The following is the full transcript of Professor Theodore Postol’s interview on Greater Eurasia Podcast, July 12, 2026.
Editor’s Note: In this insightful interview, Professor Theodore Postol of MIT joins Glenn Diesen to challenge the widely held narrative regarding the efficacy of the Patriot PAC-3 missile defense system. Drawing on decades of technical analysis and empirical video evidence, Postol argues that these interceptors—and other systems like the Iron Dome—have a near-zero success rate against modern ballistic missiles, despite their high costs and public claims of performance. The conversation serves as a critical examination of the current military landscape, warning that over-reliance on these systems could lead to catastrophic consequences in the face of evolving threats from conventional and potentially nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
Introduction
GLENN DIESEN: Welcome back. We are joined today by Professor Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security at MIT. He’s an expert in nuclear delivery systems, missiles, and missile defense. And he has also worked as a former advisor to the Pentagon. So thank you for coming back on the program. It’s great to see you again.
THEODORE POSTOL: Oh, it’s my great pleasure, as always, here. Go ahead. Sorry.
The Patriot PAC-3 and Its Effectiveness
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, no, I wanted to ask you today about the Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, because you have probably been the leading voice in discussing how ineffective they have been. And indeed, you know, you can argue that the inefficiency of this has a huge cost for the United States as well. That is, you know, he wants to sell these weapons as well, but you know, delusion also has a high price.
So I was wondering what you can say about them, because of course they are an important component of the US alliance system. They were used now and are still used extensively in the war against Iran. And Trump himself approved now at the NATO summit for Ukraine to get licensing rights to produce Patriots. So it is quite an important topic. So yes, please feel free to unpack your argument.
THEODORE POSTOL: Well, let me just slightly expand on the points you were making. We hope it won’t occur, but Europe is talking about war with Russia, which I think is delusionary, but that’s another discussion. But I think it’s extremely important that the European military and the political leaders understand that there can be no defense from Patriot, the Patriot PAC-3s against Russian ballistic missiles.
So this is an important finding if you believe that these systems can play a role in future wars. It’s also problematic with regard to the beginning or opening, reopening of hostilities in the Southwest Asia War because whether or not you have Patriots, it turns out you won’t be able to defend against ballistic missiles with them either. In addition, there are vast expenditures in the future for additional Patriots that people are now contemplating, particularly the US government, and of course governments that purchase Patriot with the support of the US government.
And if these systems don’t provide any real defensive capability, this is an important matter for the military planning as well as the political leadership to understand. So this is not a minor issue, although it’s a technical detail. It is a technical detail, but it is quite important.
Déjà Vu: The Gulf War of 1991
THEODORE POSTOL: We’ve had this debate before. My joke with my friends is, for me, this is déjà vu all over again. Because if I just show you a slide or two here, if we look at past experience, my colleague George Lewis and I published an article in 1993 after the Gulf War of 1991. And in that article, we laid out the technology and the scientific foundation for determining whether or not Patriot in the Gulf War of 1991 actually worked.
Now, the history of this has been rewritten. I discovered this when I was in Poland giving a talk that there’s a whole new history of what actually happened. The new history is that they initially thought it worked, then they realized it didn’t work because of a congressional investigation. Of course, the congressional investigation occurred because of this particular article and the work of Lewis and Postol, so it wasn’t just happened to occur, it was because of our work.
And we were attacked ferociously to the point that quite frankly I thought, among other people, that my life was under threat. This was not a minor attack on the part of Raytheon and they went after me through MIT administration. This was a very unpleasant experience and taught me that all this talk about scholarly freedom, certainly at MIT, is not the case.
The American Physical Society’s Findings
THEODORE POSTOL: But in any case, 6 years later, though it took a long time, 6 years later, there was a study produced, published in the same refereed journal by a panel of the American Physical Society. And what this article said right in the abstract was that they found an absolute contradiction between the Army’s claims about Patriot’s performance in the Gulf War and for all the engagements we scored in our video data.
So we found the claims initially — President George H.W. Bush was misled. We later found out he believed that 41 out of 42 Patriot engagements had been successful. So this was like a 96% intercept rate. His Secretary of Defense at the time, Dick Cheney, also believed that this was the case.
Now, this is in some sense a piece of history, and you might argue it has no significance, but it’s kind of a replay of what we’re seeing among the European leadership and other leaderships who seem to believe without evidence that this system has capability. And it’s clear that they’re relying on this, or they have been relying on this. And in fact, the system has not been working since the Gulf War of 1991.
