What is it about Iran that scares the US?: On Tehran’s military capabilities | Al Akhbar English
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/what-it-about-iran-scares-us-tehran%E2%80%99s-military-capabiliti
Iran built its deterrent capabilities while avoiding competition with the US on its turf. It knows in advance that it will never be able to confront a Western power in air or at sea. It is from here that asymmetrical war technologies emerged, trying to exploit existing gaps and hit the enemy with unconventional means, like missiles for instance. For years, the US was busy developing defense means for protection against Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian missiles. But a report published recently in the Economist magazine explains the difficulty of doing so. The US could not stop talking about the missile shield program but few people know that a program which cost more than US$ 40 billion failed in all five interceptor tests conducted since 2008. The Economist says that about a US$ 100 billion were spent in the last decade on similar programs that did not get the US any closer to neutralizing the missile threat. On the contrary, it may have proved that the goal itself is impossible and that, indeed, is the conclusion that many US Generals who worked in this field came to. The problem is not limited to technical difficulties – trying to intercept a warhead or multiple warheads the size of a small closet floating in space at a distance of 8 Mach or more – but also has to do with how easy it is to mislead complex defence systems with simple methods. Russian missiles today are designed to launch dozens of fake targets when the warhead separates from it in outer space, all of them similar in size and moving at the same speed, thus, making it almost impossible to distinguish between them. As the US develops new interceptor technologies, Russia launches counter measures that nullify their effect.