The Irony of Iron Dome

Nothing is foolproof

By IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117478772

This is an addendum to my recent essay on the challenge of maintaining eternal vigilance and the failure of Israel to anticipate the October 7 onslaught from Hamas.

The theme of that essay was that it’s hard to keep up your guard. The price of security is eternal vigilance and eternal vigilance is hard for humans to maintain. We get complacent. We get overconfident. This is especially true when technology is involved. Think the Titanic (unsinkable) Chernobyl (multiple “fool-proof” warning systems). The Maginot Line (unbreachable). Nothing is foolproof, but we start to believe that foolproof strategies exist.

On October 7, Israel’s intel failure was a combination of overconfidence in the incredibly technologically sophisticated wall they had built on the Gaza border and an underestimation of Hamas’s capabilities and desire to do harm. The misreading of the risks is always made worse with the passage of time and the lack of any evidence that bad things can happen. Human beings get lulled into a false sense of security.

One reason we get overconfident is that we trust the technology and assume it can protect us. We forget that all technology can fail even with backup systems. We also forget that even with superb technology there is often a human element in using it that makes it much more vulnerable to failure. So when Israeli observers at the Gazan border intercepted Hamas radio transmissions discussing the plan for the October 7 attack, senior officers dismissed them as “aspirational.” Obviously, senior Israeli security officials thought Hamas was incapable of doing something that organized and extensive. And with each passing day, that belief was reinforced by the fact that nothing had indeed happened. Until October 7 arrived.

This is the first irony of dealing with security risk. The more effective is the warning system or the safeguards, the more dangerous the situation becomes as the human side of the equation starts to underestimate the risk. Every day that Hamas did nothing more than launch a few rockets into Israel convinced the Israeli security apparatus that this was all they were capable of.

And this brings us to the irony of Iron Dome. Iron Dome is amazing. It intercepts about 90% of the rockets it deems to be dangerous—those rockets at risk of landing in an inhabited area. The goal of Iron Dome is zero damage. And it has been pretty close to zero. Until October 7, damage and casualties from Hamas attacks were very small:

In the 2006 war with Hezbollah, prior to Iron Dome's development, during 34 days of fighting, 4,000 rockets landed and 53 Israelis were killed. However, in the 2014 war with Gaza, the 50-day conflict and 3,360 rockets resulted in just two rocket-related deaths. In 2006, about 30,000 insurance claims for rocket-related damage were filed while in 2014, there were just 2,400.

But the ease with which this remarkable technology has protected us from harm also lulled us into complacency. The status quo was that every once in a while, Israel had a mini-war with Hamas. Hamas launched rockets into Israel in an act of bravado that accomplished very little other than forcing Israel to incur the financial costs of keeping Iron Dome stocked with counter-rockets. The effectiveness of Iron Dome convinced us that Hamas was incapable of doing serious harm.

The effectiveness of Iron Dome helped us ignore the risk we faced from Hamas. Before October 7 it seemed reasonable to believe that Hamas’s ability to hurt us was very limited. We were wrong. Israel came to believe that the status quo might be a bit unpleasant but manageable. We were wrong.

There are two ways to deal with forest fires. One is to put out every single fire to make sure that casualties and destruction are minimized. That was, for a long time, the strategy of the US Forest Service. The idea was simple. Fire is bad—the goal should be to extinguish every one. Seems like the best policy. The problem is that if you put out every fire, there’s a build-up of kindling, dead trees, and underbrush. Eventually, a fire comes along that you cannot put out—a massive conflagration fueled, ironically, by your efforts to put out every single fire. The policy of zero tolerance for fire sowed the seeds of destruction. In the Yellowstone fire of 1988, the fire burned for several months causing millions of dollars of damage and ended only with cold weather.

In the decades before the 2008 financial crisis, the US was loathe to let banks fail, worried about the risks of a cascade of other failures. This policy helped set the stage for 2008, when a conflagration came along that the bailouts could not stop.

Is there an analogy here for dealing with terrorism? Surely, it is ideal to intercept every missile and every incursion across the border. I’m not suggesting that we should allow a modicum of terror to keep us on our toes. But there is a painful irony—if a policy with zero tolerance succeeds, you do become vulnerable over time to overconfidence. You begin to believe that you have the problem under control. You lose the ability to imagine there is a conflagration so much bigger than the usual brushfires that you stop with relative ease.

I’m glad Iron Dome is effective. I wish it were 99% effective and not just 90% or 95% as is sometimes claimed. But with success, there is danger, the danger of underestimating your enemy and what they’re capable of.

I want to close with another tragic unintended consequence of the relative success of Iron Dome. When you reduce the risk of bad events, people often respond by taking more risks. In economics this is known as the Peltzman effect. A simple example is that a football helmet protects your head from the hit of your opponent but it also emboldens that opponent to lead with his head. A helmet can become a weapon. Because helmets are imperfect protection, they can lead to a higher risk of damage to the brain—any one hit is likely not to hurt, but the wearing of the helmet increases the numbers of hits delivered and received.

The effectiveness of Iron Dome led more people to live near the Gaza border because Iron Dome reduced the risk of harm from rockets launched from Gaza. Tragically, and it is unbearably tragic, the people who reasonably felt safer because of Iron Dome’s effectiveness, were in fact immensely vulnerable and paid a terrible price on October 7.

Let me repeat what I said earlier. Zero tolerance of terrorism is an admirable and desirable goal. But leadership requires you to remember that eternal vigilance is hard to maintain. The more successful you are at deterring your enemies, the easier it is to forget that the data you observe may not reveal the underlying reality.

I once saw Herb Kelleher, the founder and long-time CEO of Southwest Airlines give a speech. He was asked how it was that his rivals frequently went through boom and bust periods (and sometime bankruptcy) while Southwest was able to make money every year. His answer was that in good times, his rivals would over-expand, assuming that the the good times would always last. In contrast, Kelleher said, “I always remember that the bad times will come.” It is a good lesson for any leader. The bad times will come. And that’s hardest to remember in the good times. It’s the leaders job to remember that tomorrow may not be like yesterday and today. The bad times will come.