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Comment by TheGuyWhoCodes | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's a fair comparison because a rocket hit could be much more expensive in direct and collateral damage than 50k

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Yeah, a $50k missile to save even a single unoccupied house is a missile that paid for itself. And if it saves a few human lives then it was positively cheap.

If bankrupting Israel by forcing them to expend Iron Dome interceptors is Hezbollah's plan, it obviously isn't working.

I wonder how much is going into location technology much like ShotSpotter but for rockets and mortar and all that sort of thing. They may already know the origins of fire but maybe can't fire back at that precise location or something?

Counter-battery radar that can track artillery shells or ballistic rockets back to their point of origin have been around for many years now; the Israelis surely know exactly where the rockets are being fired from. I think they (usually) avoid firing back because they know there would be civilian casualties and want to avoid some of that bad PR.

One such system operated by Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EL/M-2084

True. But they're unguided, almost none of them will cause real damage, but you have no choice but to take all of them out to prevent the losses from a lucky shot - at great expense. It's a great way to drain your enemies funds, great asymmetric warfare. Casualties are just icing on the cake.

It's also a great way to test and hone one's missile shield with live unscheduled "drills" that may not be drills.

Makes it a lot easier to get funding when requested too.

Part of Iron Dome is trajectory analysis. If the profile of a target matches that of an unguided rocket and the CEP is in some unoccupied area, no interceptors are fired. If it looks like it'll land in a populated area, interceptors are fired. It doesn't just shoot everything in the sky.

Iron Dome is selective and only fires when the trajectory will go to a built up area.

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