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.
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.
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.
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 other reason being that grifters in the healthcare business gonna grift.
The main reason isn’t cost, it’s republicans.
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”
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.
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.
I don’t seriously doubt this, but would like to verify. Links?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a reasonable question to ask.
