Israel's defence against Iran attack overnight 'likely cost over $1bn'
Israel's defence against Iran attack overnight 'likely cost over $1bn'
The cost for one night of defence seen as significantly higher than the price Iran paid to mount its attack
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."
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".
The next war will be decided on what it will mean for the economy ... not by the danger or death it places on human life.
Human capital factors into that evaluation.
Note that a significant amount of the interceptor missiles and planes used were American and a small part British, so israel is not footing this bill by itself.
This is just one reason why the US doesn't have public health care.
That's BS the US is already spending as many federal tax payer dollars per capita on healthcare as the UK is spending on the NHS. That's not to say that the funding of the NHS is stellar but the service level is also in no way abysmal. Long story short: US taxpayers are not even close to getting their money's worth because most of it is funnelled to private profits, not actual healthcare. Military has nothing to do with it the US could double the medical budget and it wouldn't make a dent in the military budget.
The other reason being that grifters in the healthcare business gonna grift.
Enjoy your freedom potholes.
This and the almost $1trillion military budget. "You want money to bomb other nations? Absolutely, here, unlimited supply of money. Healthcare and education for the people who pay for the military? Nah fuck them, how are we gonna pay for it?"
We spent 4.5 trillion on healthcare. We spent 886 billion on military including healthcare. Public health comes down to one question. How much more in taxes do you want to pay to cover it? I fully support it but just expect your taxes to consume a large part of your income. Since about 1/2 of people pay taxes. That’s a burden of about 26k per person to cover to it.
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.
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.
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.
It didn't cost Israel anything. The U.S. and UK covered the cost.
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.
From 2011 to 2021, the United States contributed a total of US$1.6 billion to the Iron Dome defense system,[11] with another US$1 billion approved by the US Congress in 2022. Source
I still can't believe that Israel's actual currency is called the "shekel", it really sounds like something a sci fi author would make up.
It's okay, they will just print more money, don't worry.
More likely the US will just gift them more
From Irans perspective it is a smart move to hurt Israel's economy.
Disclaimer: I do not support Iran in any way.
I support a free, democratic, and secular Iran.
I would love to see that, as well. Unfortunately, current Iran is so far from that image.
until Israel bombs them back and starts a new war