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

https://mod.gov.il/en/press-releases/press-room/israel-mod-and-rafael-deliver-first-operational-high-power-laser-system-iron-beam-to-the-idf

by fork-bomber • 7 months ago

215 358 7 months ago

mod.gov.il

condensedcrab2• 7 months ago

From Rafael’s site: https://www.rafael.co.il/system/iron-beam/

100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.

cogman106• 7 months ago

It's quiet the power requirement. I wonder how long it has to focus on a drone to eliminate it. Like how long is this thing consuming 100kW?

jstummbillig4• 7 months ago

Hm, you think longer than the laser is firing? Could there be windup?

cenamus3• 7 months ago

Good question, probably depends a lot on how much energy actually makes it to the target some distance away. And then how much is actually absorbed. Probably depends more on the power density then, rather than total power?

Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?

A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.

tguvot14• 7 months ago

few seconds. it (lower power version) was deployed during war with hezbollah and intercepted 40 drones (big one, not fpv).

there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago

wolfi1• 7 months ago

I guess they are using it in pulsed mode, continuous mode would be a little bit much power

stackghost• 7 months ago

Depends on how tightly they can focus the beam.

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php

FunnyUsername7• 7 months ago

Is that output power of the laser? If it's input power, it doesn't really seem that high. Some US homes could draw 100kW if charging multiple EVs etc.

montjoy• 7 months ago

It’s missing almost all technical details, which seems fishy to me. But I’m sure this defense company is honest and has a system that works great and so that’s why no technical details are needed. /s

someNameIG• 7 months ago

They say it's first operational system in it's class, but it seems very similar to the Australian Apollo system, with Apollo being able to go up to 150kW

https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/

tguvot14• 7 months ago

apollo range according to site is 3km. iron beam 10km

breppp6• 7 months ago

It's also similar to the British DragonFire and US HELIOS

I think the major difference here is that the Iron Beam is operational, as in finished trials, delivered to an armed force and actually was in active use in the previous war for more than a year

upcoming-sesame• 7 months ago

from what I understand, problem with drones is first of all detection

jvanderbot2• 7 months ago

Well there's drones, then there's prop driven cheap cruise missiles.

I think we're talking the second.

slfreference4• 7 months ago

let me up the ante, drones intermixed with kamikaze pigeons.

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

problem with drones is first of all detection

You’re right for ambush drones of the sort e.g. Hamas could launch. For the ones that would stream in from Iran, which Israel needed American help defending from last time, I’m not sure that’s the case.

breppp6• 7 months ago

The re-edited title frames this as an anti-drone system but this was foremost developed as an anti-rocket system.

Hamas and Hezbollah MO since the 1990s was based on bombing Israeli towns with statistical rockets and this system is supposed to reverse the cost equation (cheaper than those cheap rockets)

Today this is also used for drones though

pimlottc• 7 months ago

Statistical rockets?

jimnotgym• 7 months ago

How far away is the laser beam lethal? Could it accidentally bring down a plane flying behind the laser? Or a satellite?

MomsAVoxell3• 7 months ago

Easily defeated with clouds of aluminum chaff?

First wave of drones get targeted, explode into clouds of chaff, second wave of drones penetrates the de-focused laser system.

marcosdumay• 7 months ago

I dunno why people insist on this, there have been desktop lasers that cut aluminum and steel for ages.

Those materials do not reflect evert frequency.

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

You are describing salvage fusing.

When you're playing with nukes it actually is rather effective, not from a standpoint of chaff (you don't bring it) but the ionization of the nuke makes a radar blocked zone and the following missile is going very, very fast--makes a bunch of progress while the defenders are blind. It's also why we don't like nuclear anti-sub weapons--the dead zone lasts for hours, there's no way to know if you actually got the target.

But a drone is small and slow. You'll need an awful lot of drones to punch through defenses this way and the whole thing goes out the window when the laser pops drones farther back in line. And chaff only denies a small area and for a short time.

xenospn2• 7 months ago

Just in time for Iran 2.0

underdeserver• 7 months ago

In the war in June, Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles. These were the only lethal munition they used, killing a couple dozen civilians.

