Author: Brown Pundits Archive

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people –
the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to
happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an
aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. 

No
one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through
the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her
dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited
whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on
the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other
way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me
everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance,
got badly on my nerves. 
The young Buddhist priests were the worst of
all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them
seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that
time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing
and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and
all against their oppressors, the British. 

As for the job I was doing, I
hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like
that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched
prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey,
cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men
who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I
was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the
utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. 

I did
not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know
that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going
to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the
empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who
tried to make my job impossible.  

With one part of my mind I thought of
the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in
saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another
part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a
bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the
normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you
can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a
roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but
it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of
imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early
one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the
town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the
bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know
what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a
pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester and much
too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful
in terrorem. 

Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the
elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame
one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants
always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night
it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who
could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but
had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away,
and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The
Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it.
It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided
some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal
rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had
turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese
sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a
labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all
over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning
at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to
where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always
sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene
of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the
elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. 

I had
almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we
heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of
“Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch
in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a
crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their
tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children
ought not to have seen. 

I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body
sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost
naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said
that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him
into the earth. 

This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and
his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He
was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to
one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth
bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell
me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have
seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had
stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon
as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting
it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The
orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges,
and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was
in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started
forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all
shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not
shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their
homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a
bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they
wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. 

I had no intention of
shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself
if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following
you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle
over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my
heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand
yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted
with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road,
his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the
crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them
against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

But at that moment I
glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense
crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked
the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of
yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over
this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a
trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I
was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I
had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me
forward, irresistibly. 

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with
the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility
of the white man’s dominion in the East.  

Here was I, the white man with
his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the
leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet
pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived
in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own
freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule
that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so
in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He
wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. 

I had got to shoot the
elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A
sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to
know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in
hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd
would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the
East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not
want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that
elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At
that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never
shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to
kill a large animal.) 

Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be
considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds;
dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds,
possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some
experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and
asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same
thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might
charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me
what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five
yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could
shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until
the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such
thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into
which one would sink at every step. 

If the elephant charged and I missed
him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller.
But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of
the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have
been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of
“natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in
my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would
see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse
like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable
that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

When I pulled
the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does
when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went
up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have
thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change
had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line
of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken,
immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. 

At last, after what seemed a
long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged
flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years
old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not
collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third
time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it
jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his
legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind
legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock
toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the
first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a
crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got
up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was
obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead.
He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great
mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I
could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long
time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. 

Finally I fired
my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be.
The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not
die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured
breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in
great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet
could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that
dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there,
powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to
finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot
into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.
The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

Afterwards, of course,
there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The
owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to
be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. 

Among the
Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the
younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a
coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee
coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed;
it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for
shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

……….

Link: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/

…….

regards

15 Lakhs rupees line of credit from Jagat Seth to the French East India company in 1757!!!! 
Does anybody know how much money that is today?? No doubt we all want to be Marwaris (dream on).
………………..
There are perhaps few international forums which are free from commentary reflecting on the unscrupulous nature of Jews, how they actually “control the world” with 30 (billion) pieces of silver.

It is high time that people got to know the businessmen (baniya) community from India. The hatred that a Jew attracts on a global scale will look and sound familiar to a Marwari in South Asia. Everyone hates them, especially the (pseudo) intellectual super-caste folks from Bengal and the South, who dominate Indian media.

The typical sentiment that we have heard and read about in countless novels, plays, and movies is as follows. Our land was the golden land. Gradually it got tainted with  the arrival of the Marwaris. They sucked the country dry. They preyed on our innocent women. They have no morals and ethics, all they know is the value of money. They are also religious nut-jobs who will deny non-vegetarians a roof over their heads. All the politicians are in bed with  them. The old glory will return only when we finish them all off, when we can make shoes for the poor with the skin of the baniyas.
…….
As anyone who has ever studied business in India knows, the country
does not offer a level playing field for new entrepreneurs. Not only
does the large, if slowly crumbling, scaffolding of India’s socialist
heyday allow government and encrusted special dispensations of various
kinds to inhibit competition, but there also seems to be a deeply
ingrained bias among Indians themselves about who is capable of doing
business and who is not.

