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

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"

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.

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

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).

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

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...

Life is not fair.

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.

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

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

'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'

>. 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

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

After??

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.

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.

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

Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?

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.

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.

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

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?"

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.

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.

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."

Statistical rockets?

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

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

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

Depends on how tightly they can focus the beam.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I think we're talking the second.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

Evidence?

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

what about mirrors with tiny little windshield wipers?

Clouds of mirror dust.

2009 Egyptian steel wall

> 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

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.

> coat the real drones in an aerogel

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

Shooting down missiles is what this is for.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The best public arguments I have read:

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

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

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