Cost To Repel Iranian Missile Attack Against Israel Was $2-3 Billion. The Implications of This Are Substantial.
Authored by Alastair Crooke via the Ron Paul Institute
Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstration’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.
The leading Israeli daily, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.
Professor Postol writes:
“This indicates that the cost of defending against waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary.”
“The videos show an extremely important fact: All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles”, [fired from mostly U.S. aircraft]. Some 154 aircraft were reportedly aloft at the time] likely firing AIM-9x Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000.”
Furthermore:
“The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes [an indication of hyper-speed], indicates that whatever the effects of [Israel’s] David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective. Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems”.
Postel adds, “I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability … it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones”.
“The implications of this are clear. The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented. At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defence system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability.”
Just to be clear, Postol is saying that neither the U.S. nor Israel have more than a partial defence to a potential attack of this nature, especially as Iran has dispersed and buried its ballistic missile silos across the entire terrain of Iran under the control of autonomous units which are capable of continuing a war, even were central command and communications are completely lost.
This amounts to paradigm change – clearly for Israel, for one. The huge physical expenditure on air defense ordinance – 2-3 billion dollars worth – will not be repeated willy-nilly by the U.S. Netanyahu will not easily persuade the U.S. to engage with Israel in any joint venture against Iran, given these unsustainable air-defence costs.
But also, as a second important implication, these Air Defense assets are not just expensive in dollar terms, they simply are not there: i.e. the store cupboard is near empty! And the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to replace these not particularly effective, high cost platforms speedily.
