needs a single picture. It really doesn’t need video of the homing, but of course it can have that video because we also have a 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 two hundred fifty bucks. I think you can go on Amazon and find one. It’s about one foot on the side, weighs much less than a pound, only requires about twenty or thirty watts of power, which can easily run off a generator on the drone or a battery. You can get real time video through a video link 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 in order to get the equivalent of cell phone access. So when I buy a Starlink — call it a transceiver or modem even, if you want to call it that — I can put it on the back of a drone or integrate it into the wing of a drone. And once the drone starts 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 Viessen flying his drone against that poor radar.” They don’t know. It’s an encrypted communication from one of a million or so of these mobile transceivers or modems that they’ve already sold, selling more at a fantastic rate.
So now you have this ability for drones to get all this data. And that combination is extraordinarily revolutionary in terms of the damage inflicting capability those drones now have. And that is all in the hands of the Iranians. Plus, you have the ability to build these drones very easily because everything is commercial, including this Starlink modem, which by itself, 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 matters is it’s commercially available and anybody can use it. That’s what matters. And this is now ubiquitous and universally available.
Assessing Iranian Ballistic Missile Accuracy
THEODORE POSTOL: Now, just to give you a sense of how my understanding — I want to be clear. I want to give your audience a little bit of a chance to understand how my own judgments have evolved over time.
This shows you the hit points at the Nevatim airbase in Israel, which occurred in October of 2024, when the Iranians retaliated for one of the many Israeli attacks on them. And basically, from these hit points, you can get an estimate of what the actual accuracy of the ballistic missiles are. Now, of course, for these ballistic missiles, if you have more modern ballistic missiles that are more accurate, you don’t have an estimate for them. But these were the data I had at the time.
And at that time, I guessed — well, it was a pretty good estimate, actually, based on the data — that the accuracy of the ballistic missiles that Iran was using at that time was about a kilometer. 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, a rough pattern of where warheads 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 five hundred meter precision. You see, all of a sudden, I’m really getting more and more damage inflicting capability with greater precision. And what we’re now seeing is that the more capable and modern Iranian ballistic missiles are much more accurate than even the five hundred meters we’re seeing here. And there’s some evidence for that.
Advanced Iranian Ballistic Missiles: What the Evidence Shows
THEODORE POSTOL: You can even see that if you have a studied eye. I mean, you have to accept that I have some experience with these matters. Here you can see four frames of an incoming modern advanced ballistic missile.
Now, 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 spot, which is the real warhead. Notice that there’s a trail associated with this warhead along with a tail, which is kind of a wake. There are 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 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, 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, I can give a talk on that. It doesn’t really matter, but here you see an extremely stable reentry trajectory.
So what does this mean? This means that if I have a Beidou navigational receiver on this, and it’s giving me meters of precision in telling me where my location is, then I’m going to have 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 of 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 at Mach twelve or Mach thirteen.
The Explosive Power of Modern Warheads
THEODORE POSTOL: But what we see here 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 explosives on the warhead, but you’re also seeing the kinetic effect of just the motion. These things coming in so fast, this gets converted to kinetic energy. So it gets converted to a molten mass of material that’s so hot it’s radiating blue light, which is hotter 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. The net result is they do tremendous amounts of damage.
Drone Strikes and the Collapse of Air Defense Warning Systems
THEODORE POSTOL: This is an indication of the damage that was done at the Mona only recently. And you can see that although this munition seems to have — I can’t, unfortunately, people insist on putting these labels on their video frames — even though we don’t know where the warhead landed, somewhere in the middle here, you can see the shock wave just knocked the walls out of all these different buildings. And if you were inside these buildings and you were near a window, you could have easily been killed or badly injured. And we don’t know what the casualties were.
We also don’t know what the warning time was, as I’ll explain shortly. The warning time has essentially disappeared because the 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 is a nonlinear consequence.
The Challenge of Air Defense Against Drones and Ballistic Missiles
THEODORE POSTOL: By that, I mean, when I have air defenses, I can shoot down a significant percentage of your drones assuming I have enough interceptors, 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 five percent or so intercept rate 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 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, time lapse photo after time lapse photo. Almost none of which show any intercepts. So the conclusion is clear.
There’s a very low percentage of intercepts. It’s just that simple.
