I worked on the beginning of Regan's Star Wars project. We viewed the problem as one in which you try to stop a bullet with a bullet. Add long range and intelligence to the bullet and the problem gets harder.The problem is hard and physics places many constraints on the solution. At one point management thought that space based defense was what we wanted until we showed that the time/distances were too great to be effective. Now we just have a scaled back terminal defense with very limited capabilities.
After all these years the only value that I think that missile defense has is PR. Effective? Not really. Forget Star Wars the movie. It's not going to happen.
Star wars to me actually made sense (although maybe not in the way it was pitched to the public).You could use a small nuclear device to screw up a much larger nuclear device while both were at very high altitude. Ok, you are going to cause a shit load of nuclear fallout to come down but hopefully that will be somewhere else like over the atlantic, pacific or mainland Europe. Either way, better a bit of fallout than an actual missile targeted at Washington or New York.
The things about Iron Dome though, is that the rockets they are trying to hit are basically crap. The rockets might have a decent range but they have no way of targeting them so they generally do sod all apart from scare people. Hamas have been launching them for days with no real effect in the latest conflict but even if you go back years they have very rarely killed or even hit anyone. Israel on the other hand kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians every year with their very advanced military hardware, often provided by the US for free.
Don't get me wrong, I think the launching of rockets randomly against the civilian population of Israel is utterly wrong, but the reality seems to be that both sides are quite happy to kill civilians on the other side its just that Israel is much better at it.
Maybe, the people of Gaza should all just up and leave so that Israel can have its promised land. It's not like then being there is stopping Israel building new settlements anyway and with the US always backing Israel there is no chance of that changing.