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The Iron Beam is Laser-Focused on Israel’s Defense
Early last month, in an undisclosed location deep in the Negev Desert, a cohort of Defense Ministry officials and senior Air Force officers conducted a final test on one of the most important military tech breakthroughs of the past one hundred years.
At high noon, technicians activated the radar systems mounted on a small truck which fed into a nearby light projector. Support staff then launched a dummy drone from a rocket-powered catapult.
Once the aircraft had reached its predetermined altitude, the radar and other sensor signals activated the projector which emanated a highly focused beam of invisible light. Approximately three seconds later, testers observed a large hole being burned through the dummy drone, which at that point was flying some two kilometers in the distance. Approximately one second later, the drone’s structure broke apart, and the aircraft fell from the sky.
Testers were jubilant. Years of research and experimentation had finally paid off.
Iron Beam was operational.
A Well-Earned Breakthrough
The official announcement of this successful test was delivered by the Defense Ministry’s Combat Infrastructure and Technology Department, known by its Hebrew acronym MAPAT.
“This is truly a historic event of global proportions,” said MAPAT chief General Yaniv Rotem in a conversation with journalists. “For the first time, there is a country that has demonstrated the capability of both firing and intercepting with an energy weapon.”
Rotem emphasized that the new platform had become, in the recent period, a tremendous priority by the defense establishment and was put on the fast track to becoming operational. “Over the last month, we worked around the clock on the proving grounds to make sure we made the Passover deadline – and so it was.”
The exact specs of Iron Beam are, not surprisingly, highly classified. But the defense ministry did release some general
With a Trick of the Light, the Iron Beam is Laser-Focused on Israel’s Defense
By ShammaI SISkInD
points about what the system does and how it operates.
Iron Beam is a laser weapon. What that means essentially is that it projects specific light frequencies in incredibly focused streams. The generator feeds 100 kilowatts of electrical power into each burst, which is what enables the beam to penetrate even extremely dense alloys.
Now, before we go any further, let’s just put that into perspective:
A small to medium-sized household in a moderate climate might consume somewhere between 200-400 kilowatts per month. This means the new laser system focuses the amount of energy typically consumed by four people over the course of ten days into a five-second burst.
In terms of its unique technology, Iron Beam was able to overcome many challenges in the field of lightwave research.
The word “laser” is actually an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. In layman’s terms, a laser produces light by stimulating the release of photons, i.e., light particles. This allows the resulting light to achieve incredible energy levels – about one million times the intensity of the average light bulb.
Lasers themselves are not new. The first operable laser-like machines have been around since the 1950s and today have a wide range of applications, especially in commercial welding and other large-scale manufacturing processes. But to deploy a laser as a weapon – the fantasy of Star Wars fans and governments
alike – many obstacles have to be overcome. Reliability, range, weather impediments – all of these are serious problems, each one by itself impeding the viability of lasers as a defense platform.
Iron Beam is the overcoming of all of these logistical hurdles. The recent series of tests have shown the system capable of accurately, and reliably, intercepting airborne objects at a range of over ten miles.
The Hard Reality of Missile Defense
At first glance, one might be tempted to view the emergence of Iron Beam as just the latest science-fiction-like accomplishment of Israeli ingenuity, perhaps more impressive than other past feats, but at the end of the day, just another improvement to an already highly advanced military.
This would be the wrong way of looking at it.
What makes Iron Beam more significant than other advances is not the technological breakthrough itself, but the broad-level strategic implications it will likely have. Indeed, understanding Iron Beam’s development, its capabilities, and the military needs it comes to solve offers a very good lens through which to properly
grasp the strategic reality faced by Israel every day.
“The entire land is the front line. The entire nation is the army.” So goes the aphorism attributed to David Ben Gurion, a phrase that still decorates the side of buildings in many an army base throughout Israel today. To the modern ear, that might sound a bit on the totalitarian side. But Ben Gurion was simply making a strategic observation.
Israel is a small place. And from a defense perspective, this fact has grave implications. Putting it bluntly, Israel’s size means the enemy is always just 50 miles away from overrunning the entire country.
