Saturday, April 16, 2022

Israel: Successfully tests new laser missile defence system "Iron Beam"

(Jerusalem) Whilst the world and his dog watches events unfold across the Ukraine, Israel has been putting its finishing touches on new cutting edge weapons systems it will need in order to prevent what is happening to the Ukraine from its much bigger neighbour from happening to itself.  In the past it came up with the Iron Dome anti-missile system, designed to mitigate the many thousands of short range missiles beloved by the likes of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and of course Hezbollah, whilst iron dome has been extremely successful , it comes at a cost of $100000 a missile, and as we saw last year when Hamas decided to lob 4300 missiles into Israel (strange how a so called nation state which claims it is been starved to death due to a so called Israel siege has no problem acquiring tens of thousands of Iranian made Grad missiles)  Israel’s  interceptor missiles stocks were eaten into, which appears to be the new Iranian tactic in which to defeat Iron dome.

So the Israeli military went to its boffins to come up with a form of missile defence which was a lot cheaper to operate and they came back with Laser beams or more specifically ‘Iron Beam’ and whilst it has been in development for a number of years, the other day they successfully tested it against missiles, Mortar shells and Drones with the IDF hoping to deploy the system by the end of the year. Whilst this is a huge game changer simply due to the speed of the weapon and the cost (around $2000 all told per shot) the weapon is still relatively short ranged (around 7kms) and its effectiveness is degraded by the weather. So initially it will be paired up with an iron dome system, but no doubt as the system matures all of the above restrictive factors will be reduced.