So at some level, you could argue it doesn’t matter because it’s never been working.
But if anyone is thinking that they can depend on this system, or they should be spending tens of billions of dollars or more for more Patriot interceptors so they can defend themselves, this is a serious problem.
Congressional Hearing and the Definition of “Intercept”
THEODORE POSTOL: In addition, the panel stated unequivocally that the techniques that Lewis and Postol used in determining Patriot’s performance in the Gulf War of 1991 were scientifically sound. And so if we use those techniques again, you should be able to understand Patriot’s performance in 2026.
Now, just to give you a sense of how serious the attempts to misrepresent the performance of Patriot was during this period when George and I first published our analysis — here is a statement, it’s just a quote from what actually happened in a congressional hearing. I was at the hearing myself. Of course I was being attacked by members of Congress who were just repeating what they had been told.
And at one point, the chair of the committee, who was very skeptical, asked the program executive officer, General Drolet, what did the Army mean by “intercept?” Because I had just shown videos that demonstrated there were no intercepts. And Drolet responded, “Well, what did the president mean when he said 41 out of 42 were intercepts?” And what Drolet said, to a lot of laughter, was, “Well, what we mean by an intercept is a Patriot and a Scud passed in the sky.”
So that’s how crazy the situation was at that time.
PAC-2 vs. PAC-3
THEODORE POSTOL: Now, one of the things that people might actually not understand is that the Patriot at the time we analyzed it was a Patriot PAC-2, not the Patriot PAC-3, which is the more modernized version. The Patriot PAC-2 is a big heavy missile. You can see my arrow. Is that right? Go ahead.
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it goes.
Patriot PAC-3: Cost, Design, and Claimed Intercept Rates
THEODORE POSTOL: The Patriot PAC-2 is a much heavier interceptor. It works differently from the Patriot PAC-3, which is a much smaller interceptor and lighter. Two things are important. First of all, the Patriot PAC-2, even though it’s a larger, heavier missile, costs about $1 million each. But the Patriot PAC-3, which is substantially technically more sophisticated and roughly one-fourth the weight, one-third the weight, costs $4 million each.
So typically the firing doctrine is that you should fire 2 Patriot PAC-3s at a ballistic missile in order to have a significant chance of intercepting. And the contractors, which are Lockheed Martin now along with Raytheon, are still claiming a more than 90% intercept rate.
So the argument or the rewritten history is we thought we had a 96% intercept rate. We discovered, in fact, the truth was Lewis and Postol demonstrated that the intercept rate was not 96% but was in fact zero in terms of destruction of Scud warheads. So it was a big difference between the actual reality that was discovered and pointed out by Lewis and Postol.
And now, of course, they just happened to discover this. They don’t explain, of course, the history shows that they lied repeatedly, they were involved in attempts to intimidate the researchers, they tried to bring the administrations of the university where I was a tenured full professor to try to intimidate me. Pressure was brought on me financially as well as administratively by the university. So this was not an easy situation.
Current Evidence: Near-Zero Intercept Rate for Patriot PAC-3
Now we’re back at the same situation. We now have a situation where they’re again claiming a 90% intercept rate and that turns out — the evidence, the video evidence, which the panel of the American Physical Society found out was in fact usable to determine whether or not Patriot in fact was intercepting warheads. The video evidence shows clearly and unambiguously that the Patriot intercept rate now is maybe 2 or 3%.
So this is the more advanced Patriot PAC-3, which costs $4 million each, not $1 million each. You fire 2 of them, $8 million in an intercept engagement. And it looks like the engagement success rate is maybe 2 or 3%. So you’re spending $80 million or $100 million to intercept a ballistic missile, given the intercept rate of this missile now. And these companies now want governments to spend more money again on this system, which is clearly not working, to be able to defend against ballistic missiles. Well, this is simply not a good situation.
How the Patriot PAC-3 Is Designed to Work
So let me just quickly show you what the Patriot PAC-3 is supposed to do, which is different again from the Patriot PAC-2, which I won’t discuss in much detail here. That can be done in future discussions if people are interested enough.
The Patriot PAC-2 has a radar that’s literally in the interceptor. So this system, unlike the Patriot PAC-2, which homes on reflected radio signal from a ground-based radar, the Patriot PAC-3 is cued to a target by the ground-based radar, but then as it goes toward the target it homes on the target by using its own radar. And with this radar, it tries to find the front end of the target, and it tries to kinetically destroy the warhead by running into the warhead and kinetically destroying the target. So this is a direct hit-to-kill warhead.
