On Saturday, Iran launched greater than 200 drones and cruise missiles at Israel, a response to an strike earlier this month in opposition to Iran’s embassy in Syria. As the drones made their method throughout the Middle East en path to their goal, Israel has invoked a variety of protection techniques to impede their progress. None will probably be extra vital than the Iron Dome.

The Iron Dome, operational for well over a decade, contains a minimum of 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed across the nation. When radar detects incoming objects, it sends that data again to a command-and-control heart, which is able to monitor the risk to evaluate whether or not it’s a false alarm, and the place it’d hit if it’s not. The system then fires interceptor missiles on the incoming rockets that appear almost certainly to hit an inhabited space.

“All of that process was designed for defense against low-flying, fast-moving missiles,” says Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives on the University of Colorado. Which additionally makes it extraordinarily well-prepared for an onslaught of drones. “A drone is going to be flying probably slower than these rockets,” Boyd says, “so in some ways it’s an easier threat to address.”

Things get extra sophisticated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them. The largest problem, although, could also be sheer amount. Israel has tons of of interceptor missiles at its disposal, however it’s nonetheless doable for the Iron Dome to get overwhelmed, because it did on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of 1000’s of missiles.

US officers have stated that to date Iran has launched a complete of 150 missiles at Israel. The Iron Dome has already been energetic in deflecting them, though a 10-year-old boy was reportedly injured by shrapnel from an interceptor missile.

While the Iron Dome is Israel’s final and arguably greatest line of protection, it’s not the one issue right here. The UAVs in query are possible Iran-made Shahed-136 drones, which have performed a prominent role in Russia’s war against Ukraine. These so-called suicide drones—it has a built-in warhead and is designed to crash into targets—are comparatively low cost to supply.

“At one level they’re not difficult to take down. They’re not stealthy, they don’t fly very fast, and they don’t maneuver,” says David Ochmanek, senior protection analyst on the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “In some way, they’re like airborne targets.”

That slowness and glued flight path specifically imply the unmanned aerial techniques (UAS) must journey for a number of hours earlier than they attain their supposed vacation spot, leaving ample alternatives to intercept them.

“Because there’s so much indication of warning in advance of the UAS, presumably there’s going to be a lot of fixed-wing, manned aircraft that are looking at these things, tracking these things, and presumably trying to engage these things,” says Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a coverage suppose tank.