And who can blame them? For at least two millennia, the “jati,” or caste
system — the form of social stratification, and indeed suffocation,
unique to Hinduism and India — has regulated society into different
orders of mainly hereditary occupations. According to this vastly
influential scheme, which allocates kingship to the so-called warrior
castes and religious authority to the priestly castes, business is best
done by the mercantile castes, and best scorned by the high or middle
castes. When the outsider demands proof of how genes, or a combination
of genes and culture, can make for such a head start in the very adult,
secular, learnable activities of trade and commerce, the answer is often
sounded: “You don’t want to compete against a Marwari!”

They seem
to have a point. The most ubiquitous of the mercantile castes, the
Marwaris have a certain mystique in India for their legendary ability to
make and manage money. As Thomas Timberg, author of a recent monograph on the Marwaris,
shows, the Marwaris have for hundreds of years served as merchants,
bankers, venture capitalists, speculators and brokers, the managers of
both trust and risk in the Indian economy.

Although
entrepreneurial aspirations have skyrocketed in India since
liberalization in 1991, evidence of the old caste-based structure
continue to show on surveys of wealth creation. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires
list of the world’s richest people, three of the nine richest Indians
are Marwaris. The combined wealth of Lakshmi Mittal, Kumar Mangalam
Birla, and Savitri Jindal is nearly $35 billion.

A group more
dispersed and more enduring than even the great business families such
as the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers, and enabled by social structure
and history as much as dynasty and accumulated wealth, the Marwaris are
an interesting example of an indigenous capitalism pursued, one might say, in a partly collectivist spirit, an essential case study of the relationship of capitalism to culture and social organization.

The
Marwaris, though far-flung today across India and the world, trace
their roots to the harsh desert region around Marwar, in modern-day
Rajasthan in western India. The term “Marwaris” is in fact not a caste
name but an ethnic catchall for various merchant castes from the region.
According to Timberg’s survey, the influence of the Marwaris began to
spread outside their traditional domicile around the 16th century, when
they emigrated in significant numbers to places as far east as Calcutta
(today, Kolkata) and Dhaka (today the capital of Bangladesh) as bankers and financiers to the great Mughal dynasty.

Historically
the managers of India’s premodern “bazaar economy” and the bookkeepers
and funders of kings, the Marwaris were slowly drawn into the world
powers’ battles for control of Indian trade. “Between 1718 and 1730, the
East India Company took an average credit of Rs. 4 lakh per year from
the Jagat Seth firm,” Timberg writes of one of the earliest diasporic
Marwari “great firms.” “As late as 1757 they were lending Rs. 4 lakh per
year to the Dutch East India Company and 15 lakh to the French East
India Company.”

The firm lent to all comers who seemed
creditworthy. Slowly, as British power in India became not just
commercial but also political, many Marwari traders linked up with the
empire as its local commercial face, becoming commodity brokers in the
vast new colonial businesses of tea, opium and jute or agents for
British companies. (Some things don’t change. When the first-ever
McDonald’s opened in India, in Bombay in 1995 — where I ate my first
burger — it was no surprise that the store was being run in partnership
with Amit Jatia, a vegetarian Marwari.)

Later, when the first stock exchange in India — indeed, Asia — was established in Bombay
in the second half of the 19th century, many Marwaris were quick to
jump into what, until very recently, seemed to the more financially
conservative sections of Indian society to be just another form of
gambling, making and losing vast fortunes in their willingness to take
risks. The pan-Indian Marwari network made the financiers in their midst
also bankers of a sort, able to supply and redeem an indigenous bill of
exchange called the hundi and eliminating the risks of cash
transactions.

Socially conservative and tightly knit, the
prosperous Marwaris often served as a school of apprenticeship to clan
members from more modest backgrounds, many of whom eventually branched
out on their own: a kind of Marwar School of Business. Perhaps it’s only
in the last three decades or so that the principle of “Education can wait. Business can’t” has been abandoned by the great karta, or head of the Marwaris.

As
the Marwari ways became widely recognized — financial nous, thrift,
clan solidarity, appetite for risk, social conservatism, involvement in
both religious and secular philanthropy — so too did their mystique.
This subtly reinforced both the stereotype of the grasping Marwari and the occupational-specialization theory of caste,
as well as the larger social consensus that man’s life is embedded in
the rules and values of his own community, not nation or even
self-expression. Looking back at the entries in logbooks and account
books of past centuries, we learn so much about the grain of the Indian
past.

In post-liberalization, as the allure of a new pan-Indian
corporate “MBA culture” distinct from the old
community-and-apprenticeship way of thinking about business has taken
hold, the prospect of a life in entrepreneurship
has for the first time become widely dispersed across Indian society.
The question now being asked of the Marwaris, especially their large
pool of family-owned firms of the brick-and-mortar variety, is: Can they
continue to hold their own in the economy of the 21st century?