The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles

Iran also fired “over 1,000 suicide drones” [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

Lots and lots of drones--it's just the drones were all picked off, the only things that got through were some of the ballistic missiles. Most of which were aimed at things that they shouldn't have been shooting at in the first place.

And Iron Dome scored on the ballistic missiles, I would assume Iron Beam also could. When it's coming down on it's target it's slowed by the atmosphere and it has no defense other than being fast.

mcpar-land• 7 months ago

Don't Get Distracted

https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

endtime• 7 months ago

This is designed to save people.

cogman106• 7 months ago

Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.

That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.

jmyeet2• 7 months ago

There is no such thing as a defensive weapon.

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.

As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.

bastawhiz2• 7 months ago

Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"

halJordan• 7 months ago

This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.

throwaway-11-1• 7 months ago

hey man what country were the 9/11 hijackers from? What counties did we invade and which did we give f-35’s to?

wat100008• 7 months ago

How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.

breppp6• 7 months ago

it's almost as if it is unrelated to the article discussed

wslh• 7 months ago

I think the historical relationship between war and human societies is deeper than many like to admit. We often act as if advancing technology, and some societies well-being, have fundamentally changed human behavior, but in reality conflict and the use of force have been central to how groups have interacted for millennia. The peace utopia doesn't click.

This isn’t an endorsement of corruption or violence; it’s just a recognition that human social organization has long involved the use of force alongside diplomacy, negotiations, trade, and other political instruments. The modern/post-modern/meta-modern isms may change how we fight, but it doesn’t by itself make the underlying dynamics disappear.

unfitted2545• 7 months ago

The blood meridian quote that stuck with me for this:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

yonisto2• 7 months ago

It is so sad the Humanity needs to develop weapons...

geertj• 7 months ago

On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."

If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.

I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.

(edit: grammar, slight rewording)

yonisto2• 7 months ago

I totally understand the need for weapons. It is just makes me sad.

And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.

solatic• 7 months ago

More to the point, "technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral, it just exists". Ultimately all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and what matters is the people who wield them.

This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.

Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.

Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.

steve-atx-76003• 7 months ago

We are also lucky a miscalculation didn’t occur during the Cold War resulting in millions of nuked folks. But, not sure what the alternative is. Best idea I’ve heard is for everyone to stop reproducing.

throw-12-166• 7 months ago

Weapons are why we exist in the first place.

judah3• 7 months ago

Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.

Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.

RegnisGnaw• 7 months ago

Lets send some over to Ukraine.

myth_drannon• 7 months ago

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.

elcritch5• 7 months ago

Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.

kjkjadksj• 7 months ago

Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?

jampekka• 7 months ago

Hopefully victims of fundamentalist groups like Israel will get this kind of technology too.

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

Disagree--most rockets are determined to fall into unimportant locations and are not engaged. Israel only shoots at the ones that are going to fall on something.

(Although, notably, Israel destroyed one that was going to fall on The Dome, the very location that Islam is supposedly trying to protect from the Jews.)

sporkxrocket6• 7 months ago

It resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered as it's stopping the Palestinians from being able to defend themselves. It's literally enabled genocide (along with US support).

jokoon• 7 months ago

I wish they would make a demonstration

causal2• 7 months ago

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 of the horrifying footage out of Ukraine you will understand how badly we need more effective and cheaper drone defense as soon as possible.

cogman106• 7 months ago

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 the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.

causal2• 7 months ago

Which, IMO, is better than having swarms of cheap bombs flying around.

Taken to the extreme, I also prefer the current status quo vs. everyone having a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and would welcome a countermeasure if cheap ICBMs became a thing.

b00ty4breakfast• 7 months ago

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.

fpoling2• 7 months ago

That laser station will not last in Ukraine an hour and will be destroyed either by missiles or drone swarm.

