Over the past 11 months, the world has witnessed an extraordinarily high usage of missiles, rockets, mortars, and drones in conflict areas, resulting in the killing of people and the destruction of infrastructure. It is a signal of the spiraling proliferation of offensive missile technology across 8 different armed conflicts around the globe today.
Given the urgency of the need to address this issue and saving lives and better defending our forward operating bases, air fields, and ports from these 360-degree threats. We are displaying data from this year’s attacks, on a global interactive map that will continually be updated to keep pace with the proliferation.
From the information collected since the 1st of January to the end of November, there have been at least 290 missile, rocket, or UAV (aerial drone) strikes used in a total of 93 incidents, across 8 different conflict zones:
The Palestine dispute
The Iraq insurrections
The Yemen Civil War
The Libyan Civil War
The Nargono-Karabakh conflict
The Syrian Civil War
The Tigray Rebellion
The Taliban insurrection.
This year has seen an average of 2 incidents per week, acknowledged publicly, in either the Middle East & North Africa (MENA region) or central Eurasia, and an average of 4 missile/rocket/UAV strikes per incident. A total of 144 strikes have taken place in the Iraq insurrections. The target for the majority of these strikes is the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Those attacks are typically carried out by Iran through its proxies, in an effort to pressure the U.S. out of the region. Many of these reported rockets and missiles were launched from different platforms, to include from the back of trucks — giving them a mobile capability and increasing the difficulty of tracking their origin. Certainly there have been many more unreported attacks that would increase these already significant numbers.
We, as a nation and a world, will have step up efforts to address these issues, by increasing capacity, creating better capabilities, and jointly man, train, and equip the missile defense enterprise, in order to counter and defend against what is clearly a global proliferation of cheap missile and precision-guided-munitions technology.
2020 has demonstrated that this threat is accelerating. As geopolitical and strategic shifts continue to shake the global structure, small wars and regional armed conflicts are a tragic arena that encourages the tactical/operational employment of missiles, rockets, mortars, UAVs, and other such weaponry and systems in modern war.
We cannot ignore this threat. We cannot keep doing what we have been doing. We have to address it now.
With the cascade of recent peace agreements in the Middle East, we must be resolute in defending our forward operating bases.
We must commit to Peace through Strength.
