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  • 12 hours ago
With countries across the Middle East intercepting incoming missiles as the US and Israel trade blows with Iran, Taiwan is closely watching to see what proves effective as it looks to bolster its own air defenses against potential threats from China. To find out more, TaiwanPlus spoke with Guermantes Lailari, a former US Air Force attaché in the Middle East.

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00:00Why do you think the U.S. and Israel's weapons systems have been effective in the current Middle East conflicts?
00:06What has been a decisive factor?
00:09Israel and the United States bring overwhelming air superiority. I mean, right now, Israel and the United States control the
00:16skies over Iran. There's no doubt about it. And they can basically do whatever they want from the air.
00:22And the second is on the defense side. Both the U.S. and Israel and the U.S.'s allies in
00:30the Middle East, the Middle Eastern countries, for example, they all have a common, similar, multilayered missile defense.
00:38So that's really important because it means it's all integrated. Everybody knows if there's a missile coming, where it's going,
00:44and they can decide which system to use against it.
00:49And the third is deeply integrated intelligence. Again, the U.S. and Israel, you can have air superiority, but if
00:59you don't have information on what targets to hit, it doesn't really mean anything.
01:04So the integrated intelligence aspect, all aspects, is very important.
01:12Taiwan has proposed the idea of the Taiwan Dome, an advanced air defense system.
01:18Are there any lessons Taiwan can learn from these Middle East conflicts, such as a better integration of different weapons
01:24systems?
01:25So the integration is important of all the, all the different missile defense systems, the Skybo, three and four, the
01:34PAC-3s, the NASAMs.
01:36Those are all the missiles, missile defense systems that are in Taiwan, and they need to be connected and integrated
01:44and deconflicted.
01:46You know, when you have a missile coming in, you don't want five different systems hitting it.
01:50You want, you want a system that will coordinate and decide and help humans decide which system should be used.
01:59In Israel, it's, it's, it's, it's done this way.
02:03How do you assess the use of drones in this conflict? What does that mean for future warfare?
02:09The, the, the main idea behind these drones is that they're cheap and they're very effective.
02:16And also these, these drones can hit not only military targets, but they can hit economic targets.
02:22That's another part, the swarming, you know, overwhelming the defenses of any, any place that you're trying to defend is
02:28another problem that the drones can do, especially with AI.
02:30And so besides focusing on defense, let's say missile defense, Taiwan needs to focus also on offense and bringing the
02:40headache to the, the people's liberation army, whether, whether, wherever they are, whether in sea, in the air, underwater, or
02:48hopefully, hopefully not on Taiwanese territory.
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