Paradoxically,
this challenge has been accompanied by an upswing in social status.
“The Marwari has never quite earned the respect from Indian society that
he has yearned for,” wrote the Indian corporate guru and business
historian Gurcharan Das.
That is now changing rapidly as Indian values become more
unapologetically materialist. Perhaps now we all want to be Marwaris.

…..

Link: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-20/mba-culture-crushes-caste-in-india

…..

regards

A valuable overview of missile defense.

To the horror of peace activists everywhere (torture never works!!, missile defense never works!!!) the Iron Dome works. However this is a cautionary tale. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) says that it needs 13-15 Iron Domes for full coverage, only nine are operational. Expense is probably not an issue, we will put on our best “Jews own the world” hat and assume that there will be a fair good number of billionaires willing to pony up for an Iron Dome with their name inscribed on it.

But it may also be the case that Israel does not take the threats too seriously and is using Hamas as a punching bag. Hamas no doubt deserves every bit of the bitter medicine but the problem is that the leaders (and even troops) are hiding in deep tunnels, while the civilians are bearing the brunt of this brutal war.

So….. if Israel has perfected missile defense, Hamas has also perfected missile offense. While Israel has attacked Gaza with tanks, Hamas has a few nifty (30m deep!!!) tunnels which are being used to launch surprise attacks inside Israel. Both sides gain from the ability to keep the water boiling at the right temperature (following what a famous Pakistani general had once said).

Worldwide muslims are living under varying degree of occupations by non-muslim powers in Kashmir, Xinjiang, Palestine and Chechnya (there are less prominent ones as well). Of course many more muslims are living under the domination of muslim dictators and tyrants. It gives us no pleasure to say that the first set seem to be better off than the second one. It is a false choice really, all muslims should be free to pray and fast (and not pray and fast as well) and get on with their lives.
………………………
Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first
century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably
easy to kill. Not anymore.

…
Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel),
it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli
defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider
themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a
defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.

….
Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between
those who believe in the strength of a defensive posture and those who
put their faith in the attack. Aside from the proponents of the nuclear
doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, no one has ever seriously
claimed that an exclusively offensive or defensive strategy is viable.
Some military organizations have traditionally put more emphasis on
defense and others on offense.

….
Israel, because of its small size, has always preferred to fight
offensively. If there is going to be a war, let it happen on the other
guy’s territory. This made sense in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1973,
however, the IDF’s lightly fortified positions in the Golan Heights and
on the east bank of the Suez Canal were overwhelmed in the initial Arab
surprise attack.

….
This led to the delusion that the Bar Lev line in Sinai was somehow
an Israeli version of France’s disastrous Maginot Line at the beginning
of World War II. In fact, it was a set of positions built during the War
of Attrition (1968–70) to protect Israeli soldiers from Egyptian
artillery fire, and hadn’t been intended as a line of defense capable of
repelling a full-blown attack. The costly success of the IDF’s
offensive across the canal and the drive on Damascus in the north
convinced Israel’s military leaders that their attack-centered doctrine
was the correct one; it just needed better tanks.

….
In spite of this doctrine’s failure to work as planned during the
Lebanon war that began in 1982, Israel’s leaders remained committed to
an offensive-minded strategy. However, they knew that their enemies were
beginning to equip themselves with long-range missiles. Indeed, Egypt
had used a few early-model Scuds during the Yom Kippur War.

….
Thus, when the Reagan administration offered Israel the chance to
take part in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile-defense
program in 1983, a small faction inside the IDF leaped at the chance.

….
Gradually Israeli leaders came to recognize that missile defense was
just as important as other forms of air power. Thanks in part to U.S.
funding, the Arrow missile-defense system was built and deployed along
with a limited number of Patriot-missile batteries. Israelis had long
been used to having bomb shelters in their homes and neighborhoods, and
they came to accept missile defenses as just another form of homeland
protection.

….
During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s forces fired 42 modified
Scuds at Israel. The ensuing controversy over the effectiveness of the
Israeli and U.S. Patriot units that were hastily activated and deployed
in response taught both America and Israel some valuable lessons. 
….
For
one, education and preparation count. The Israeli Patriot crews were
barely halfway through their training when the crisis broke out. Neither
Israel nor the U.S. Army had enough experience with these weapons to
understand how to effectively integrate them into a large-scale
defensive scheme. ….
The U.S. Patriot units did not arrive in Israel until
the war was already underway, and their improvised deployment has
generally been regarded as a failure.

