The Gaza War, a Humanity Game Changer

One startling outcome of the recent outbreak in hostilities between the Hamas-run government in Gaza and Israel is that it renders void an ancient paradigm. In a recent Op Ed, Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the US reflected that, in war, it has been long held: a potent offense will eventually overwhelm even the most determined defense.

The archives of military history make the case that defensive measures work until they don’t. For over a millennium, the great fortifications that surrounded Constantinople seemed impregnable. Begun in 330 AD by Constantine, the city’s founder and first Christian Roman Emperor, the great series of moats and walls were massively expanded by the Emperor Theodosius beginning in 395. So massive were these fortifications that they were considered a wonder of the ancient world. And for a millennium they withstood many assaults, mostly mounted by the armies of Allah. But on May 29, 1453, with the use of huge cannons developed with the help of European mercenary craftsmen, the great walls were breached and the inhabitants slaughtered or taken into slavery.

As it pertains to modern offensive rocket attacks on population centers, in the twentieth century, the British defenders were helpless against the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rockets, seeing large sections of London reduced to rubble. As recently as 2006 and 2008, when thousands of Iranian built missiles were launched by Hezbollah and Hamas from Lebanon and Gaza into Israel, it forced the Israeli’s to launch costly and bloody invasions to stop them.

Enter Iron Dome, the new Israeli missile defense system. As Ambassador Oren points out, their new anti-missile system went from drawing board to deployment in three years. Amazingly, just two missile defense batteries achieved an 85% success ratio in Gazan attack and shot out of the sky scores of missiles aimed at southern Israeli population centers, making it the first antimissile system ever to succeed in combat.

Iron Dome is so intelligent that in split seconds it can determine whether an incoming rocket is headed for an open space or a population center and only launches at those which threaten life. This is the fusion of technology and the belief in the sanctity of life. As the Ambassador puts it:

“Millions of Israelis live within the terrorists’ range, with as little as 15 seconds to reach a bomb shelter.”

Moreover, the Israeli’s know that their terrorist enemies just outside their borders have 70,000 rockets and that 15 out of 100 can still penetrate Iron Dome even after it is fully built out. (Estimates are that 10 – 13 batteries will be needed to defend the whole country).

The Ambassador goes on to say that the Israeli’s, with assistance from the US, are also working on a system which will intercept orbital and suborbital ballistic missiles called Arrow and another system, beautifully named “David’s Sling,” which will destroy a long-range rocket defense system.

To be fair to the Obama Administration, it has supplied funding to the Israeli’s in their development of its Iron Dome System and should be commended for doing so. But for the past five or six decades, the Democrats and John Kerry specifically, the man who is rumored to be on Obama’s short list to be the new Secretary of Defense, have uniformly voted against the development of missile defense technologies.

Obama was even caught on an open microphone letting Dimitri Medvedev that he would accede to the Russians’ desire that US limit or halt our missile defense development.

Based on this encounter, what Obama clearly doesn’t understand is that the rise of militant Islam, the on-coming nuclear weapons proliferation within the very unstable Muslim world can be contained through missile defense technologies. Thankfully we still have an Israeli nation to lead us toward that salvation.

We must pray that we can bring about a more visionary leader of the US. Missile defense technology is nothing less than a humanity game changer.

As H.G. Wells famously wrote:

History has always been a race between knowledge and catastrophe.