The Devastating Impact of Ballistic Missile Warheads
All right. So here’s another example 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 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 an armored room in your apartment, which, if you have a specialized room within your apartment that’s got steel doors and special reinforced walls, and you’re not foolish enough, 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 — this, I know this was reported by some of your earlier interviewees and it’s something I’ve confirmed it independently — 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 survive. It’ll protect you from the rubble, 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 awakened and you have to go down to a shelter because you can’t assume that your building’s not going to be hit. It’s a low probability event as an individual. But it’s easy for me to say. I joke with my military friends. I say, well, it’s hard to hit an aircraft carrier, but I always say — because I want to be respectful to them because they are the guys who are out there — but of course, I’m not on the carrier. So you can’t take it for granted and you won’t. I know for sure from my own attitudes, I would definitely be down in the shelter.
So the fact that there’s a low probability it would hit doesn’t mean it won’t, and that is having a tremendous stress on Israeli society.
So here’s just an example of damage — this is from Gaza actually. And this just shows you internal damage to an Israeli home that was probably several hundred meters, a fraction of a kilometer away from a detonation of a ballistic missile warhead. So this is not minor damage. I mean, 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 this is not the kind of damage you could routinely accept unless you have a shelter and you don’t want to ignore the possibility that this thing could have hit your building. And that apartment would just be rubble at the bottom of the building. So again, these kinds of levels of damage are very large and very much a problem.
Iranian Shahed Drones: Low-Tech but Highly Effective
So now let’s get to the problem of drones. The drones are different. They are somewhat low tech vehicles. This is an example of an Iranian drone, it’s called a Shahed drone. This is very close to the Russian gen two drone, which is based on the same design. Right now, the Russians, Ukrainians, obviously Iranians who invented the first design, Turks, and Americans all have drone models that look very much like this vehicle. 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 surface to air missile, but the surface to air missile — for example, if the surface to air missile is an Iron Dome interceptor, which is essentially useless against ballistic missiles. Iron Dome is a total failure against ballistic missiles, but it’s very capable against drones. If you’re going to shoot it against drones or cruise missiles, it’s going to have a very high intercept rate, probably close to one. So I wouldn’t even shoot two of these things at a drone. I’d shoot one at a drone.
But the thing probably costs a half million dollars. Israelis claim it’s a hundred thousand dollars, but that’s nonsense. Nobody knows how to build one of these things for a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand dollars if you’re very clever at building that, but even that I doubt.
So you’re talking about a half million dollar intercept. If you’re talking about a Patriot, you’re talking about a one million to four million dollar interceptor depending on whether it’s a Patriot PAC-2, Patriot Advanced Capability Two interceptor, or a Patriot Advanced Capability Three interceptor. That’s a four million dollar interceptor. That’s against a thirty thousand dollar drone. And probably these drones are cheaper than that because when you’re building them in mass amounts, they are going to be a lot cheaper.
Iranian Underground Tunnels: An Indestructible Arsenal
So here’s an example of one of these underground tunnels. Now, 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 against if you’re trying to 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 very thin layer of plastic surface, fiberglass or something like that. And on top of that fiberglass, you can cover it with sand. So when you look down from an airplane or even from the ground, walking around, you don’t even know there’s a hole to a tunnel there.
I was in Vietnam as a visitor, and I was standing 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, fortunately friendly — because I was visiting — Vietnamese 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 the hole, even though I had been standing next to it. It’s very hard to identify these holes.
And you put the missile there and you just fly through the cover. Now let’s say I know the hole is there. So I come with one of my 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 could have tunnels coming off with holes, 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. 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 of both the Israelis and the Americans.
Here’s another example of these things stacked. Now you see these drones are stacked in these canisters here, but look at this back here. That’s probably god knows how many canisters. And look at 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. Even if you had nuclear weapons and you went after them, 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.
So the situation is extremely bad from the point of view of the Americans and the Israelis.
Starlink Navigation: Giving Drones Pinpoint Precision
So we’re now in a situation where you can put a navigation system on the drone. Now there are several systems available. The obvious system to use at this time, I think, is Starlink. You go out, you go to Amazon, you buy yourself a Starlink receiver. So let me show you what one of these things looks like. Here’s a Starlink receiver in the wing of a drone.
