The most interesting number in this story is not 11. It is 75% — the probing that stopped happening. A weapon's usual résumé is a list of things destroyed. Here, the claimed achievement is largely an absence: threats turned away before they became a count of any kind. That inverts the way we usually picture power, which we tend to measure by visible impact.
The verse draws a similar inversion. Its climax is not the soaring or the running — it is the walking and not fainting, the unglamorous long haul. And its strength is not seized; it is found by those who trust. Power that endures, in the prophet's picture, is power received and spent on faithfulness, not on proving a point. A laser that succeeds by turning threats aside offers an earthly echo of that order: strength whose best work is prevention.
The tension deserves honesty. The 75% figure is the military's own attribution, not an independently verified cause, and the verse promises no border security and endorses no weapon. It does not guarantee that deterrence holds. What it does offer is a different measure of strength — one we can apply closer to home. Most of us will never command a laser, but all of us hold some form of strength: in our families, our workplaces, our conflicts. The question worth sitting with today is whether ours is spent proving we can win, or quietly turning harm away before it lands.