Iran Attack Might Not be the Dud You Think It Is

“One Arrow missile used to intercept an Iranian ballistic missile costs $3.5 million, while the cost of one David Sling missile is $1 million, in addition to the sorties of aircraft that participated in intercepting the Iranian drones,” he said.

“I am only talking about interception to what the Iranians launched and not injuries that were marginal this time.”

Yehoshua Kalisky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies think tank in Tel Aviv, told The Wall Street Journal that the costs “were enormous” and comparable to what Israel had spent during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

It is not known how much Iran spent on its attacks, though ballistic missiles in the country can cost up to $99,937 (₤80,000), The Guardian said.

From Harratz

Five ballistic missiles hit the southern Nevatim Air Base, the official said, damaging a C-130 transport plane, an unused runway and empty warehouses.

From Wikipedia

 It is one of the largest in Israel and has three runways of different lengths. Stealth fighter jets, transport aircraft, tanker aircraft and machines for electronic reconnaissance/surveillance, as well as the so-called Israeli Air Force One, are stationed there.

From Harratz

Four additional ballistic missiles struck the Negev Air Base, but no significant damage was reported, he added.

From The Intercept

The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”