It cost Israel more than $1bn to activate its defence systems that intercepted Iran’s massive drone and missile attack overnight, according to a former financial adviser to Israel’s military.
“The defence tonight was on the order of 4-5bn shekels [$1-1.3bn] per night,” estimated Brigadier General Reem Aminoach in an interview with Ynet news.
“If we’re talking about ballistic missiles that need to be brought down with an Arrow system, cruise missiles that need to be brought down with other missiles, and UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], which we actually bring down mainly with fighter jets,” he said.
“Then add up the costs - $3.5m for an Arrow missile, $1m for a David’s Sling, such and such costs for jets. An order of magnitude of 4-5bn shekels.”
How much would it cost NOT to shoot them down?
A better way to put it would be: how much would it have saved to not have to shoot them down to begin with?
Israel is desperate to keep wars going to justify their annexing of Gaza and West Bank and leech off the US.
Ah yes, Iran who famously has nothing at all to do with Hamas and was best buds with Israel until last fall.
Israel struck an embassy/consulate. They knew what they were getting into.
Iran was using that embassy/consulate to direct weapon shipments and strikes on Israel
When does it stop being off-limits?
If iran is fair game for Isreal then under the same logic the US becomes fair game for Hamas.
The US is fair game to them. Hamas just won’t dare touching the US.
More a capability issue and the fact rhat they’d be glassed overnight if they touched the US, because no one thinks the US is fair game. Unfair game at best, but no one important in international politics would stand up for Hamas should they attack the US, theyd sit and watch the genocide accelerate. The same way no one should be standing up for Isreal after attacking Iran.
That’s a legit point, though I think that there’s also a very real point that we need more-cost-effective counters to shoot down low-end weapons.
We’ve focused on increasingly-high-end systems for a long time in the air defense world. If you’re going to have everyone running around with explosive-bearing quadcopters and $20k craft that can precisely deliver a munitions payload 1,600 miles like the Shahed-136, we’re going to need to have cost-effective counters.
Not to mention the scale-up question. Let’s say China started mass-producing weaponized DJI drones tomorrow, which I expect that they probably could without too much trouble. Maybe we can hypothetically develop a cost-effective counter, but how long is it going to take us to get that up to scale? And what are the implications if we can’t?
Supposing China has a cheap aerial delivery vehicle that releases weaponized quadcopters over Taiwan, lets them land and go to sleep, waking up only periodically at specific times for instructions. The vehicle is cheap enough to be attritable, and the quadcopters obviously are. Maybe you could even use subs to deliver them. Is there anything we can do to counter that, or does Taiwan just face an overwhelming deluge of precision-guided anti-personnel/anti-vehicle weapons that China can activate at any point?
We have good counters to a lot of high-end weapons. I’m not sure that we have good counters to massed low-end weapons. And I’ve read enough articles from folks commenting on the military situation concerned about it that I kind of suspect that I’m not just missing something obvious.
You can not scale an attack with drones like DJI or FPVs simply based on the limited available spectrum, even if we assume no electronic warfare at all. It will get interesting once we have useful AI for navigation and targeting, making them autonomous. But then we can do the same to build counter drones, which can be much smaller and cheaper, negating the new weapon.
The defense to deal with such threats in mass amounts already existed with radar guided guns like the Gepard. They were just not useful anymore for all the more advanced threats, so now we build stuff again like Mantis , which can deal with lots of drones at once for next to no cost. Dumb it down a bit and you have a cheap, but not quite as capable AA system.
That’s the point of iron dome system. It only shoots down rockets that would otherwise hit targets that would cost more to rebuild/restore. At least that’s the case with hamas rockets - they are predictable enough. Drones are a different story.
You make it sound as if they calculate the cost of a rocket hitting X or Y, instead they just check if it would generally hit or not. Also, lives can hardly be valued anyway.
What a horrible thing to write. Civilian lives were on the line.
Edit: I understand now that it was meant to suggest that it was less expensive to stop the attack than to rebuild. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
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Oh, I totally agree Netanyahu put them in this situation. That’s not the same thing as contemplating inaction in protecting innocent lives.
Pretty sure you took that the wrong way.
How was it meant to be read?
I take it to mean that if Israel did nothing to stop the attacks, what would the monetary cost be for all the damage that Israel would suffer, not even counting for the human cost. It may have cost one billion dollars to defend itself, but Israel may have had to spend more to repair all the destruction had the not defended themselves.
I see. Suggesting it cost less to stop the attack than it would have cost in repair?
That’s how I took it.
Makes sense. I edited my comment to reflect your insight. Thanks for the explanation.
You are correct.
It’s a reasonable question to ask.
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Not just for a sociopath. Anti-air is expensive (table with some options. A patriot cost like $3M/pop. If a missile was going to hit an uninhabited area choosing not to intercept makes sense.
That’s why DARPA keeps working on DEWs.
I wrote this before someone pointed out that I misunderstood the thread comment. I thought they were suggesting idly allowing civilians to get bombed, when they were attempting to suggest cost analysis of repair vs. prevention. I’ll delete the comment.
Ahh fair enough. Hope you have a great day.
Thanks. You too!
This is war. You need to allocate your resources where they will be most effective. If a rocket is on target to hit … A bunch of crops, then it’s better to let it pass and use your costly defenses on rockets hitting things of military importance or civilian centers.