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.”
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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.