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Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

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Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#311
post #304

[flagged]

I can both dislike the Israeli government and want for the Israeli population to be protected against missile and drone attacks.

I can both dislike Hamas and want for Palestine to be free.

Is it that hard for you to imagine that people just want to be safe? This is not a football match where you pick a side and then hate on the other side! Stop doing that! These are real people. If groups shoot stuff at Israel of course they're going to try to shoot that stuff out of the sky.

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. Yes, I believe that even if you as a civilian personally voted for someone who ended up being a horrible genocidal dictator, that doesn't make it ethical for the other side to target bombs at you; warfare should be directed at combatants, or at least at the industrial base rather than indiscriminately at civilians.

Ya let's only engage in war the 18 year olds sent to die, musnt engage in war against the senders. Voting for war should have consequences.

I'm not familiar with any place where civilians vote whether their country will go to war. Who here on this thread voted for the US to go to war against Venezuela?

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?

Human lives are pretty cheap all things considered.

I was bored so I did the math and you are not correct. Even if you don't care about the people themselves, a normal citizen in an industrialized society like Israel has about 40 years of working life. Let's assume for simplicity that some rockets would hit children but others would hit retired people, on average hitting people when they're halfway through their career and would have 20 years of productive work left.

According to Wikipedia [1], Israel has an average GDP per capita of about 60 USD per hour worked, which at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks worked per year over 20 years comes to about 40000 hours of work and ~2.4 million USD of GDP generated. At an income tax of about 30% [2], that means an income for the state of about 800k USD equivalent. If the person dies due to rocket attack, the state would miss out on that. Iron dome interceptors are quite cheap compared to that and the laser intercepts should be an order of magnitude cheaper still.

This doesn't even take into account the sunk costs that industrialized nations incur by every citizen having to attend school for about the first two decades of their lives, mostly funded by the state. That represents a tremendous investment into human capital that would be lost if you let your citizens get shot up in preventable rocket attacks.

So no, human lives are not actually cheap when viewed through the lens of a country, even when completely excluding morals and only looking at it financially. They are in fact quite valuable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Israel#Income_tax

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#315
post #64

A lot of comments decrying new weapons tech, but I think drone defense tech is particularly critical right now and going to save a lot of lives. Put another way, I don't think we would be against new clothing that made bullets less effective, even if it remains terrible that such clothing is needed. Especially as AI becomes better and cheaper and suicide drones become more nimble and autonomous. If you have seen any…

Yeah, I see this as ultimately a wash. In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq). What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks. Effectively, this puts…

this back and forth has been going on since the dawn of industrialized asymmetric warfare. There is no reason to think that this is the finish line in that race.

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#316
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.

iran has a religious rule against making nukes, to the same extent that it has religious decrees calling for an end to israel. iranians arent gonna nuke anyone without first toppling their religious government

Isn't there some kind of uprising in Iran just now?

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#317

Paid for by American taxpayers who don’t have universal healthcare. https://quincyinst.org/research/u-s-military-aid-and-arms-tr...

A tiny fraction of the US budget which is almost entirely earmarked to be spent buying from US suppliers but sure, the Jews are the reason you have a malfunctioning health system.

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945. I would still say "what about a missile shield?". If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors. If some…

> If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, th…

Gaza's "air defense" is hundreds of miles of tunnels, civilians just aren't allowed to shelter in them. Hamas having better technology wouldn't change the fact that they're not interested in protecting civilians.

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#319
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is hasbara. You need to learn more about Israeli history. Hamas was elected with the support of Netanyahu et al. And 50% of the people in Gaza weren’t even alive when Hamas was elected. (However many of them remain. The death toll after Oct 7 will probably be around 500,000 dead) Israel has never been interested in a peace deal. It is a settler colonialist project in the finest traditions of such with the aim of…

Hamas was not elected with the help of Nethanyahu, the Prime Minister at the time was Ariel Sharon.

Israel supported the PA who wanted to postpone the elections due to the obvious Hamas victory yet Bush pressured to have these in order to democratize the middle east.

The end result was a Hamas victory and subsequent blockade policy which was supported by the Quartet

https://ecfr.eu/publication/back-to-democracy-europe-hamas-a...

Re: Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

#320
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human lives are pretty cheap all things considered.

I was bored so I did the math and you are not correct. Even if you don't care about the people themselves, a normal citizen in an industrialized society like Israel has about 40 years of working life. Let's assume for simplicity that some rockets would hit children but others would hit retired people, on average hitting people when they're halfway through their career and would have 20 years of productive work left.…

Thats a nice calculation, but the reality is that billions of people do not meet those criteria.

Life in the developing world is very cheap.

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