How Israel dramatizes and falsifies efficacy of military systems built with US

By Ivan Kesic

On August 2, the Israeli regime's military affairs ministry revealed that it received approval from Washington to export David’s Sling to Finland, formally finalizing the lucrative $345.80 million (€316 million) deal.

Foreign sales of David’s Sling require the approval of both sides since the air-defense system was jointly developed by the Israeli company Rafael and the American conglomerate Raytheon.

Earlier in April, immediately following its official accession to the NATO military alliance, Finland approved the arms deal, aiming to become the first foreign customer to use it.

The air-defense system, which will be installed along the Finnish border with Russia, is designed to intercept enemy planes, drones, and ballistic and cruise missiles, fired at ranges from 40 to 300 km.

The David’s Sling system is often described in superlatives and as "90 percent" effective, however, such idle boast comes from official regime sources and the true effectiveness hasn’t so far been independently verified and acknowledged.

Israel has a long tradition of boasting joint projects with the US as its own, and both have a tradition of overestimating and falsifying the performance statistics of such jointly-built military systems, with the aim of exporting and making lucrative profits.

Old anti-missile system hoaxes

The case of the American MIM-104 Patriot, the first operational anti-missile system of Israel, is a good example of the aforementioned manipulations and profiteering.

After the war with Iraq in 1991, the Patriot was hailed as an almost omnipotent defensive weapon that shot down "ninety percent" of Iraqi ballistic missiles fired at both US-allied Arab countries and Israel.

With such falsified effectiveness, Patriot batteries were extensively exported to European, Arab and East Asian countries, resulting in a multibillion-dollar arms trade.

However, over the following years, US military studies first reduced the Patriot's effectiveness against rudimentary Iraqi ballistic missiles to sixty percent, and then to just nine percent.

Even the alleged first successful interception of an enemy ballistic missile in history turned out to be a lie, as the Patriot missile was fired in empty skies due to a computer error.

The controversy with the statistics continues to this day, with dual reports of effectiveness, one realistic for the serious needs of its own military, and the other fabricated for export purposes.

Despite various improvements, the recently proven inability to stop retaliatory attacks by the Yemeni Ansarallah resistance movement testifies that the Patriot is far from a reliable system.

The very efforts of Israel and the US to develop an alternative to the Patriots also testify to its flaws, especially against newer advanced ballistic missiles.

New anti-missile system hoaxes

Experienced ease of effectiveness manipulation, high cost of anti-ballistic systems and a limited number of global manufacturers served as a model for identical manipulations with newer joint US-Israeli systems as well as for their aggressive export attempts.

Iron Dome, an air-defense system designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells, has also been touted in recent years as extremely successful with "90 percent" effectiveness.

These claims come from the manufacturer and the Israeli regime, with no independent confirmation or secondary evidence to back them up. In fact, the latter refutes them.

Although Tel Aviv tried to hide the damage from the Palestinian retaliatory rocket attacks, videos of destroyed factories, refineries and offshore drilling platforms are circulating on social networks, indicating that the damage is incomparably greater than officially acknowledged.

The Iron Dome system is designed to prevent attacks on these industrial facilities, as well as on settlement infrastructure, and its missiles self-destruct harmlessly in the air in case of unsuccessful interception.

Footages of all these explosions, whether they were successful intercepts or self-destructs, were misleadingly used as alleged evidence of successful interceptions for propaganda purposes.

Flawed manipulative efforts are also evident from the manufacturer's promotional footage with uniform flashes and sounds of explosions in the sky as if light and sound travel at the same speed.

Another important problem with Iron Dome, David's Sling and similar systems is cost-effectiveness since they are many times more costly than the missiles they intend to intercept.

Therefore, even with high effectiveness, they can be useful only for situations when the enemy does not have a large number of missiles and its own production base.

Israeli cover-up and export efforts

Israel targets exports to countries that are in a relatively stable environment and there is no danger of imminent armed conflict, therefore there is no fear of independent, non-Israeli verification of effectiveness in wartime circumstances either.

Finland, a wealthy country that shares a border with Russia and is a newly-inducted member of NATO, is an ideal such case and only the latest in a row, as the Israeli regime previously tried to export its air-defense systems to Japan, Singapore, Germany and the UK.

There are also the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf where Washington and Tel Aviv are intensively lobbying for the export of questionable, unverified anti-missile technologies.

On the other hand, the Israeli regime avoids sending any of its "almighty" systems to Ukraine, a country that has become a testing ground for all the latest types of Western weaponry.

Kiev officially demands this from Tel Aviv, despite repetitive claims that it is already extremely successful in shooting down Russian missiles and drones, again with the alleged "ninety percent" effectiveness.

However, Ukrainian demands have not been positively answered, which Zionist officials and certain independent analysts interpret as Israel's alleged independence and successful balancing between the conflicting parties.

This is far from the truth since Israel, despite its relations with Russia, openly boasted of its advanced drones killing Russian soldiers during the Georgian war.

Turkey also maintains a fairly balanced relationship with both Russia and Ukraine, which does not prevent it from exporting drones and other advanced weapons to the latter country.

This decision proved disastrous for Bayraktar and its drones which, previously hailed as extremely effective against smaller countries, proved to be ineffective against a well-equipped military power.

The situation is similar to the German Leopard tanks, which were pompously announced as a turning point in the Ukrainian war, and then proved disastrous on the battlefield.

Israel, therefore, avoids repeating the Turkish and German embarrassments and is more concerned that its existing and planned export deals to safe countries do not fail.

If Israel really had an unparalleled game-changer system, it would certainly export it to Ukraine where it would be quickly, easily and independently verified; therefore dozens of countries would spend billions to order those expensive anti-missile systems.

The possible repercussions from Russia are irrelevant, which is confirmed by the earlier example of exports to Georgia, as well as by the possibility of indirect exports to Ukraine via the US, which is officially an equal party in the system development.

Another theoretical possibility is that Israel exports its supposedly air-defense "wonder-weapons" to both countries, effectively depriving them of air warfare.

Such a scenario would be desired and applauded by Washington, knowing the damage Russian cruise missiles and drones inflict on Ukraine every day.

Yet, none of the mentioned scenarios happened or will happen in the future, for the sole reason of the fear of exposing the true performance.

The joint US-Israeli anti-missile program developers are well aware of the vulnerability of their systems that they can only export to peaceful countries like Finland, with the old marketing tricks of "90 percent" effectiveness.

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