100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/
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
That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV
A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.
Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.
The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat.
there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago
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.
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> 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
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
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...
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.
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...
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.
'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
Iran also fired “over 1,000 suicide drones” [1].
In particular, put attention to this:
""" What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded. """
The problem with these summaries is everyone can always somewhat legitimately claim a prior offence. The 1967 offense resulted from the shitshow that was the 1948 war [1], which itself resulted from a history of French, British and Ottoman control.
They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.
They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.
It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
As the russians were not asked about it.
The russian government decided to do so and to supress any oposition.
(But their army is largely made up of volunteers)
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there should be reparations—from Israel but also France, Britain and Turkey—for victims of the Nakbah.
But let’s be clear on a right of return: this logic applies to almost every human in Europe or Asia when it comes to the Middle East if we go back far enough. We’re talking about the closest coast to the cradle of civilisation.
I do too. The contours of how that works with their descendants, and when we draw the line for the living, has been debated in good faith (and bad, increasingly recently) for decades [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...
To emphasize, however, per your own source, this is a critical analytical tool and not a testable hypothesis nor even prediction about the world.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
To what extent are they in the same bucket as those who reflexively blame the CIA or Russia or immigrants or white people for everything?
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
https://babylonbee.com/news/nyc-restaurants-now-require-proo...
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Both Azeris and Armenians hae engaged in ethnic cleansing back and forth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Azerbaijanis_fr...
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-say-oct-...
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
what you are doing in many paragraphs (laden with historical errors or misinformation) is whitewashing antisemitism and shifting blame back to jews.
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2022/03/01/ukra...
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
Listen to what this lady from a military family has to say for instance — it is just the latest war du jour: https://x.com/silentlysirs/status/2006133094177218711
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
$1.2B
Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
Also, the amount Israel gets is in the same ballpark as Egypt and Lebanon, but interesting that that is never mentioned?
Source for this estimate?
> then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI
This is nonsense. Federal welfare spending is about $20k per capita [1]. You could get that to $30k by co-opting all state spending [2]. (And only in Alaska, Oregon and Hawaii.)
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-govern...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
"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)
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.
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.