What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.

tguvot14• 7 months ago

you should tell it to ukrainians. because they are busy developing their own laser system https://thedefensepost.com/2025/04/15/ukraine-unveils-laser-...

nsoonhui• 7 months ago

Maybe Hi Tech weapon is impressive but that could lure us into false sense of security. Israel learnt the lesson the hard way in the October 7 attack.

throw-12-166• 7 months ago

This will be vital tech after China swarms Taiwan with a massive drone invasion.

cenamus3• 7 months ago

After??

loloquwowndueo• 7 months ago

Iron Dome, Iron Beam… what next, Iron Curtain?

tguvot14• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain_(countermeasure)

DANmode• 7 months ago

Iron Sheik

incompatible• 7 months ago

Iron Wall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_barrier

sc970• 7 months ago

2009 Egyptian steel wall

seydor• 7 months ago

Iron throne

elcritch5• 7 months ago

Personally I think that defensive technology like this is fantastic. It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones. Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].

Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.

This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].

1: https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/how-many-rockets-fired-a... 2: https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/how... 3: https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/iron-dome-part...

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones

One could also hope that e.g. Iran starts focusing its economy on the wellbeing of its people versus playing regional cop to America’s world police.

xenospn2• 7 months ago

They haven't done so in decades. You think they'll start now?

breppp6• 7 months ago

They have economic related riots starting as we speak so the progressive end result (a few riots down the line) might either be this or regime change

jmyeet2• 7 months ago

Three thoughts:

1. Just to repeat myself from another comment on this thread, there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.

Let me pose this question to you: if these were purely defensive technologies, why don't we give them to everyone, including the Palestinians? and

2. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and

3. Many people, yourself included it seems, need to examine these conflicts around the world through the lens of historical materialism.

Take the genocide and conflict in Sudan. The SAF are arguably the ones with the "cheap rockets" here. Should we be giving the RSF anti-drone technology? The RSF are backed by the UAE using US weapons. Why? To loot Sudanese gold.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Territory, access to the Black Sea, resources and to create a land bridge to Crimea that had otherwise become extremely expensive to maintain as a colonial outpost. Like, just look at a map of controlled territory.

But why is it in a stalemate? In part because Russia is a nuclear power but also because the West is unwilling to let Ukraine do the one thing it could do to defend itself properly and that is to attack Russian energy infrastructure. Despite the sanctions, Russia is still allowed to sell oil and gas to places like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium, India and China.

Back to the Middle East, we have Yemen, who was devastated by war and genocide at the hands of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.

The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-rules-out-giving-ukr...

_DeadFred_3• 7 months ago

'people shouldn't have locks on their doors, they discourage them from improving society'

'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'

appreciatorBus• 7 months ago

The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.

Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.

klipt• 7 months ago

Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.

I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.

After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.

FunnyUsername7• 7 months ago

I think you have it backwards. Israel tolerated something like ~30k rocket attacks from Gaza (between 2005-2023) before finally launching a major military campaign that sought to remove Hamas from power.

It would normally be absurd to expect a state with military superiority to tolerate ~30k rocket attacks from its weaker neighbor. That was only tenable because Israel's air defenses mitigated the bulk of the damage.

If Israel's air defenses and bunkers suddenly disappeared, Israel would be forced to respond far more aggressively to each terrorist attack.

tguvot14• 7 months ago

. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and

Israel build in Ukraine early warning system for missile defense and transferred to Ukraine it's stock of patriot missiles and batteries

recroad9• 7 months ago

Data says it’s the Palestinians that need defenses, not the ones doing 95% of the killing.

https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties

falcor84• 7 months ago

What kind of argument is that? All civilians should be protected.

Gibbon13• 7 months ago

Palestinians patrons need to tell them they aren't going to win militarily against the Israeli's

elcritch5• 7 months ago

Israel invests in defending their civilians with technology like Iron Beam.

In contrast the Gazan government strategically uses humans shields [2, 3] and despite this the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war by attacking civilians on Oct 7th [1]. Defense technology doesn’t help if you don’t want it unfortunately.

Hamas also has hundreds of miles of tunnels which civilians aren’t allowed to use.

1: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/1000#:~:text=The%20Trump%20Pla... 2: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.... 3: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/01/hamas-officials-admi...

XorNot2• 7 months ago

Defensive weapons technology is how you get less conflict though.

