Comment

Will's points about Lebanese Hezbollah are real--particularly with respect to its rocket arsenal. LH is sitting atop--conservative numbers here--150,000+ rockets that are much more advanced than the crude "Qassam rockets" that Hamas uses (Iranian short-to-medium range missiles vs Hamas machine shop rockets). Anti-Missile Defense (AMD) systems like Iron Dome--or even American-made Patriot-3 and AEGIS-based systems--are all vulnerable to sensor saturation because their tracking systems have a maximum number of incoming "tracks"--inbound missile trajectories--that they can fix and counter-fire against at any given point in time. If you fire a barrage of missiles/rockets that exceed that number then every single projectile that exceeds it will come through the counter-fire barrage and impact targets (ex: if a system can only maintain 16 tracks at a time and LH fires 20 rockets simultaneously, 4 of them get through and hit targets). One only needs to count the number of AMD batteries between Israel's northern border and Tel Aviv, estimate a multiplier based on how many open tracks each AMD battery could theoretically maintain, and then compare that number to the arsenal of missiles/rockets that LH has on hand to figure out that LH can overwhelm these systems via volume-of-fire and cause a whole lot of destruction in places like Tel Aviv should a war between Israel and Lebanon go hot. It's not a pretty picture, and that's before you consider what steps Iran would take in support of LH at a time when it is maximizing its munitions productions in support of Putin's war in Ukraine (Putin needs N Korean artillery shells more than it needs Iranian drones/missiles right now, giving Iran the space to shift munitions deliveries to LH if it wants to).