logoalt Hacker News

ttulyesterday at 8:06 PM7 repliesview on HN

Not to mention the multiple THAAD radars taken offline. Those are $500M assets - and only 8 exist in the world. 24,000 precise transceivers all liquid cooled… not available on Amazon for next day deliver either.


Replies

bijowo1676yesterday at 8:14 PM

a single AN/FPS-132 radar costs $1.1 bln, not $500m. And Iran stuck 17 of the CENCCOM sites hosting radars of all kinds across Qarar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, etc).

Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.

in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).

So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available

Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iran-str...

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-radars-airstrikes/

show 10 replies
blitzartoday at 12:24 AM

> not available on Amazon for next day deliver either

Available on aliexpress - but has longer shipping times and of course those tariffs, that you don't have to pay, that you have to pay.

hokkosyesterday at 9:05 PM

Is this story even true ? There has been fake AI photo about destructed THAAD radars : https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.A2B239E

show 1 reply
HaloZeroyesterday at 11:00 PM

I thought all the US ones existed in US states/territories? The ones in the middle east could be potentially destroyed true though.

reliabilityguyyesterday at 8:23 PM

AFAIK, the one in Qatar was paid by Qatar and operated by US.

FlyingBearsyesterday at 8:13 PM

we have likely moved on from this to satellite as a stop gap.

show 1 reply
motbus3yesterday at 8:42 PM

Cmon. At least it is all justified with good reasons!