When some idiot in the ME decides to shoot something at Israel, the character of the response demanded by the population depends heavily on whether any Israelis die or property is destroyed.

Israel didn't aggressively bomb Gaza till October 7 killed a lot of Israelis, even though they were regularly shooting down Hamas launched rockets with Iron Dome.

There is a practical gulf in political and diplomatic options depending on if an attack lands or does not, so much so that whether or not someone can shoot down incoming weaponry is a factor in some diplomatic decisions (I.e. Iran firing missiles at US bases in Qatar).

throw-12-166• 7 months ago

Life is not fair.

hersko2• 7 months ago

Country A attacks vastly more powerful neighbor. They have no defensive infrastructure (for civilians), no plans for minimizing civilian deaths, no hope of actually winning the war they started. There strategy is to fight in a dense urban environment among their own civilians while firing thousands of unguided rockets at their enemy, knowing the retaliation is going to be horrific with no way for them to stop it (other than surrendering, but they would rather all die).

Country B has possibly the best missile defense system in the world; mainly because their neighbors shoot unguided rockets into their city. They work to defend their citizens at all costs even with expensive missiles and a protracted military campaign. They design cutting edge laser missile defense to help them alleviate the burden of protecting their citizens. The only reason they do not have to completely annihilate their neighbor who's shooting rockets at them is because they are able to intercept most of them. If those rockets were actually landing and causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties their retaliation would have to be far more deadly.

People on the internet: "actually its the civilians from country A who need defenses"

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

The defenses they need are against Hamas.

Nobody else comes close to Israel in protecting civilians in combat zones.

And let's take a critical eye to that data you linked. I'm having a hard time with the filters but we can see enough without: The fatalities are nearly 90% male. That implies that probably 80% are in some fashion combatants or combatant-adjacent.

And note that the death toll for the recent war includes all deaths. Natural causes, internal combat, rockets falling short (historically, ~25% of Gaza deaths, but probably not this time), combatants and civilians. As well as some that are fake.

And Hamas had the power to end the war at any time--return the hostages, the world would quickly have stopped Israel. Thus we can conclude that Hamas wanted the war despite what it did to their population.

testing435232• 7 months ago

Except when the bombardment comes from space.

Golden Dome is planning large constellations of lasers like this in constant orbit, as well as hypersonic warheads able to target any spot on Earth within 90 seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

It's explicitly an offensive technology (and of course Musk has been involved)

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

The only similarity between Golden Dome and Iron Beam is in their branding. An orbital conventional launch platform shares almost nothing with a land-based small-arms directed-energy one.

choult• 7 months ago

It's Trump's version of Reagan's Star Wars - it's all bluster that we will not see any result of, and it will be quietly shelved by future governments.

solidsnack90008• 7 months ago

The economics have been favorable to attackers for a while. Maybe precision systems like this can help to shift things in favor of the defenders.

PaulHoule2• 7 months ago

Lasers need a straight path through clean air. Israel is a favorable location because Tel Aviv gets 200 or so sunny days a year, but if there are clouds this won’t work or will have to fire at the last moment.

As for drones, they’ll fly lower to the ground to reduce the line of sight.

ThePowerOfFuet2• 7 months ago

Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].

There's a reason that's been happening, and it's not technical in nature. Technical solutions are thus unlikely to successfully address the root cause.

mupuff12343• 7 months ago

Technical solutions can lead to diplomatic solutions as it changes the power dynamics.

Will it solve the "root cause"? Probably not, but that's because there's no single "root cause", but it still might lead to some diplomatic resolution.

newsclues2• 7 months ago

Part of the issue is that it makes it more possible to launch a first strike attack without fear of suffering blows in retaliation, and gives one side of conflict the overmatch that enables leaders to start a conflict thinking they can win without repercussions

newsclues2• 7 months ago

For the downvotes https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2023-09/features/delusions-a...

thinkcontext• 7 months ago

Colombian narcos have been using drones against the state, they tally 58 dead, 400 injured. This is a big problem that is going to get a lot bigger quickly. Colombia likely can't afford many fancy defenses and anyway they are likely to be of limited effectiveness where there are no front line.

