Skeptics have been firing potshots at the whole idea of missile defense for decades, beginning in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars” by critics. They dismissed the idea of a space-based missile-killing laser as pie in the sky.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after-action reviews concluded the vaunted U.S. Patriot missile failed to work as advertised, never successfully intercepting any of the highly inaccurate Iraqi Scud missiles, including one that hit a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 U.S. troops and wounding almost 100 others.

Since then, American rocket scientists have spent more than 30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to perfect technology to knock incoming missiles out of the sky. It’s a task once compared to the difficulty of hitting a bullet with a bullet.

The Patriot system, which was initially designed to shoot down planes, was reengineered after the Gulf War to employ a hit-to-kill warhead.

“Patriot was batting about zero during Desert Storm. This new missile might be able to bat .300, but it’s not going to bat a thousand,” John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists said in 1994.

Over the years, the concept of missile defense has been refined and reimagined as a multilayered shield with different systems for destroying various types of missiles at different altitudes, trajectories, and speeds.

One concept that was tested and rejected would have mounted a powerful laser on a Boeing 747 airframe to zap missiles in the boost phase.

After years of unimpressive tests, pessimism about the prospects for a viable system began to calcify into cynicism in some scientific quarters.

“What they did is they invented this elaborate set of arguments, all of which, on the surface, look like it’s serious analysis, but in fact, it’s mumbo jumbo. It’s nonsense,” Ted Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in 2000. “The technology is completely unsuitable for solving the problem that they claim they are going to solve.”

Even when interceptors did hit mock warheads in tests, critics argued the tests were too easy or that in the real world, mylar balloons or other decoys would confuse targeting radars and easily thwart defenses.

One of the sharpest critics was then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden. The Delaware Democrat, in a Sept. 10, 2001, speech at the National Press Club during President George W. Bush’s first year in office, argued missile defense was too expensive and too porous — also that it would risk a new arms race by undercutting the now-defunct Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

“Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements to go it alone, a kind of bully nation?” Biden said, arguing that deterrence alone was sufficient defense against enemy missile attacks.

“Name me a time in the last 500 years when the leader of a nation-state has said, ‘I know I face virtual annihilation if I take the following action, but I’m going ahead, and I’m going to do it anyway,'” Biden said, according to a Washington Post account, which described his speech as a “spirited attack on President Bush’s plans for national missile defense.”

But the Pentagon soldiered on, pouring billions into developing systems designed to confront an array of threats, including ground-and-ship-based missiles for exoatmospheric interception of long-range ballistic missiles, THAAD, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, for short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and the Patriot as the last line of defense against cruise missiles, drones, and aircraft.

As the technology matured, confidence grew that in actual combat conditions, missile defense could be a game-changer.

When the new state-of-the-art Patriot missile batteries arrived in Ukraine last year, they quickly became standout performers of the Ukrainian air defenses, shooting down everything in sight, including a Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

Then came the evening of April 13 and early morning of April 14, when Iran unleashed approximately 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles in a massive attack that Israel defeated in spectacular fashion with help from a military coalition that included ships and planes from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan.

The combined forces were able to shoot down 99% of the incoming projectiles, preventing any loss of life or significant damage to infrastructure.

It was “a historic watershed moment for missile defense,” Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, gushed at a forum a few days after the attack.

“Just an immaculate, perfect game. It is a perfect missile defense architecture that was implemented. … It just all came together, and nobody died,” Ellison said. “It’s amazing. It was a massive, massive attack by Iran, with intent to kill, with intent to destroy infrastructure, and nothing happened.”

Experts gathered by Ellison for a post-mission analysis contended the unprecedented success of the coordinated effort effectively refuted decades of specious arguments that portrayed missile defense as a fool’s errand.

“Critics said missile defenses could easily be overwhelmed. … It’s very easy, they said, for the attacker to simply launch more missiles,” noted John Rood, former undersecretary of defense for policy in the Trump administration.

“What we saw is the Iranians employ the playbook that Russia has used to great effect in Ukraine, launching waves of slow-moving drones, which saturate the air defense picture,” Rood said. “The Israelis, aided by the United States and our allies, really showed that the opposite was true, that with the right kind of planning, with the right kind of defenses, you can be effective.”

Among the U.S. systems that passed the real-world test with flying colors were the SPY-1D radars on two U.S. guided-missile destroyers, the USS Arleigh Burke and USS Carney, which guided SM-3 “standard” interceptor missiles to destroy Iranian missiles above the upper atmosphere.

It was the first time the naval system was used in combat.

“Critics have said for many years missile defenses are not cost-effective. After all, offensive missiles are cheaper to produce than defensive missiles,” Rood continued. “Some even have exaggerated to say 99% effectiveness would simply not be enough with missile defense. The leakers would be just too severe. Well, what we saw in Israel is exactly the opposite. Roughly 99% effectiveness claimed by the IDF was effective enough, and the few leakers did not cause a destabilizing situation.”

In many ways, that was the greatest success of the nearly impervious missile shield — it allowed Israel to respond with a calibrated attack using standoff missiles, demonstrating to Iran its missile defenses were easily penetrated and, therefore, its nuclear site at Natanz was vulnerable, while at the same time limiting damage so that Iran could save face by not responding further.

A dangerous tit-for-tat cycle was avoided.

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“Missile defenses are stabilizing. They’re not destabilizing. They provide options to de-escalate. They provide options to not be provocative. They provide options instead of preemption,” Rood argued. “Of course, arms control and diplomacy have been tried to great effort by this administration and previous ones with Iran, but they’ve been unsuccessful at deterring this kind, of preventing this kind of attack. And it just shows the deep flaws of this dangerous approach that’s been advocated by missile defense critics for decades.”

Effective missile defense allowed time for rational decision-making, Ellison said. “There’s time, there’s pause, there’s no emotional response. That stabilized this and prevented a war,” he said. “It’s a phenomenal thing, and we should celebrate it.”