The Patriot PAC-2 had an explosive warhead on it, and it tried to damage the incoming missile or detonate the warhead with fragments from the explosive warhead. That turned out to be completely incapable of doing the job. So they went to this much more advanced hit-to-kill system, which costs $4 million each rather than $1 million each, and it depends on being able to be accurate enough to hit the front end of the missile. If it hits the back of the missile, the warhead will simply break off and go to the ground and explode.
Lockheed Martin’s Own Simulation Reveals the Flaw
Let me show you what the particular company — this is Lockheed Martin — shows in a video you can find on the web. I have the YouTube URL to it. So this is Lockheed Martin’s own simulation. It’s a simulation they’ve done with their own simulation software of an intercept attempt. So this is what they find is an example of an intercept attempt.
And so what you see here, this is the target. We have a rough estimate of the target’s radar cross-section. I won’t get into the details of how we do that. It’s a very small radar cross-section, which means that the distance at which the interceptor can detect the incoming target is relatively small. It’s only a few kilometers, which means that the interceptor only has a very limited maneuver time.
So basically, the idea is that the interceptor is maneuvering to hit this target. This is a simulation showing you the thousandths of seconds before the actual intercept. And we see the intercept getting closer, closer, closer, and closer. And then this is the last video frame. It hits the target. The warhead — it misses the warhead.
So we know from our simulations, from data we have from the Gulf War of 1991 and data we have from the Gulf War of 2026, that if you hit the missile body and not the warhead, the warhead is going to go onto the ground undamaged and explode. So what they’re showing in their own video is that the system will be defeated — their particular simulation shows that the interceptor was defeated. Even in their own simulation. They didn’t even understand that from the earlier analysis my colleague George Lewis and I had done from the Gulf War of 1991.
Video Evidence: What the Footage Actually Shows
Now, if I go back to share, let’s just look at the video data. Remember, the video data which I’m going to explain is going to show you what is actually happening. So let’s start looking at the video data.
Here it is. Here we’re going to see probably 50 or 100 warheads coming in, and we only see one intercept. I’ll show you the intercept in slow motion. What you’re seeing now is no evidence of any intercepts, and I’ll show you what an intercept looks like so you’ll know exactly what to look for in future videos.
So here’s all these missiles coming in, and you’re going to see an intercept here. This particular warhead is going to be destroyed by a Patriot. You see the whole sky lights up because the explosion of the warhead is very dramatic. So you’re seeing this at 1/10 speed, and you’ll see here is the remnant of the intercept, but you see 2 of the 3 warheads go onto the ground, and when they explode on the ground, you see very bright flashes.
So in the roughly 50 or 100 missiles coming in, there was one intercept. So the real-time mass attack should look like this. There should be intercepts everywhere. If you had a 90% intercept rate, you should be seeing intercepts everywhere. I’m showing you these little circles. You don’t see that. In other words, you don’t see what should look like a July 4th fireworks display. You just see these missiles coming in. You don’t see any evidence of successful intercepts.
Now here we have another example of no intercepts, and this is in slow motion. We’ll see a bright flash in the sky, and that’s from a bright ground explosion. And then we’re going to see a submunition release. This is again very slow motion. There’s a second ground explosion which lights up the sky. So that’s another failed intercept.
And now we see something coming in and submunitions being dispensed, and then another ground explosion. So this was a compound warhead. And actually, what we actually saw here was a warhead that was a big explosive warhead, and it also dispensed submunitions. Then we see, in 5 seconds, because this is slow motion, another — this is the warhead coming in. There’s the submunitions being dispensed and falling to the ground. There was a ground explosion that you saw. No evidence of any intercepts at all here. And what we instead see are these anti-personnel-sized submunitions falling to the ground, plus this bright flash from the warhead that dispensed the submunitions. So this is a very, very complex target.
Here again, we have Tel Aviv, no intercept. Here again, we’re going to see an intercept in the sky with almost no — a Patriot dives to the ground. Then we’re going to see evidence of another intercept in the sky that’s very bright, but no other bright explosions. So again, what we should be seeing if there’s a 90% intercept rate is the sky filled with bright explosions of intercepts.
So again, the video evidence is showing you that the intercept rate is very low, maybe 1 or 2%. The video reveals unambiguously that if you know what you’re looking for, it reveals unambiguously that the Patriots are not successful making intercepts at all.
