[CNN] A ‘Pearl Harbor’ moment: Why didn’t Israel’s sophisticated border security stop Saturday’s attack?

This has been my main question these few days, the ever hyped and 'perfect' Iron Dome. And Mossad, an Intelligence agency considered one of the best in the world. Where did the failure happen?

Don't get me wrong. This attack was a tragedy. But what happened to the security infrastructure that Israel is so proud of

But what happened to the security infrastructure that Israel is so proud of
Sometimes things need to magically "fail" so leaders can get the war that they want, but can't openly start.
- Especially when they're in trouble for corruption charges and making sweeping changes to their country's justice system to help themselves at the detriment of their democracy?
- The Israeli far right and Hamas are symbiotic, they justify each other's rule and keep the other in power
- #MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
- Christ, conspiracy already. 🙄
- Do you victim blame rape victims too?
The Iron Dome is there to stop rockets, not cars and paragliders. (The latter could potentially change.)
Any air defense system is vulnerable to saturation.
The best educated, non conspiratorial guess I can offer is that the sheer number of projectiles overwhelmed the system.
That's accepting that the reports of thousands of rockets launched is accurate, mind you.
The dome is pretty great but hamas claims 5k missiles launched and other sources say at least 2k. There's no way they're going to intercept them all. As for the intelligence failure, who knows.
- This is my thinking too. Enough were launched to overwhelm the system.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s the first question my wife asked when I told her about it. Neither of us believe that this could have happened without Mossad knowing about it.
- You think it is a conspiracy then.
I'm just gonna put a tinfoil hat on and guess some of the top secret documents Trump let Saudis / Iranians peruse had relevant Intel to these events
But I'm just guessing
- I don't think you need a tin foil hat, to believe that Trump compromised intelligence on many levels to many people he shouldn't have....
I would say the agency dealing with homeland terrorism (I guess this is the way Israel looks at this) would rather be Shin Bet than Mossad.

Wasnt pearl harbor an attack on a military base? So a totally valid target for a war. This was an attack on civillians so the comparision is bad.

That's not the point of the comparison. The point of similarity is that it was a significant blow that struck without the defenders anticipating it.
- I thought it was to go to war? Before that the US pubic was super anti-joining WWII (like 80+%), then all of a sudden, for the first and last time in history of logic, in the middle of a world conflict no less, they put all of their navy eggs in one lil basket & announced that very publicly to everyone.
Agreed, it's more like 9/11 for Israel.
- Were the people auditing a missing $9 trillion in government spending killed?
So a totally valid target for a war
only two small Problems:
they didn't constrain themselves to just military installations
the Fact that there was no fucking war at the time
idk about you, but imo you need to actually be at war to be allowed to attack anything, even if you think it's a "totally valid target for war"

Non-amp, non-google redirect link: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/07/middleeast/israel-gaza-border-security-intl/index.html

Reading books by CIA folks over the years, Mossad has benefitted from Arabs that feel this violence isn’t reasonable, and provide intel to help stop raids. I can guess that Iran has helped with signal intel over time to determine who’s calling in tips, and left those people in place while cutting them out of the loop on this attack. Probably Mossad was getting false traffic from normal moles while all this was planned.

Sadly there’s not a good end for those informers post attack, they served their role to keep Mossad complacent, and likely died just after the strike.

All conjecture (I have no intel sources on this), but bad for Mossad if true. This would leave them back to square one on human intel if it happened.

War has changed. Drones, internet and new MANPADS have eroded Israel's technological supremacy as shown in Ukraine vs Russia. Now it is more risky for Israel to go against their enemies. Already there's footage of the vaunted Merkava tank blown to pieces. Also, this was the perfect storm:

The US is preoccupied with political infigthing (thanks, Republitards!)
The Israeli government was busy oppressing it's own Jewish people because they drunk too much rightwing koolaid (thanks, Trumpettes!)
Item no. 2 made Israel lose a lot of support from the West.
Technological weapons breakthroughs in Ukraine (thanks, Putin!)

They made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it. The balance of power has shifted. I forsee Israel using nukes in the next 5 to 10 years out of desperation but it will backfire spectacularly.

HUBRIS

Because it's an expensive propaganda tool. Insanely expensive against cheap and plentiful Scud missiles.

Plus, there's not much incentive to stop 100% of the missiles because that would make it harder to justify military aid. Though in this case it could easily be that the system just isn't as effective as it likes to tell the people it's encouraging to move into Palestinian homes.

Because it wasn’t supposed to

care to elaborate?

nobody in the entire US military saw Jan 6 coming either

Protecting the US from itself is an issue distinctly for civilian agencies... and it wasn't that none of them failed to foresee issues... it's that they can't act before a crime has been committed and the capitol police were denied reinforcements.
... and it's really that last part that's the crux of the issue... if capital police had been given reinforcements, there never would've been a Jan 6th.
- Yup, Ttere was a lot of chatter on how trump's protest rally could easily turn violent. We've been slowly getting info since then that basically trump or a lackey had to give permission to send in the national guard.
- Several forms of conspiracy are crimes.
Except the Iron Dome has been active 24/7 for years and is arguably the most effective ground-based aerial defense system in the world.
Please understand that I'm not endorsing any conspiracies. I'm genuinely curious what happened. Right now my best informed hypothesis is that the sheer number of rockets launched managed to overwhelm the system.
If anyone has better information I would greatly appreciate hearing it.
- The missile attack was pure saturation. So many objects in the air at once is just too much for the few launchers available. There's only like 7 of them actually online at any given time. They cost a billion dollars each.
  They waited for a day everyone wants to be home, did a massive attack to send everyone into hiding, and then breached the gates. It's such a massive power move that no one thought they'd be stupid enough to do. Yes, it succeeded, but they can't win, and the response now will be tenfold more powerful. And justified.
- Is it even arguable? What else would come close? My assumption is the same, stock up and then throw everything you have blitzkrieg style in an effort to oversaturated it.
Plenty of military people saw it coming. They were prevented from acting on it by the same powers that were commiting the crime
The US military was more prepared for the Area 51 raid