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] 99 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

The cost for one night of defence seen as significantly higher than the price Iran paid to mount its attack

That looks like it's exactly the point. Israel hitting the Iranian embassy wasn't extreme enough for Iran to seriously escalate, yet you can't just leave such a thing unanswered or they'll do it again and again, you also don't want to draw (additional) ire to yourself, meaning you don't want to have any casualties, at least not indiscriminate ones, at the most you want to give people a scare. So you shoot a couple of volleys you know Israel can intercept, maximising not for anything getting through but interception costing them a pretty penny. Now, the next time the IDF considers such a strike some politician somewhere is going to say "we don't have a billion dollars to spare right now for that BS, cut it out".

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It didn't cost Israel anything. The U.S. and UK covered the cost.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I don't believe that that's true. We used some of our weapons. And we do provide some military aid. But we don't pay Israel's military budget, and assuming that Iron Dome was a major factor here, that's an Israeli system.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (5 children)

How much would it cost NOT to shoot them down?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 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 6 months ago (5 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.

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