Further Thoughts on Iron Dome

Professor Uzi Rubin visited the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs yesterday, and we interviewed him, so a video will probably be coming in the next couple of weeks. If you don't know who Professor Rubin is, he was one of the technicians who developed Iron Dome.

We talked with him for quite a while, and further details will be provided in the aforementioned video, but one of the questions that we asked him was "what is the cost per kill of the Iron Dome system?" Obviously, in some ways this question has a lot riding on it, since a common criticism of the Iron Dome is that it is too expensive for what it does and prolonged use of it will eventually bankrupt the country. In Professor Rubin's answer, I learned quite a bit.

First of all, we don't exactly know how much it costs because people who you ask often give you different answers. This is because the company who develops it is going to try and sell it to other countries, and might want to inflate the price. But the answer that we usually hear is around $100,000 per "kill." Now this sounds like a lot, but contrast that with other anti-missile defense systems used by the USA such as the Patriot and Arrow. Those two often run in over a million dollars per "kill," so relatively speaking Iron Dome is much cheaper.

The second part of the answer to this question relates to a cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand it appears that Israel is losing money: Hamas fires a hundred dollar rocket, Israel fires a hundred thousand dollar missile, it's Israel that has lost in that exchange. But think of it in another way: Imagine Hamas fires a five dollar rocket that hits the Ashkelon power plant and does a hundred million dollars worth of damage. Suddenly a hundred thousand dollar Iron Dome missile sounds like a much better investment, especially since one can't put a price on human life or the IDF's operational efficiency.

The problem remains, of course, that Iron Dome might still be too expensive to be effective over the long run. And for the answer to that question you'll probably have to go to someone who is more knowledgeable than I am. But consider also that there may be psychological effects that we aren't considering: Israel's citizens and military will feel safer while on the other hand Hamas won't feel like their attacks are being effective. That certainly gives Israel an advantage.