For the first few decades of Israel’s existence, this was actually a real possibility – and almost came to fruition on a few occasions. With important changes to the region’s geopolitics, the chances of Egyptian tank columns rolling toward Tel Aviv is no longer particularly high. But the underlying reality of Israel’s lack of strategic depth still remains. Military and diplomatic victories have eliminated certain types of threats. But eventually, innovation offered Israel’s adversaries ways of leveraging its fundamental weakness.
Over the recent decades, this innovation came along with the proliferation and diversity of airborne weapons: machines that are relatively cheap and aren’t limited by ground-based borders and other topographical impediments.
Years before Gaza morphed into the miniature hellhole of a terror state that it is today, Israel came face-to-face with modern combat and its effects on population centers. During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile arsenal flooded Israel’s skies. Over a roughly five-week period in early 1991, dozens of missiles
were fired in an attempt to target Israeli cities. (As an interesting aside, at the time, American Patriot missile batteries were deployed to defend Israel from the incoming Scuds. Today, with the success of Israeli missile defense technology and the notorious unreliability of the Patriot system against modern projectiles, Washington is now procuring platforms from Jerusalem.) The conflict was the first since Israel’s War of Independence in which civilians found themselves in the thick of the action. The following year, the defense establishment decided on the creation of the Home Front Command, a military branch that would be responsible for civil defense.
The Home Front has become wellknown for its search-and-rescue unit, which has been deployed to crises around the world such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and, more recently, after the 2021 Florida high-rise disaster. But the Home Front Command’s primary mission is, of course, the home front. Arguably its most critical job is responding to the threat that was the impetus for its creation, namely missile defense. To this end, Home Front operates a top-secret system, called the “Ram’s Horn,” which plays a critical role in command-and-control for the systems that counter airborne weapons.
With over ten years of experience, the Home Front has missile interception down to an extremely exact science. The system’s computer has the entire country neatly divided into 235 “defense zones.” Within seconds of a launch alert (confirmed by radar and other electrical sensors), the system alerts the relevant intercepting batteries that cover the particular zone under threat. In this way, the Ram’s Horn network, in tandem with other command and control systems operated by the Air Force, can ignore launches that don’t pose a threat, pinpoint real dangers, and respond with incredible speed and accuracy.
True, the prospect of rocket barrages from Gaza remains a serious problem. People still can be, and have been, killed by these attacks. But with the incredible success of Israel’s missile defense program – of which the Iron Dome is the most famous but certainly not the only platform – most Israelis simply don’t relate to this as a high-level danger. This was highlighted by reports during the May 2021 Gaza conflict of Tel Avivians crowding the beaches to watch the Iron Dome in action. Whether or not you think this was foolhardy behavior is not the point. The fact is the prevailing sentiment is that the missile threat has more or less been solved.
But as many high-ups in the military establishment understand, this is simply not the case.
The current missile defense model has serious flaws. While they haven’t been all that harmful in recent rounds of conflict, it was always only a matter of time before they began to show their failings.
The first and most obvious problem with the current model is the cost factor. The Iron Dome is truly a marvel of technical engineering. It was remarkable when it was deployed over a decade ago in the
spring of 2011, and it remains unrivaled today. The problem, though, is that Iron Dome is an extremely expensive platform to operate. Producing a missile that can fly fast enough to intercept a short-range projectile, change course in mid-air, and blow up exactly when you want it to is not cheap. Each Tamir interceptor missile fired by Iron Dome costs between $100,000 - $150,000. In contrast, the Qassam rockets favored by Hamas and Co. run around $800 a pop. That’s basically the equivalent of hurling a Rolls-Royce into the air to knock down an Erector Set.
Even before Iron Dome was deployed, the cost problem was seen by many experts as a fatal flaw in the entire concept. In 2010, Reuven Pedatzur, a fighter pilot veteran and well-respected military analyst, estimated that operating the system would literally drain the entire state military budget in any high-level conflict. The concerns of Pedatzur and others were tempered by tweaks to the system that allowed it to discriminate between dangerous and “benign” launches. The fact that Iron Dome would only fire at projectiles that would otherwise hit populated areas meant it would not be indiscriminately shooting hundred-thousand-dollar missiles into the air. This produced substantial savings on the system’s operative costs.
Still, deploying Iron Dome in the recent military conflicts with Gaza has proved very expensive. What’s worse is that the cost seems to go up with every round of fighting. And not just by a little. In 2014, the cost of operating Iron Dome reached over $225 million. In the last war in 2021, the price had inflated to $1 billion. Whatever the cause of that spike (likely the increased number and accuracy of the rockets being fired at Israel), it’s clear this trend is unsustainable in the long-term.
