Israel is on track to deploy one of the first combat-ready laser air-defense systems, according to reports.
“We have demonstrated the first production-line system. It was very successful,” Rafael Advanced Defense Systems CEO Yoav Tourgeman told Fox News. “We are delivering the system to the Air Force, which will use it operationally.”
The system, called the Iron Beam, is capable of combating rockets, drones, and mortars with light.
“The interception cost is just a few dollars,” Turgeman said. “There’s no interceptor debris, so the collateral damage is much smaller. It enables us to reduce the cost of interception and enhance the performance of our system.”
National Defense reports that the system is a 100-kilowatt high-energy laser weapon.
Turgeman told the outlet that artificial intelligence will be implemented into the system over time, which will allow soldiers to “decide where to intercept and how to intercept the target to minimize the collateral damage.”
“The whole philosophy behind the air defense in Israel is a layered air defense,” he explained, noting that Israel’s Iron Dome Tamir missile interceptors are “one of the layers, and the Iron Beam is one of the layers.”
The United States is seeking to build a missile defense system known as the Golden Dome.
Thad Beckert, Golden Dome C2 director at Lockheed Martin, said the dome’s development is a challenge “unlike anything attempted at this scale or on this timeline, and we’re moving fast to bring together connected C2 capabilities that work now.” Beckert described the prototyping approach as a “novel method” intended to offer the government the “ability to experiment and exercise with technologies that weren’t originally built to work together and make them operate cohesively.”
