this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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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."

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago (4 children)

How much would it cost NOT to shoot them down?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Israel struck an embassy/consulate. They knew what they were getting into.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

Iran was using that embassy/consulate to direct weapon shipments and strikes on Israel

When does it stop being off-limits?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If iran is fair game for Isreal then under the same logic the US becomes fair game for Hamas.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The US is fair game to them. Hamas just won't dare touching the US.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

How much would it cost NOT to shoot them down?

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.