Defence of Populated Areas against Ultra-Short-Range Ballistic Rockets - guns? Lasers? Missiles?

The challenge of Defence of Populated Areas against Ultra-Short-Range Ballistic Rockets has turned from an abstract, technical issue to a very pressing practical daily challenge, considering the fact that a continuous barrage of thousands of such terror weapons a year is launched against civilian populated areas in Israel. This paper will describe the threats, and will analyze the different defence requirements of relatively larger populated areas vs. relatively smaller military installations. It will briefly describe representative Gun-based, Laser-based and Missile-Interceptor based defence system. A small set of parameters will then be defined, and used for comparing, in a generic, normalized, non-dimensional manner, the capabilities of the three types of defence systems. Finally, some conclusions of this comparison will be presented.