https://archive.md/pW3kL WSJ

AbuAssar• 7 months ago

you have the audacity to play the victim card for Israil after the whole world -including you- witnessed live and in HD for over two years what they have done to Gaza poeple?

za3faran• 7 months ago

The hypocrisy is astounding. Even to this very day, how many Gazans have been slaughtered since the so called "ceasefire"? No one bats an eye.

yoavm3• 7 months ago

Do you think Israeli civilians shouldn't be able to defend themselves from Hamas' rockets? If yes - why? If not - what exactly is it that you find so problematic with the parent post?

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

What you don't understand is the carnage in Gaza is self-inflicted. Hamas attacked knowing what would happen. And knowing that every dead Palestinian was a weapon to use against Israel in the propaganda war. Thus they did everything they could get away with to maximize dead Palestinians.

sporkxrocket6• 7 months ago

Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. Israel is an illegitimate state, there is not "defensive technology" as far as they're concerned. Anything that perpetuates Zionism, is by definition offensive and a violation of human rights.

xg154• 7 months ago

Someone should give people in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon the same tech.

judah3• 7 months ago

Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.

Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.

This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.

xg154• 7 months ago

That's not how it looks like though with the way Israel acts like the judge, jury and executioner of the region. You get the feeling that only Israeli lives count in the Middle East.

8note2• 7 months ago

you could alternatively pount towards israeli expansionism, which is a bit more likely than religious extremism. demolish peoples homes and kidnap their families, and theyre gonna respond in whatever way they can.

i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo

ignoramous• 7 months ago

violent religious fundamentalists firing ... cities because of religious hatred

Some tend to be more introspective:

  Shahak's Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel picked up on the theme in explaining its pervasive, destructive influence in Israeli politics, the military and society. He noted that substituting German or Aryan for Jewish and non-Jews for Jews makes it easy to see how a superiority doctrine made an earlier genocide possible and is letting another happen now. Shahak called all forms of bigotry morally reprehensible and said: "Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes more potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society which indulges in it." For Israeli Jews, he believed, "The support of democracy and human rights is... meaningless or even harmful and deceitful when it does not begin with self-critique and with support of human rights when they are violated by one's own group. Any support of human rights for non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the 'Jewish state' is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist..."

  Kook was Israel's first chief rabbi. In his honour, and to continue his teachings, the extremist Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi's Centre) was founded in 1924 as a yeshiva or fundamentalist religious college. It teaches that, "non-Jews living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) must either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or banished, or exterminated."

  Chief military rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, called Operation Cast Lead a "religious war" in which it was "immoral" to show mercy to an enemy of "murderers". Many others feel the same way, prominently among them graduates of Hesder Yeshivat schools that combine extremist religious indoctrination with military service to defend the Jewish state.

  Others in Israel teach the extremist notion that the 10 Commandments don't apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council: "There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them... A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."

  In June 2009, US Hasidic Rabbi Manis Friedman voiced a similar sentiment in calling on Israel to kill Palestinian "men, women and children". "I don't believe in Western morality, ie don't kill civilians or children, don't destroy holy sites, don't fight during the holiday seasons, don't bomb cemeteries, and don't shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)."

  ...

  Though a minority, Israel's religious community wields considerable influence politically, in the military and society overall.

  ...

   How the future balance of power shifts from one side to the other will greatly influence the makeup of future Israeli governments and determine whether peaceful co- existence can replace over six decades of conflict and repression. So far it hasn't, and nothing suggests it will any time soon; not while extremist Zionists run the government, serve prominently in the Israeli army, and -- according to critics -- are gaining more power incrementally.

I mean... let's not throw stones from an equally spectacular glass house.

LightBug14• 7 months ago

From where I'm seated, Israel needs to be de-Nazified - let alone given Iron Dome technology. Perhaps then they wouldn't need the technology to begin with.

sporkxrocket6• 7 months ago

Zionism is an illegal, genocidal, racist ideology. It exists 100% on land stolen from the Palestinians. They have every right to resist the foreign occupation on their land.

solidsnack90008• 7 months ago

They do receive a lot of assistance, actually -- including military assistance -- but it is almost never put to defensive use.