Here again is the same thing shown again. This is one of the Alpha-Tau warheads coming in. It shows you at very high speed, no evidence of an intercept, explosion on the ground. In this case, we see a shockwave propagating out because the violence of the explosion is so high, because the Alpha-Tau comes in at a speed where its equivalent weight of TNT is added to the explosive power of the warhead as well. So it’s even a more intense explosion.
Here we see a rapidly maneuvering warhead. We can see that the warhead is rapidly maneuvering because we see it zigzagging and the ground should be zigzagging.
Okay, all right, we’ll just go to the back end of the video here. We again see an attack coming in, just a line of warheads coming in, and we’ll see one intercept out of these many dozens, many scores of warheads coming in. There’s the intercept, but that’s in real time, so I’m going to slow it up into slow motion so you can see what you’re looking for. Anyone who has a video who can slow it up into slow motion can identify the intercepts easily.
Now there’s the intercept, and if you focus on the bright area, you don’t see any bright object coming through relative to the object that was coming in initially. So that’s a clear intercept.
Implications: A Giant Deception in Missile Defense
So we can just end this now and discuss the question of what is really going on here. And I think the answer is that we have unambiguous evidence, overwhelming unambiguous evidence that the Patriot PAC-3, the more advanced interceptor that costs $4 million each — typically according to doctrine, 2 of which are fired at a ballistic missile in order to intercept it — has a 2 or 3% intercept rate.
So let’s say it’s 2%, 1 out of 50 engagements. So we have 100 interceptors fired in order to intercept a single ballistic missile. That’s its effectiveness. So this is not a good situation if you’re worried about being torn to pieces by ballistic missile attacks from Iran and you’re Israel.
And I can show, it’s another long talk, that the Iron Dome has also got a near-zero intercept rate. So what we have been having is a giant deception in terms of what the public is being told about how much protection they’re getting from missile defenses. And one of the reasons for it — it’s not the sole reason — one of the reasons for it is that the contractors are getting hundreds of billions of dollars by falsely claiming that these intercept systems are working. And this is a tremendous drain on the European, American, and other countries that are buying these missile defense systems in the hope of mitigating the consequences of ballistic missile attacks.
So it certainly has higher order implications for what could happen if we have a general war or general wars where these missiles are going to be used. And we now know that countries like Iran and certainly Russia can manufacture very large numbers of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads and do tremendous levels of damage with those missiles. Their accuracies have gotten very high and their warhead weights are significant. We’re talking about tons, 1.5 tons of munitions of high explosives, which can do very considerable damage.
So this is the situation that we’re now facing. And it’s extremely important that both political and military leadership understand this. And this is why, of course, we have other things going on right now. You have been properly having people on to discuss the breakdown in the war with Southwest Asia, the Ukraine situation. And I don’t have a lot important to say about that, except in this ancillary discussion of this technical detail, which is enormously relevant because of these other ongoing military activities. So anyway, that’s the situation at the moment.
GLENN DIESEN: But we see all this — we know that Israel has very strict limitations on what the media is allowed to cover. That is, they — I mean, it’s very open now about how — not a very great secret — how much destruction that has happened in Israel, that they didn’t want to reveal what had happened during the Iranian attack. We also know now from the satellite photos that the US was not very open about the destruction of its bases across the Middle East. So again, the destruction was much greater than what was reported during the war. Well, what is the main importance here, though?
The Future of Air Defense: Patriot’s Viability in Question
THEODORE POSTOL: Well, I think I haven’t— I’ve been thinking about this. I’m not sure I can fully understand the main importance of this, but the most profound possibility, which I think is real, is that the existence of air defenses for military purposes may turn out to no longer be possible.
Keep in mind that the ballistic missiles are becoming more and more accurate, so they can potentially target Patriot radars. In addition, we already know that drones are more than capable of destroying Patriot radars. They destroyed THAAD radars very early in the Gulf War of 2026 in Southwest Asia, literally within the first day. All of the long-range ballistic missile defense radars were destroyed by Iran.
The Patriot radars are somewhat more difficult to destroy, not because they’re defendable — they’re defended — but because they’re a little harder to find because they’re a little bit more mobile. But a little bit more mobile is what I mean. They’re not easy to hide. These things are radiating very large amounts of radio signal, and the drones can be modified to home on radio signals along with other techniques.
So between satellite reconnaissance and electronic reconnaissance and drones, which can be even internetted — the drones can be, you can have a swarm of drones coming with artificial intelligence internet links between them — and one of the drones’ surveillance sees a Patriot defense unit, they immediately should be able to locate the radar. And then the radar has to defend itself against tens or hundreds of drones.
