Iran’s historic attack on Israel didn’t damage much of anything actually in Israel, but it did cost the Jewish state around $1.3 billion. That’s according to the latest expert analysis of the ordeal.
The Israel Defense Force said 99% of the 300 or so threats fired from Iran at Israel were intercepted. Iran used an assortment of drones and missiles in its attack, which was said to be in retaliation for an alleged Israeli strike that killed two Iranian generals. There is footage from Iranian social media which showed at least some of the drones and missiles fired from Iran failed to leave Iranian airspace, instead falling on fields and homes below.
Israel employed some of the world’s foremost air defense systems, taking a layered approach to its success. The Iron Dome protects against short-range rockets, artillery and small drones. David’s Sling is useful against planes, larger drones, tactical missiles and ballistic missiles. The Arrow missile system can take out threats like ICBMs while still in the upper atmosphere.
But defense costs more than offense. A single interceptor from an Iron Dome costs $30,000. One launch from David’s Sling is roughly $700,000 and an Arrow 2 missile is $1.5 million. The upgraded Arrow 3 missiles are going for around $2 million a pop. These are all orders of magnitude more expensive than the weapons they’re designed to interdict.
The attack from Iran against Israel is being called “historic” because this is the first time Iran has launched anything from its own territory to attack Israel, but it’s hardly the first time Iran has ever tried to attack the Jewish state.
There is an argument being made that Iran sent just enough munitions to save face as a “response” to the attack against the two generals at an Iranian consular building.
There’s another argument that says this attack by Iran could be part of a very deliberate battlefield strategy — one that Russia is using to near perfection in Ukraine. The tactic calls to overwhelm an enemy’s expensive air defenses with cheap munitions a country is willing to lose. So, when the offense breaks out the big guns, it’s able to get past the air defenses and do more damage.
When Iran launched its strike, it’s not like the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and all the various Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-aligned factions in Syria stopped their assaults. Israel and its allies in the U.S., U.K., France and Jordan still needed to defend attacks from multiple directions.
Iran is sitting on a sea of oil money too. Launching more of these relatively cheap attacks could eventually exhaust the supply of those fancy defensive weapons faster than they can be built. Or at least faster than they might be resupplied.
That is why there is so much focus on directed energy weapons, like High-Energy Lasers (HEL) and High-Energy Microwaves (HEM).
These energy weapons are currently in development, and here’s basically where that tech stands: it isn’t perfect, but it’s maturing.
The U.S. Department of Defense spends around a billion dollars a year developing directed energy weapons. There are several types of microwave systems that are good against smaller drones, even waves of them, but they have a limited distance.
Lasers give commanders a little more of that stand-off ability they crave, and for a fraction of the engagement cost of most any kinetic option. On average, a shot from a HEL is in the neighborhood of $11-$12. But getting the weapon out of the lab and into the field on a large scale is proving to be quite complicated.
The U.S. Navy is experimenting with some HELs made by Lockheed Martin aboard several vessels, but there’s no fleet-wide weapon yet. The U.S. Air Force just ditched its plans to put a laser on a special forces Ghostrider gunship.
Israeli-based Rafael is working with Lockheed Martin to further develop the Iron Beam into more of an operational weapon. There’s no timeline on when that project will reach completion, though.
The British Ministry of Defence hit a major testing milestone in March with its directed energy weapon, something the U.K. calls DragonFire.
The laser took down aerial targets for the first time in the test. DragonFire is reportedly accurate enough to hit a £1 coin a kilometer away. That means it can hit a one-inch target from a distance of about two-thirds of a mile.
DragonFire’s production was already fast tracked once so it could be fielded by 2027. However, the U.K. is now thinking about sending the system to Ukraine even sooner because an imperfect system is better than no system.
So, while directed energy weapons certainly seem like the perfect tech to counter the current threat, developing those weapons into fieldable units is going to take more time and more money.
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Author: Ryan Robertson
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