You can lead a horse to water...

frnkng• 7 months ago

Someone will find a reflexive material to put on the drone. Then you have a multi kw laser that hits randomly anywhere when intercepting drones.

Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.

So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.

andy_ppp• 7 months ago

So will we get drones coated in mirrors and temperature sensors that automatically move them away from these weapons quickly? Or is the laser just too powerful?

bawolff5• 7 months ago

Its really hard to make near perfect mirrors that stay perfect in rough conditions. Mirrors arent a reasonable defense to laser weapons outside of scifi.

gaanbal• 7 months ago

what about mirrors with tiny little windshield wipers?

MomsAVoxell3• 7 months ago

Clouds of mirror dust.

mrbluecoat• 7 months ago

Probably a dumb question, but could a ploy drone fitted with a directional mirror redirect the beam back to the source to damage or destroy it?

SirIsaacGluten• 7 months ago

No, but an AI drone like the one Turkey has can probably detect the source of the beam by hiding behind some sacrificial/decoy drones and watching them blow up then shooting a missile at the laser source. It's not like the laser is coming out of thin air.

cwillu2• 7 months ago

Shooting down missiles is what this is for.

uf00lme• 7 months ago

Mirrors are not effective enough. Shielding drones from energy weapons seems like a similar problem to entering Earth’s atmosphere, you want to shield it in a way that will blast away safely and ideally diffuse the laser, so the energy is spread over a larger space. I suspect larger lasers will likely aways win, since there is only so much shielding can do. At which point we could end up with transformers like drones that are built to be broken apart mid flight and yet still deliver damage. I feel like defending drones could become possible with energy weapons but only under ideal weather conditions.

cwillu2• 7 months ago

I'm not certain, but I think the returned beam would likely be significantly out-of-focus.

andwur• 7 months ago

Likely cheaper to just coat the real drones in an aerogel or similar light weight, high thermal resistance material. It's an arms race still, but one with a reasonable amount of asymmetry in favour of an attacker.

JumpCrisscross12• 7 months ago

coat the real drones in an aerogel

You’d still have to deal with an asymmetric ablative jet.

bethekidyouwant3• 7 months ago

Flying disco balls when?

PeterHolzwarth• 7 months ago

They certainly have those for radars! Although the reason for using them is different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

jmward014• 7 months ago

The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare that is new in the world and deeply scary. It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where person x is killed since they are marked as a 'bag guy' and as part of being marked every person they were next to for the last few days was also marked as likely enough to be bad guys to kill as well. All that has to be done is push a button. It is a scary, and unfortunately all to possible, future if not now.

bawolff5• 7 months ago

It seems incredibly hard to imagine what else you would do with a ground based laser other than shoot at incoming projectiles. What exactly are you expecting the Israelis to do? Change the laws of physics?

steve-atx-76003• 7 months ago

I think we’re already there. Sounds like Obama administration hit jobs.

solidsnack90008• 7 months ago

It's been possible for a long time.

For antipersonnel use, guns are perfectly adequate and guns on tracking turrets have been widely deployed (for example, CIWS). The underlying technology is a ballistic calculator and a fast panning turret. Modern ballistic calculators, weather stations (a small device about the size of a cellphone), and good quality ammunition allows for incredible precision with small arms -- hitting something 25cm in diameter at 1000m is something people can do with these tools.

A weapon like this can't really "mass kill" -- it is for point targets -- but we have long had tools that can automatically track and kill. Why don't we employ them to shoot at people? We have the tagging technology, &c, as you mention.

One reason is that positive identification really does matter a lot when designing and developing weapon systems that automatically attack something.

The anti-missile use case is one of the most widespread uses for automatically targeted weapons in part because a missile is easily distinguished from other things that should not be killed: it is small, extremely hot, moves extremely fast, generally up in the air and moves towards the defense system. It is not a bird, a person, or even a friendly aircraft. The worst mistake the targeting system can make is shooting down a friendly missile. If a friendly missile is coming at you, maybe you need to shoot it down anyways...

