Israel’s new Iron Beam air defense system is a laser system with the potential to change modern warfare. It is the stuff of Star Wars brought to reality.
Since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has had to defend against a barrage of at least 27,000 ballistic missiles, rockets, and drones fired from Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Had a substantial part of this ordinance landed on their intended targets, Israel would have been effectively obliterated.
Amazingly, Israel, with its layered air defense system—Iron Dome, for short-range rockets, David’s Sling for medium-range threats, and Arrow for long-range ballistic missiles—stopped 99% of those aerial attacks. But operating these conventional air defense systems comes at great expense. According to a Grok estimate, Israel has expended billions of dollars on air defense systems and munitions through September 2025.
That’s all going to change now that Israel has deployed its new air defense system, Iron Beam. Its radar acquires a target as far as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) distant. The 100-kilowatt laser fires at the speed of light. It maintains its lock on the target for the four seconds during which the laser heats the target, destroying it. It then moves on to the next target. And it does all of this at stunning cost-effectiveness.
To put aerial warfare in perspective, the cost of a single US B-2 Spirit Bomber is $2.1 billion. The cost of a single Iranian Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile is $3 million. And while drones are much cheaper than aircraft or missiles, they are not de minimis. A single Iranian Shahed-136 drone costs $375,000.
In comparison, the Iron Beam system costs $90 million per unit. However, once the system is in place, the operating costs are virtually non-existent. Each “shot” costs about $2.50 in electricity, which is roughly the cost of five 5.56mm bullets for an M16, and the only limitations to an infinite number of shots are the energy supply and keeping the weapon cooled. Concerns of ordinance and ammunition supply disappear.
As Mike Watson recently wrote at the Washington Free Beacon:
Iron Beam can destroy incoming rockets, mortars, drones, and manned aircraft, and it has already proved its worth in the campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran. . . . In 5 to 10 years, Rafael chairman Yuval Steinitz predicts, “nothing hostile will fly in the air—no aircraft, no drones, no cruise missiles, no shells, no bombs—because the laser will completely clear the air of anything detected, anything seen.”
Aerial warfare—including planes, drones, missiles, and rockets—has been with us since World War I. It has continuously grown in tactical and strategic importance to the point that it now dominates the battlefield where there is insufficient or ineffective air defense. In the Ukraine-Russia war, drones account for 70–80% of all battlefield casualties on both sides, inflicting more casualties than all other weapons combined, including tanks, field artillery, and small arms.
That reality will soon change in locations where Iron Beam is deployed. So it is that in Israel, its air defenses have repelled not just rockets and missiles, but completely neutered Iran and Houthi attempts at drone warfare as well—and Iron Beam has been battle tested in that defense.
Outside of Israel, the Iron Beam system will be adapted to protect everything from fixed targets to ships and aircraft carriers. This would be of particular concern for an increasingly aggressive and bellicose China, which has designed an entire class of “assassin’s mace” rockets and missiles to target and destroy US seapower in the Pacific.
Iron Beam marks a major technological breakthrough. Simply put, as a defensive weapon, it is and will be a game-changer. Moreover, soon, and in ways most of us can’t imagine, smart people will adapt this technology for offensive weapons. The world of today is much closer to the weaponry of Star Wars than we have ever been.