Even ignoring the problem of expense, the Iron Dome has technical weaknesses as well. The system, for instance, is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by swarms of simultaneously fired rockets. Despite its incredible reaction/response speed, the Iron Dome does need a modicum of time flexibility in order to operate effectively. These essential seconds are usually gained during the boost phase of an enemy rocket (while the projectile is ascending) and the terminal phase (the descent to the target), which during a typical launch are usually long enough for the Iron Dome’s AI to calibrate and fire. But by simply firing a missile at low trajectories, an opponent would be able to seriously undercut that timeframe, making it difficult, if not impossible, to intercept it.
Last but not least is the logistical component of Iron Dome’s equipment. Each interceptor missile is a heavy, roughly seven-foot-long projectile which is loaded into large batteries which then need to be hauled into position with trucks. Even in an ideal world where cost is not an issue, the task of delivering and replenishing Iron Dome batteries is not easy and would likely not be able to keep pace in a scenario of large barrages.
Iron Beam has addressed – if not completely overcome – all of these shortcomings.
In a press conference, Prime Minister Bennett focused on the economics of Iron Beam.
“The [current] equation doesn’t make sense; it allows [the enemy] to launch more and more Qassams and for us to shed many millions on a ‘lightning strike’ and billions during a campaign. We decided to break the equation.”
Bennett said, Israel’s enemies “will invest a lot, and we will [invest] a little. [We can now] intercept a missile or rocket with an electric pulse that costs a few dollars.”
In terms of supplying and transporting the system, Iron Beam also presents huge advantages. The platform’s “ammunition” is basically electrical power, which is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. The actual platform itself is relatively small, and at least certain versions are comprised of only five or six tripod-supported sensors along with the laser projector itself.
The ability to deploy large numbers of lasers and maneuver them according to need with rapid agility is a categorical improvement of the current missile defense model. This is why Bennett and other senior officials speak of a new “laser wall” strategy, spreading defense systems throughout the country in an effort to make aerial defense super efficient, cheap, and reliable.
The Repercussions
Any discussion of Iron Beam wouldn’t be complete without touching on some of the more important, long-term consequences of the breakthrough.
First and foremost is the application of the technology.
Alfred Noble thought his dynamite invention would be used to excavate mines and speed up construction projects. Military professionals are trained not to have that naive approach. If technology can be used for one thing, it can be used for other things as well. While Iron Beam inventors may have intended it for intercepting missiles, there is absolutely no reason why it cannot be used as an offensive weapon. The prospect of possessing an arsenal of high-powered energy weapons which are relatively cheap to manufacture and deploy is an intriguing one. There are already analysts in Israel exploring this possibility.
Second is the geopolitical benefits.
It is no secret the trend in recent years of reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbors (most notably the Emirates and the Saudis) has been spurred in no small measure by the common Iranian threat. All throughout the Persian Gulf, Iran’s enemies face serious dangers from missile attacks by both the Iranian military and its regional proxies – the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Yemen-based Houthis being the most important example. Keeping their citizens and infrastructure safe is a prime concern for these nations and, in turn, their new quasi-ally Israel. With the new capabilities provided by Iron Beam, one of Jerusalem’s priorities will be to help defend the region from Iranian missiles deployed in the Horn of Africa and throughout the Middle East.
Last and not least are the implications of Iron Beam for the development of modern warfare as we know it.
Airborne weapons are becoming more and more common and indeed
proving more and more important both tactically and strategically. The current war in Ukraine has served as a great example of this, where the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones have been wreaking havoc on Russian armor. Iran as well has ample experience with drones, many having successfully penetrated Israeli airspace from Syria. In the beginning of 2022, a report by several Israeli defense officials predicted a dramatic increase in Iran’s deployment of drones for both reconnaissance and attack missions. These relatively simple-to-operate machines are already being used by Iran’s proxies in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
Defending the skies from these newage weapons is now firmly a central focus for today’s war planners. In this way, Iron Beam will follow the pattern of the scores of IDF innovations that came before it: What began as a brilliant solution to one of Israel’s unique problems will eventually cater to national challenges around the world.