Drones have a different signature from a missile and recognizing them in a way that doesn't confuse them with a bird, a balloon, &c, is different from recognizing missiles -- but here again, the worse thing that happens is you shoot down a friendly drone.

jmward014• 7 months ago

CWIS is pretty massive, not that this isn't still big, but I think this is taking a miniaturization turn, is upping the accuracy and number of engagements it can handle significantly and potentially upping the range especially in urban environments. CWIS in an urban environment would cause chaos and a lot of collateral damage to buildings but you can now be very sure that only your intended target is being hit so people could die without all the optics of buildings crashing down. It is much easier to have a war when the cameras don't see the destruction. Positive ID is huge, if you really care about it, but even with perfect positive ID if a government is ok with genocide then everyone is a valid target. Are you a male older than 13? You are a combatant and will be killed once you are in sight. Did someone help you in any way (like your mother of family giving you food?) They are also combatants. It is unfortunately not a stretch with modern tools to see this happening in real time. This weapon is, unfortunately, on an inevitable path.

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

And note an advantage to lasers--when you fire ordinary stuff it falls back. C-RAM is specifically designed that misses detonate while still in the air, but no munition has a 100% fusing rate, you get duds. Nothing falls back from the laser.

Amir_A• 7 months ago

Truth is it's already happening, this is how "Lavender" and "Where's Daddy" were used to collectively punish entire families of what a poorly trained AI model thought may or may not be a Hamas fighter

LorenPechtel23• 7 months ago

Evidence?

And the Lavender system was only deployed once it was doing as good as the humans. It isn't 100%, war never is.

petermcneeley• 7 months ago

There isnt much information here. What is the total power per m^2 and what is the frequency (range). As we know the sun alone is 1kW/m^2 over quite a range.

coppsilgold2• 7 months ago

Laser weapons appear to be advancing rapidly. Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.

What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?

[1] <https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.ht...>

Waterluvian• 7 months ago

Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.

Requires a mountain of evidence and argument.

coppsilgold2• 7 months ago

The best public arguments I have read:

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...

bawolff5• 7 months ago

We are nowhere near that point yet. Small rockets are totally different weapons then ICBM.

tguvot14• 7 months ago

there was interview with guy from rafael who was head of iron beam project. it looks like they have some plans for dealing with icbm. airborne if I understood correctly

29athrowaway• 7 months ago

I guess they could use railguns too.

throw2020• 7 months ago

Paid for by American taxpayers who don’t have universal healthcare.

https://quincyinst.org/research/u-s-military-aid-and-arms-tr...

nir• 7 months ago

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.

wildrhythms• 7 months ago

Conflating the state of Israel with "the Jews" is antisemitic. Many Jews do not support the state of Israel whatsoever.

adrian_b2• 7 months ago

By this logic, if the CEO of a big company with a revenue of 100 billion $ per year steals every year from the company 100 million $ for gifts to some of his/her family members, that does not matter, because it is just 0.1% of the revenue, and perhaps those family members would use a part of the money to buy products of the same company.

adrian_b2• 7 months ago

Indeed, for any non-US citizen it is very hard to understand why USA has always paid each year a significant aid for Israel.

For anyone who has worked in Israel or who has just visited it, there is no doubt that Israel is one of the richest countries and it has more than enough of its own resources to ensure that it maintains its military superiority against any neighbors.

Israel certainly does not need a permanent aid for that, though of course they would be fools to refuse the many billions of $ they receive as a gift from USA.

Perhaps this aid might have been justified in the initial years after WWII, but it has been a long time since the initial reason cannot have remained true.

Now USA claims that it may have not obtained benefits commensurate to its expenses in the relations with many other countries, even if it is much less clear which were the benefits obtained by USA for paying this aid to Israel every year.

A part of the money paid to Israel is likely to return to some US companies that are friendly to the US government, so this is an indirect method for giving gifts to those companies too, but in other countries USA has been able to obtain such profitable contracts for well-connected US companies in a much cheaper way, just by bribing or blackmailing the local governments, instead of paying the contracts in full with US money.