Now you can see that 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, nonmetallic surface. This thing has a very, very low radar reflectivity. And the Styrofoam, which fills the cavity, gives it good physical rigidity. So I don’t need to have a thick cover. And then you have a thin cover that’s hardly reflecting of radar. And I have rigidity from very cheap materials, which are light and ubiquitous and adequate for making the drone strong enough to be aerodynamically functional.
So the radar cross section of this vehicle is probably around one hundredths of a square meter. It could be a few hundredths of a square meter. It could be a little less — radar cross sections are sensitive to orientation — 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 of a bird. So the radar, when it looks out, sees birds. 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 signal processing 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. It’s not easy to separate these two moving targets.
Here’s that radar receiver next to a rather cute dog. You see it’s very small. You get it in a pizza box. So if someone’s ordering pizza boxes around you, you better watch out. They may be getting their Starlink transceivers. If you want to look at what this thing looks like from the top, that’s what it looks like from the bottom. You can see the attachments to it, but you just pull the attachment off. That’s a link for the power, which is maybe about twenty-five, thirty watts. A battery can easily provide that, or power that you’d have from an engine in a drone. And it basically 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 satellite. The Starlink satellite sends the data through a laser link to other satellites. That laser link eventually delivers the signal to someone on the ground who can see what’s happening. And as the drone homes on the target, they can send commands to the drone to give it perfect precision.
Drone Damage: Why Safe Rooms Are No Longer Enough
So now, if you want to see what one of these drones can do in damage, it’s not close to as powerful as a ballistic missile warhead. It’s maybe fifty kilograms to a hundred kilograms, but that’s a lot of damage if you can point it directly at objects. So here are examples of damage done by drones. It’s not something you would ignore.
So if you were in a safe apartment in the second floor unit, you would probably be killed because the building would collapse. This is from, I think, actually from Ukraine, but the point is it could be Israel, 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 the ceilings and structure are not going to collapse on you. So this means that if you’re sheltering in place, it means a basement somewhere, a strong fortified shelter. And that is disrupting your life in a very major way.
Here’s of course an apartment building that was hit by a drone.
Radar Destruction and the Collapse of Air Defense Systems
THEODORE POSTOL: 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 radars are the eyes and ears of a defense system. If you don’t have eyes and ears, you cannot intercept anything. I am attacking 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 what happens next is, here’s an example of what happened in Bahrain. You can see there were two radars. These are almost certainly air defense radars. They’re not missile defense radars. They’re too small or they’re too specialized. They’re in radomes, and you can see both of them were destroyed. I don’t know whether this happened February 28th or March 2nd or 3rd, but it happened very shortly after the war began.
So here is 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 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 have, 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 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 view. So all it has to do is make very minor adjustments to hit it. And we can see it was totally successful.
The Cost Asymmetry: Cheap Drones vs. Expensive Radar Systems
THEODORE POSTOL: Here is an example of larger warheads or maybe multiple drones hitting a facility. My guess is this is multiple drones hitting these buildings, but the death of a thousand cuts is still a death. And remember the drones, let’s say there were three or four drones that were used there. You’re talking about a hundred thousand dollars worth of drones. A ballistic missile is going to cost you a couple of million dollars.
If there’s no air defense, then 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. I looked all over. I finally found a photograph. This radar is a masterpiece of modern radar technology. You can buy it for the bargain price of five hundred million dollars. A man standing next to it would be so tall. So it’s a very small radar. It can see a launch of a ballistic missile from Iran at a thousand kilometers range. So this is an incredibly capable missile radar. The power it can generate, the low noise capability of its amplifier system is extraordinary, but they took it out with a thirty thousand dollar drone.
And if we look at probably what happened, it’s hard to tell what is what here, but it looks like this attack took out ancillary equipment. For example, what you see here behind this, you can see another structure. That’s probably the generator system for the system. It’s got megawatts of power in order to run this thing.
The Billion-Dollar Radar in Qatar and Its Destruction
THEODORE POSTOL: So here is a billion dollar radar. This is what’s called the ultra high frequency radar. This is in Qatar. This radar was critical because this radar cues the THAAD 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 says something’s there. So I go and tell THAAD, you can only search a small area of sky, look here. And you are the THAAD. 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 THAAD radars have to search large areas of the sky. 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 have to drop their range to search, then I have less warning.
