New Delhi. Operating an air defense system is a very expensive task. In response to the unprecedented large -scale missiles and drone attacks by Iran, Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system was widely activated. Military analysts estimate that Israel would have spent hundreds of million dollars, even $ 1 billion to stop the attack.
Iran fired hundreds of missiles, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. Israeli defense forces destroyed about 90% of these threats in the middle, making the effectiveness of systems such as ‘Iron Dome’, ‘Davids Sling’ and ‘Arrow’.
According to defense experts, the iron dome system, which is mainly made to prevent near and shorter distance hazards, was most commonly used during this attack. Each ‘Iron Dome’ interceptor missile costs around 40,000 to 1,00,000 US dollars (according to model and version). If hundreds of interceptors are fired, the defense cost of Israel would have been rapidly touching the sky.
If we take only 500 interceptor conservative estimates, and on an average cost of $ 50,000 per interceptor, only $ 2.5 million (about Rs 200 crore) is spent on ‘Iron Dome’. When it is also added to extremely expensive systems like ‘Davids Sling’ and ‘Aero-3’-a missile can cost from 10 lakh to 30 million US dollars-then only one night defense cost exceeds $ 500 million, and possibly reach close to 1 billion dollars.
Although the cost is shocking, Israeli officials say “the price of every shekel is recovered,” because this multi-level defense system prevented the loss of life and property on a large scale and loss of infrastructure.
The tension in the Middle East is still at the peak, and in such a situation the question has started to arise to how to maintain such advanced and expensive defense systems in the future, especially when the nature of dangers is constantly changing.
