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.
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…resources in general, that is. Physical, immaterial, real, imagined, actual gold and timber or actual street cred, heck even peace, but it’s always resources because that’s what politics are about and war is nothing but the continuation of politics by different means.
If you’ll allow me to be extremely cynical, I’ll provide two examples.
Raids and wars were easily started prior to the modern era because human populations still worked according to a Malthusian logic: at some point you were already working the best farming lands or hunting grounds, but you had a still growing population that would become less and less productive, so throwing heads at a newfound enemy became a better option until you didn’t too much people again.
After the industrial revolution, the fertility rate of the most developed countries has been diminishing, so they’ve become less and less interested in direct military conflict, unless it is wars they believe will be fast victories. For one reason or another, some developed countries still have other reasons to initiate wars, such as Russia, so they fight against their own natural tendencies by trying to get women to have more children than they would like.
WW2 was over as soon as Japan struck pearl harbor, as an example, neither Germany nor Japan could win the war against such a robust economy. Some lucky strikes might have created some windows but the deck was stacked in favor of the allies.
Wars have always been determined by resources, in the modern world that’s industrial output but it’s always
Economically, yes, but there’s plenty of other factors. Capacity to cooperate with the USSR was a resource, the capacity to see a Nazi-ruled Europe being way more of a long-term headache than facing them off was one, the US wanting to impress ole daddy stiff upper lip was, etc. Different actors come to different evaluations of those not so hard factors and that’s why they slug it out, to convince the other side that their evaluation is right. And sometimes they’re just plain delusional. And never underestimate the morale boost of an independence war (like Vietnam) or, even more so, an existential one (like Ukraine).
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.
The main reason isn’t cost, it’s republicans.
I keep telling people we already spend more than other places but they don’t get it. Waiting til you’re in the ER with a preventable issue is always going to be the least cost effective
And that’s the reason so many low-income counties are losing their hospitals.
No, that’s because private equity bought them up and drained them. Just like they do with other companies. It’s not the sole reason but it is a reason.
https://lowninstitute.org/the-rising-danger-of-private-equity-in-healthcare/amp/
Hospitals should he government owned, non-profit, etc. they stocks not be private equity owneds.
Absolutely, but they were first financially extended through the use of required care by people who couldn’t pay their medical bills. Those institutions then preyed on the struggling hospitals.
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”
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 issue has and always will be that Medicare for all takes money away from the billionaire class.
Privatization is the reason for “small government”
I don’t seriously doubt this, but would like to verify. Links?
The WHO has all the data you could wish for. Long story short: About 55% of US health spending is public (as opposed to out of pocket or insurance), about 80% in the UK is public (covering the whole of the NHS) and here’s a nice overview from the world bank the UK has a total per-capita expenditure of $5,634 while the US clocks in at $11,702.
Oh and I kinda blanked on that: Not all of that is due to profit, much of it is plain inefficiency. E.g. people not going to the doctor because they can’t afford it, then making acquaintance with the ER even though it was avoidable, and the state picking up the bill to bail out hospitals because the patient can’t pay. Would’ve been much cheaper for the tax payer to cover that initial doctor’s visit and cheap preventive medicine.
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.
You’re touching on the most common misconception. Most people would pay less in taxes than they currently do in insurance premiums. The cost of healthcare would go down in the US with single payer. Even the ultra conservative Koch family funded Cato Institute found this to be true.
There is way too much profit motive in the US healthcare system. So much so we pay double what other nations do for some procedures with generally worse outcomes. Last report I saw is the US spends 16% of GDP on healthcare. The next closest nation was Japan at 10%. Yet the US was among the lowest life expectancy of all G20 nations.
Cite the Cato report. I have not seen a report that said cost would significantly cost but the standard of care would stay the same
https://www.cato.org/commentary/no-medicare-all-wont-save-money
Because they wouldn’t admit that. What they did say is costs over next 10 years with single payer would be $36T. Without then admitting the cost of keeping our current setup is estimated at $42T.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/covid-19-crisis-doesnt-argue-single-payer-health-care
Thank you. I’ll read that later tonight.
Maybe we should stop giving tax cuts for trillion dollar companies or ask them cover complete healthcare for their employees.
In a profit driven system with much of it preventable in the right system.
In most cases I’m not against profit. Due to the inelastic demand of medicine and the lack of true choice, I think profit should be limited.
Who’s covering it now?
Insurance. Employers, people.
Even the year I had 3 surgeries I didn’t pay 26k out of pocket. I paid like 8k.
As I said I’m not opposed but I’m also not foolish enough to think the average persons taxes won’t radically increase.
The math has been done a number of times on this. 2016 and 2020 the Sanders campaign did it then a number of independent think tanks and institutes “fact checked” it.
At current levels of care most would expect to pay less.
At the level of care where we’re no longer subsidizing emergency services for preventable diseases almost all would expect to pay less still.
They won’t radically increase unless we get grifted.
It’s hard to explain how saving money would equate to us paying more so I’m interested in the how.
Sanders is an idiot who is wrong about almost everything. He didn’t even understand how Income Works. He wants to tax wealth which he can’t grasp is unconstitutional.
I would cite Bernie if you want anyone to take you serious. Nice man, just not very smart.
Christ dude I literally “cited” the campaign of Sanders that put out an idea as a platform and backed it with research and examples from the rest of the world.
The studies were not done by Bernie Sanders himself but even had they been I’d dare you to refute them intelligently.
You talk as if we ought to respect you but that also informs your opinion has no credibility.
If you would ignore your arrogance and lack of self awareness for a second, you could venture slightly outside the US for a comparison.
Case in point: Germany. We do have a mixture of semi-public and private insurances, and I would argue on average better health care access than the US right now. Insurance rates for the default public insurance is something like 8% of your income before taxes, plus the same amount paid by your employer. It’s capped at about 420€ per month (so and 850€ including employer part). This insurance includes dependent children “for free”, and if you’re unemployed you’ll get insurance paid for you.
So in short, 8% of your income, but never above 420€. Hardly any out of pocket payments. Comparable standard of care.
That means, it’s absolutely possible, it’s just that some people are dense enough to almost collapse into themselves and prefer to be screwed over.
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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
So about 250 million a year. This one attack cost four times as much.
Don’t forget the billions more we give them every single year https://www.axios.com/2023/11/04/us-israel-aid-military-funding-chart
You should address the person I was responding to.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the Israeli government sees civilian lives as very valuable.
Oh, I totally agree Netanyahu put them in this situation. That’s not the same thing as contemplating inaction in protecting innocent lives.
It’s a reasonable question to ask.
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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.
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!
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.
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 a reference to antiquity. A shekel was a unit of weight and later a unit of currency in the ancient Near East.
So, just like Pound in the UK.
Except more Biblical
It’s okay, they will just print more money, don’t worry.
More likely the US will just gift them more