….
Another problem was that space-based sensors on America’s Defense
Support Program early-warning satellites, which provided critical alerts
every time the Iraqis launched a Scud, were not directly hooked into
Israel’s air-defense system. 
….
The satellites were designed to give early
warning of a Soviet nuclear strike, and their ability to detect Iraqi
missile launches was an unplanned side benefit. The Israelis learned the
hard way that they would need a complex, sophisticated, and extremely
fast-acting sensor system if they were to make missile defense work.

….
When the Second Gulf War broke out in 2003, Israel had deployed the
early version of its Arrow defense missile. It also had integrated
improved Patriot batteries and had developed an advanced
command-and-control organization to provide it with a multi-layered
national missile-defense system.

…
Yet when Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at northern Israel
during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, existing missile defenses did little
or nothing to stop this attack. For some unknown reason, Israel was
unwilling or unable to obtain the American Centurion short-range
missile-defense system (based on the U.S. Navy’s Phalanx anti-missile
gun). Additionally, the proposed Nautilus chemical-laser system was seen
by experts as both too expensive and too easily overwhelmed, since it
could only fire seven or eight shots before it needed to be refueled.

….
Meanwhile, the Israeli defense firm Rafael was developing the concept
that would lead to Iron Dome. It would be based on Israel’s
longstanding expertise in radars and especially on the AESA (Active
Electronically Scanned Array) type radar. This technology uses dozens of
small transmit–receive modules to scan for targets. It does not need
any sort of mechanical sweeping apparatus, and its power output can be
easily adjusted to concentrate on any given part of the sky. 
….
Israel had
first developed such radars as replacements for the older systems that
equipped its F-15s and F-16s.

…
Iron Dome uses a Multi Mode Radar (MMR) to detect and track enemy
rockets. If the rockets are going to land in an uninhabited zone, the
system does nothing; if the projectile is going to hit a neighborhood or
an area that has been designated as “protected” it will launch one or
sometimes two “Tamir” interceptor missiles in order to destroy the
incoming weapon.

….
Its rate of success, which the IDF claims is in the 85 to 90 percent
range has been challenged by, among others, Theodore Postol of MIT, a
longstanding, hardcore opponent of U.S. missile defense. …
The details of
the system’s effectiveness are closely held, but in its performance
against the improved “Grad” and other rockets that Hamas has been using,
the results speak for themselves.

….
The system is by no means perfect. When a rocket is hit, it does not
disintegrate into nothingness. Debris from both the missile and the
rocket fall to Earth and this debris can sometimes do damage, but this
is minimal compared to the damage a live warhead would do.

…..
Back in 2012 I wrote a piece
for the Gatestone Institute making the argument that the economics of
Iron Dome are not as bad for Israel as some people claim. Since then,
the price of the Tamir interceptor missiles has probably gone down
thanks to improved manufacturing techniques and the larger quantity of
weapons being built.

…..
Three points about the system are significant for Americans. First,
while the U.S. has been financing a great deal of Iron Dome’s
development and manufacturing, our military seems reluctant to take
advantage of the weapon’s availability. Second, the system is
continuously being improved; as with every military system there is a
constant need to update the hardware and software, and, thanks to Hamas,
the Israelis have a great deal of live-fire data on which to base their
upgrades. 
…..
The third, not always evident, point is that there is a human
element in the operation of Iron Dome: Some crews are better than
others, and training and experience count. The technology by itself can
only go so far. American missile-defense crews get little, if any,
live-fire training. Simulators have their limits. In light of this, the
U.S. military should rethink the way it trains its missile-defense
troops.

…..
According to recent reports, Israel now has at least nine Iron Dome
units in operation. The IDF has said in the past that they need a total
of 13 to 15 units to cover the whole country. As production for Israel
winds down, the U.S. would be wise to consider buying a few units of its
own for use in South Korea and in places like Bagram Air Force Base in
Afghanistan. After all, the Taliban often use rockets similar to those
used by Hamas. We should expect that future enemies will use similar
weapons against similar targets. If an Iron Dome were to prevent the
destruction of a single U.S. C-17 transport plane, it would pay for
itself several times over.

…..
The U.S. is already scheduled to begin producing components for Iron
Dome, and there is no reason why it could not manufacture an
increasingly large part of the system. Rockets such as the Grad have
been an important part of the arsenal of insurgents in low-intensity
conflict, and are also an important weapon in more conventional warfare.
As time goes on, Iron Dome or weapons systems like it will be
integrated into the arsenals of all the major powers.
…..

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/382931/

……

regards