Warning Times Collapsing in Israel
THEODORE POSTOL: What we’re now getting reports from in Israel is people attacks occur and people sometimes don’t even receive warning. They were receiving, people were reporting that they were receiving sometimes one or two minutes of warning. I can tell you where that’s coming from. That’s coming from the Green Pine 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 two hundred kilometers range. And that’s about two minutes 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 hundred kilometer range. So a Patriot radar might have a chance of seeing these incoming objects maybe thirty seconds before they arrive, twenty or thirty seconds, because the range is not adequate. And the Patriot radars, of course, they’re also under attack.
So, this is just a picture from this. You can see that this face has been destroyed. There are two other faces. They didn’t even bother. Why bother attacking them? They’re looking in the wrong direction.
Drone Attack Footage: How It Happens
THEODORE POSTOL: Here is an actual drone attack. This is on the second of these two radars that you saw in the other picture. Here’s the drone. It’s a delta wing drone and it’s coming in. If you look at the whole video, you can see that 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 see at low altitude. Probably there were birds, ships, even small waves creating what’s called clutter. And this drone was not seen until it began to climb to high altitude. Once it climbed to higher altitude, you had a minute. You can’t launch an interceptor in a minute. You just don’t have time. You have to track this thing.
So here’s the drone coming in and of course, bang, 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. Very, very severe damage was done in this case, and it doesn’t matter how severe the damage is, the radar is no longer functioning.
Here’s an example of a defense system that was mounted near, or on, the American embassy in Baghdad. It’s a small system. It’s basically a gun-like system for shooting at easy targets like a drone, and the drone just came in and hit it. So now the system is, unless you have others of these systems, you’re not defended.
Satellites: The Last Line of Early Warning
THEODORE POSTOL: So I’m not going to talk too much about how these systems work because 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 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 can’t actually see, it’s like the clouds refract, 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 roughly tell it’s going toward Israel. 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 Haifa, Beersheba, Dimona, 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. Spend a few nights getting up three or four times a night and see how you feel about it.
Interceptor Depletion: How Long Before Israel Runs Out?
THEODORE POSTOL: So the effectiveness of these drones is certainly going to increase in time. The Royal United Services Institute just came out a few days ago with a very interesting study where they projected how soon, based on their estimates of consumption of interceptors, the different defense and offensive systems would be. It’s a bigger study than this.
What I did is I took one of their tables, which was much longer than this, and I just extracted Israeli defensive systems because we’re talking about the defense of Israel at the moment, at least 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 going to run out of interceptors the 27th of March. Who knows if they’re already out of it or not?
And early April, David’s Sling. Of course, in my view, neither of these systems matter much because they’re not intercepting much anyway. They’re 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 eighteen, before depletion, because it’s not functioning. THAAD 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.
A Failure of Strategic Thinking
THEODORE POSTOL: 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 that are going to be attacked by drones.”
And he said to me, “They just didn’t think.” I mean, this guy is one of the smartest people. He’s a brilliant guy, very decent person, incidentally. He’s against the government. But he’s clued into the system because he’s an active soldier. And he says, “They didn’t think. They weren’t thinking.”
Then they have air-to-air missiles. Well, air-to-air missiles are almost useless. An airplane can only be airborne a certain amount of time. The drone’s going to 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.
Acoustic Detection as a Last Resort
THEODORE POSTOL: I’m not going to talk about the Baidu system for the moment, if you don’t mind. But what these air defense systems do need are surveillance and tracking capabilities, and that’s what the Ukrainians are supposedly bringing to the game. They’ve been taught. 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. Here are three 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 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 difference. And I can triangulate to its location.
So if I have several of these on street poles in your favorite neighborhoods, I can tell where gunshots occur, so I can direct the police to areas where things are happening. This is not a new idea.
Acoustic Detection Systems and Drone Defense
THEODORE POSTOL: Just to give you a sense, here is what was done during World War One. These are air defense acoustic sensors, and they would be used to tell, you know, to look for airplanes, which of course made a fair amount of noise. These are the kinds of systems 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 air is going to make it extremely difficult to be able to track these drones, even if you can occasionally track them.
So, basically, 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.
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