CrzyLngPwd• 7 months ago

Drone tech will adapt, as it has been in the russia/ukraine conflict.

A small, fast, autonomous drone flying between trees and buildings, avoiding obstacles and not flying in a straight line could destroy such an expensive system with very little explosive.

Or a cloud of such drones.

Or launch your attack on a foggy/rainy day.

globalnode• 7 months ago

yeah no footage of the system in operation, no demo reel. seems like a feelgood measure. even if such footage existed and was real the things you mention would be cheap and easy.

bouncycastle• 7 months ago

drones with mirrors?

MomsAVoxell3• 7 months ago

First wave of drones explode into clouds of chaff, second wave of drones penetrates the very expensive laser system…

jvanderbot2• 7 months ago

Its so fun to armchair general drones nowadays.

I think they're hoping this will be useful against long range cruise missile style drones, not hyper agile FPVs. Agile FPVs have not been a major threat from Iran vs Israel.

Does israel get a lot of fog and rain? Might this be part of a layered defense?

tguvot14• 7 months ago

https://www.rafael.co.il/system/lite-beam/

llm_nerd• 7 months ago

This system was originally built as a cheaper version of Iron Dome, useful against dumb, slow, predictable trajectory Hamas rockets. The new drone branding is a twist, but of course it's fully usable against things like the Iranian Shahed drones that are basically slow, prop driven cruise missiles.

If someone got close enough that a normal FPV drone like what is seen in Ukraine was in play, I don't think these laser stations would survive for long. Nape of the Earth followed by a barrage of very inexpensive exploding drones.

bethekidyouwant3• 7 months ago

This is not gonna be placed within 15 km of a fibre optic operator

ThouYS• 7 months ago

I think systems like this will turn drones (or at least, drone swarms) into nothingburgers. We're just one layer deeper into rock paper scissors now

mos87• 7 months ago

The Chinese are most likely steaming ahead with the drone armies.

MarkusWandel• 7 months ago

What I don't get about these laser defense systems: Doesn't the attacker just have to attack on a foggy day?

FunnyUsername7• 7 months ago

It's absolutely an issue, although this is outside the visible spectrum and degradation may be a bit less severe compared to visible light.

yoavm3• 7 months ago

If Hamas could only fire rockets on foggy days, Israel would have many more rockets-free days.

greekrich92• 7 months ago

All of the most reasonable and logical threads here have been nuked from orbit

PaulHoule2• 7 months ago

The real advantage of laser weapons in this role is a very low consumables cost per shot. A few cents of electricity as opposed to an interceptor missile that could be $50k-$1M. Even shooting down missiles with bullets as in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

can cost about $10k a shot because that thing shoots $30 bullets. That kind of laser can even shoot down artillery shells!

The disadvantage is that the beam is disrupted by poor atmospheric conditions such as clouds and turbulence. If the enemy knows you are using it they will attack when conditions are unfavorable for it. It ought to be backed up by something like "Iron Dome".

An airborne laser can fly above the clouds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

that one was not so practical because it was powered by mixing two kinds of bleach, which is bad enough when you do it on the ground, worse in the air. The targeting system worked great and I think the assumption was that it would come back when fiber lasers got good enough that it could be electrically powered.

bethekidyouwant3• 7 months ago

Not much here discussing the actual laser.. it seems to be vaporware? and only the 10 kW one is actually available.

smashah• 7 months ago

Hopefully the world's population of human beings can crowdfund this system to protect the survivors of Israel's Bloodthirsty Holocaust of Gaza.

devJdeed• 7 months ago

This technology will only yield escalations and human violence. Israel continues to build more of these technologies bringing only more violence more than what we saw in Gaza for 2 years straight. Everywhere where these technologies are being developed are contributing to this human disaster.

metalman• 7 months ago

downvotes are exclusivly against any pro palistinian voices, and the eternal zionovictim anti muslim chant goes on and on and on, as the stage is set for the full resumption of the most violent public genocide in all of history.

mabedan• 7 months ago

Or, stop starting wars

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

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