So I’m not sure that Patriot units will be survivable in the future. The S-300 is a somewhat different system, or the S-400 and 500. I haven’t had a chance to study that. It may have a similar poor future, but in the case of the S-300, S-400, and S-500, those systems do not depend on a single high-performance radar to function. They use multiple radars. So taking them out requires the destruction of multiple radars. Each of the radars that are destroyed are expensive, but they’re not essentially irreplaceable like the Patriot radar units are. For a Patriot unit, the radars probably cost $200 or $300 million. So it’s not like you lose a $10 million ancillary radar and you have a backup radar that you can bring online. So the Patriot is the worst possible design relative to the S-300 to S-500 system.
Patriot’s Effectiveness Against Aircraft vs. Ballistic Missiles
So I think we could be looking at a future situation where the Patriot radars are no longer viable for defense. Now, this is not minor. Because the Patriot radars pose an absolutely overwhelming threat to aircraft. An enemy air force can essentially be kept out of the defense area of a Patriot defense unit, because the Patriot interceptors have such a high intercept rate against airplanes. That’s simply because the airplanes are going so much more slowly — any damage you do to an airplane causes its destruction. So the Patriots probably do have a 90 to near 100% intercept rate against airplanes.
So if you have a Patriot defense unit defending Kyiv, it’s not possible for the Russian Air Force to just come into Kyiv and bomb the place at will. But of course, if the Patriot unit can be destroyed by drones and ballistic missiles, then air power becomes completely dominant and you can use it at your will. And you can use these FAB 3,000 bombs — these 3,000-kilogram wire-guided bombs that have precision delivery of 5 or 10 meters. I mean, you’re talking about a hellish situation for ground troops if you have an adversary who can keep their air force in the air relative to you. And unless you have an air force that can take them on directly, you won’t be able to do it with ground-based defenses, it seems to me.
That’s not a minor change in the military landscape. I don’t know this is true at this point, but I think this is possibly what we’re facing in the future. So Patriot may — you may have to abandon Patriot for a completely different kind of distributed air defense system where it has multiple, much less capable radars trying to do things, so that you can afford to lose some of these radars and still have a viable air defense.
I don’t know what the solution is going to be, but it’s not going to be easy. And I don’t think the future is going to continue to have Patriot as a military solution in the long term. Probably not even in the near term. So this is a significant military development from what I can tell.
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, and also perceptions are important though. That is, for the US and Israel, which have been seen in the region as being all-powerful, a part of this image has of course been upheld by the Israeli Iron Dome — the assumption that it had complete and total efficiency, that nothing could possibly hit any target in Israel. This has been quite important for countries who, taking this into account, view to what extent they could engage in a conflict with the Israelis. So again, the perceptions are important. Now that this is beginning to crack, it seems as if warfare will be impacted greatly in that part of the world.
Countermeasures: Maneuvering Warheads and Decoys
THEODORE POSTOL: Yeah, now another problem that I haven’t even begun to discuss here — and I can briefly touch on it if we have enough time — is countermeasures. What we see in the videos are warheads that are just falling. They’re not evading. I showed some evading warheads, but that wasn’t the warheads where we saw intercepts. The warheads we saw intercepts against were simply ballistically falling warheads. They were not warheads that had rocket motors that were pushing them along, like one of the warheads I showed, the Alpha-Tau warhead.
Those warheads are very unlikely to be interceptable by the Patriot PAC-3 because you need to have an estimate of where it’s going to be possible to make an intercept, because it takes time for the interceptor to get to a location where you can then make minor adjustments to hit the target. And with a rocket motor accelerating this incoming warhead, you don’t know where that location is because the rocket motor can change its thrust. The rocket motor can actually cause the warhead to maneuver.
So if we go back and just show you a few examples of countermeasures that are already demonstrated — so we’re not talking about theoretical stuff at this point. I’ve been talking about this for years. And every time I talk about it, the critique is that, oh, we haven’t seen this. And my argument at the time was, well, you have no reason to see it because you already can’t intercept the ballistic targets. So why would I spend any time building a countermeasure?
But now the Iranians have decided that they want to build countermeasures. So here is the rocket-propelled Alpha-Tau warhead. Here’s a better view of it showing you its size. The rocket motor is back here. The warhead is up in front. That’s easily a 1-ton warhead. So that’s going to do a lot of damage.
