Mortar bombs: hail them or fry them? Means to counter ballistic missiles or anti-ship missiles have been found several years ago--although these solutions continue to mature. Strangely, anti-rocket and anti-mortar systems appear to have remained out of reach. Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, however, have dealt a fresh hand.

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Technology

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Mortar bombs: hail them or fry them? Means to counter ballistic missiles or anti-ship missiles have been found several years ago--although these solutions continue to mature. Strangely, anti-rocket and anti-mortar systems appear to have remained out of reach. Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, however, have dealt a fresh hand.

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Whatever the actual form of deadly spear is used to knock incoming rounds out of the sky, the very first requirement lies in the absolute necessity to obtain a radar that is able not only to detect them, but also to track them and very accurately compute (in other words very precisely predict) their flight path to provide the necessary firing lead angle. Part of the developmental work has already been achieved with the relatively recent advent of the counter-battery radar in its ability to track and compute the past trajectory of a hostile artillery shell in order to determine its original launching point and order counter-fire based on the obtained co-ordinates. This is already quite a performance, but with all due respect for the engineers behind the development of such radars, the job of plotting an existing flight path is one thing, working out not only what the future trajectory of a round will be, but also the location of the tight little window in which...

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