To: bruiser98 who wrote (133033 ) 4/12/2017 1:58:16 AM From: Elroy Jetson Respond to of 221603 The French journalist Thierry Meyssan, which you posted an excerpt from, makes the claim that Russia must have deactivated their S-400 anti-missile system. "it is easier to understand why the Russian anti-air defence failed to react - supposing that the S-400 anti-missile missiles, which are triggered automatically, were deliberately de-activated beforehand. "This demonstrates the popular misunderstanding of the extremely limited capability of anti-missile missile systems. The Russians have demonstrated existing systems can easily shoot down a slow moving passenger airliner from Malaysia, but shooting down missiles is much tougher. The Russian S-400 system would have to be able to see Tomahawk Cruise Missiles in order to shoot them down. Cruise missiles hug the ground using electronic maps, so they're rarely if ever visible to radar systems and thus never provide a target for the S-400 system. Russia says they're going to improve the ground radar capabilities in Syria, but they know themselves the S-400 system is barely functional. Our Patriot Missile / Iron Dome systems, which are more capable than the Russian S-400 system, but still laughably ineffective. Use of the Iron Dome in Israel shows a miserable target hit rate of only 5%. The Israeli's made a major improvement to Iron Dome simply by creating a self-destruct mechanism in our Patriot / Iron Dome missiles so they don't create so much damage on the ground when they inevitably miss their target . Even with great radar coverage to shoot down a missile equipped with simple random avoidance maneuvering requires multiple anti-missile missiles, perhaps as many as four to one. More capable systems like Cruise Missiles require even more interceptors. Ronald Reagan's "star wars program" was bullshit in 1985 and unfortunately today it's still bullshit . The difference is in October 1986 the Soviet military and leaders thought star wars was an American reality. Today, all military leaders around the world are in on the joke. They're an "eye wash" system which make civilians think they've been provided with some protection. Pentagon planners have publicly stated the futility of trying to fill the air with that much metal to try to halt a barrage of missiles. Even with self-destruct mechanisms, most of the damage on the ground is going to be caused by missile parts.