And in the case of the Alpha-Tau, the rocket motor causes the warhead to maintain a very high speed while it’s re-entering the atmosphere, so it hits the ground at maybe 3 or more kilometers per second. At 3 kilometers per second, if this warhead had no explosives in it at all, it would have the explosive power of its entire weight in high explosives, because it hits the ground so fast that the kinetic energy released is the equivalent of its weight in TNT and other high explosives.
So this has got double — this is like a 2 or 2.5 or 3-ton warhead hitting the ground, which is why we saw the shockwave associated with the ground explosion with the Alpha-Tau. Because this thing hit the ground at such a high speed that when its high explosives detonated, it was already carrying the kinetic energy equal to the high explosives in terms of motion. So the damaging ability of this particular warhead is tremendously higher and it’s even harder to intercept.
Winglets, Submunitions, and Electronic Decoys
If we look at all these ballistic missiles of different kinds, notice that all the warheads have winglets on them. And if you have winglets, what you can do with the winglets is you can cause the warheads to maneuver by just maneuvering the winglets. So here’s a maneuvering warhead. There’s no way a Patriot PAC-3 is going to hit that. It could — it has a 2 or 3% intercept rate against the targets that are not maneuvering, that are predictable in their motion.
Here’s the same thing. This is a SAGIL warhead. You can see it’s powered. This more dense stream you see here is the second stage of the SAGIL, and this is the SAGIL warhead — its plume is very broad because it’s at very high altitudes and the plume, there’s no atmosphere around it to contain the plume into a narrow plume, to a narrow contrail.
Here again is the submunitions. You can’t intercept submunitions. You just don’t have enough missiles to intercept the submunitions. And here, for example, is a mockup which is shown in an Iranian facility that’s open to the public. So this is like a 150mm artillery shell, and we saw those things being deployed on a bigger warhead than this. This is a small warhead. This is just an example of the submunitions. Here up in the left, there are small subunits. This is not a unique warhead. So you either have a big warhead that’s carrying hundreds or even thousands of these smaller anti-personnel warheads, or tens or many scores of the equivalent of 150, 155mm artillery shells.
So these are the countermeasures. This is an example of one of these basic artillery shells. As you can see in the back here, you can see evidence of a fold-out wing, and the utility of the fold-out wing is it causes the warhead to point downward aerodynamically. So when the warhead hits the ground, the fragments generated by the warhead are spread near the surface of the ground. They’re not oriented in an inefficient killing way. This is a very efficient way to cause lots of damage to people on the ground.
Here’s another example. This is an Iskander ballistic missile, and you notice on the back here you have these vents. Well, it turns out these vents carry decoys. These are decoys that are deployed from those vents, and the decoys have electronic circuits in them, and they mimic the appearance of a warhead. So when you have one of these Iskanders come in, first of all, the Iskander can maneuver, so it can defeat the interceptor — even if the interceptor manages to figure out where the warhead is, because the warhead has probably got a jammer on it, a radio jammer on it, but it’s got all these other electronic jammers coming along with it. So you have no chance at all to defeat the system anyway.
The Collapse of Air Defense: Strategic Implications
So the situation is such that between the drones and the ballistic missiles, air defenses are going to play no role in the future. And as long as you can build very inexpensive drones and have them highly accurate and homing, and very inexpensive ballistic missiles with large warheads, you’re in deep trouble.
And we know that Netanyahu told Trump that he’s more worried about the Iranian ballistic missiles than the nuclear weapons. We have him on record of that, and he should be — because Iran does not need to use nuclear weapons to defeat, to really destroy, Israel’s ability to fight and to support an economy. And that’s what they’re looking at now.
If this war starts up again in a serious way and the Iranians start going at Israel again with ballistic missiles, there will be no defense. They can claim all they want, but the evidence is clear. The evidence is unambiguous that these air defense systems have no capability against ballistic missiles or drones.
GLENN DIESEN: Ted, thank you so much for sharing your insights and the slides here. I think most people started realizing that the interceptor missiles’ efficiency had definitely been oversold — that is, when all the damages were essentially prohibited to be reported on. And well, later on, of course, this has come to light. So thank you very much.
THEODORE POSTOL: And remember, one other point — if those ballistic missiles are nuclear armed, God help us. Because the defenses will be able to do nothing to stop them. And that’s true of the strategic systems as well, which is another discussion.
So anyone who thinks that these ballistic missile defenses, whether they’re strategic or tactical, can play any role in defending you from the mortal consequences of either mass conventional attacks or nuclear attacks is really courting an existential disaster. This is really important for people to understand.
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