[HN Gopher] Missile defense is NP-complete
___________________________________________________________________
Missile defense is NP-complete
Author : O3marchnative
Score : 230 points
Date : 2026-03-24 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smu160.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (smu160.github.io)
| dboreham wrote:
| It's been known since the 1960s that effective anti ballistic
| missile defense is impossible.
| trollbridge wrote:
| A lot of things involving rockets and putting things in space
| have changed since the 1960s.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Have they, really?
|
| * Small rockets can now land themselves.
|
| Anything else?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Computer guidance? Better materials? Better telemetry?
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| Still short amount of time to make a decision based on
| very messy data
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Observability has changed in most other ways we have
| regressed.
| XorNot wrote:
| That's true. And while I disagree with the parent comment,
| ICBM interception remains enormously problematic and likely
| will remain so until directed energy weapons get _really_
| cheap.
|
| Fundamentally the rocket equation and orbital dynamics really
| fight you on this.
|
| It's a lot less "can't be done" versus "would be financially
| untenable to build and maintain even when the objective is
| nuclear defense".
| cpgxiii wrote:
| There are several different levels of ballistic missiles.
|
| ICBMs, for which the GBI is intended, are the most challenging
| to defend against and show the least interceptor success.
|
| In contrast, we do have some pretty definitive evidence that
| theater and "lower" MRBM/IRMB ballistic missiles can be
| intercepted successfully. If you define "effective defense" as
| "most missiles that would cause damage are intercepted", then
| it is clearly possible with current technology. If you define
| "effective defense" as "all missiles are intercepted", then it
| remains beyond the current technology.
| hedora wrote:
| If you define "effective" in terms of cost ratios: R = (cost
| of defense system + cost from failed intercepts) / (cost of
| attack system)
|
| then N < 100 is well beyond current technology, regardless of
| whether the defense system is perfect or non-existent.
|
| There's no magic Pareto-optimal point where investing the
| right amount in missile defense means that starting a war
| against a medium-sized country makes economic sense. Russia
| figured this out in Ukraine, and the US figured it out in
| Iran.
|
| Israel's genocide worked pretty well tactically, but is a
| long-term strategic disaster. If the US continues to be a
| democracy, polls say that it will cause us to withdraw
| support sometime this decade. Also, it only works if you have
| an incredibly asymmetric fight.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Oh, I thought this was going to be about the old trackball arcade
| game. Or perhaps it is? Same sort of rules? The maths is going so
| far over my head I can't hear the whoosh.
| gs17 wrote:
| I expected that too, but it's about the inspiration for the
| game, I guess. I was trying to figure out how you encode
| computation in the game.
| delichon wrote:
| Add multiple decoys and the missile math tends to become an
| argument for the importance of preemption. Han shot first for a
| good reason.
| busterarm wrote:
| Careful. Preemption takes many forms, some of them many would
| find unpalatable.
| gos9 wrote:
| Unpalatable preemption is generally better than reentry
| vehicles coming down your chimney.
| phkahler wrote:
| The problem there is you can't prove anything would have
| come down the chimney if the preemption is successful, so
| people will still be unhappy.
| busterarm wrote:
| I agree, but some of them are more obvious.
|
| Like not giving 100 billion dollars to someone who
| actively wants to kill you.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A thought experiment: would the world be a better place if
| the US had preemptively attacked the USSR in the 50s or
| early 60s when it was possible to do without more than
| "get[ting] our hair mussed" as General Turgidson put it?
| XorNot wrote:
| But it's also the basic l basis of deterrence and the
| destabilizing nature of ICBM defense: relying on interceptors
| presumes the war happens.
| heyitsmedotjayb wrote:
| Preemption is a propaganda lie.
| hedora wrote:
| If you haven't, watch House of Dynamite.
|
| Sadly, the Trump Administration concluded we should build
| exactly the defense capabilities described in the film.
|
| They even cited it by name as a good roadmap for the Golden
| Dome, so I know they read the title. I guess their reading
| comprehension levels are extremely low.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The game theory of it is the prisoner's dilemma.
|
| Preemtive betrayal is a terrible strategy if there are more
| than two parties in the game, and they are allowed to
| cooperate.
|
| You have to be one heck of a smooth conversationalist to
| convince them to take a number and patiently wait in line to be
| the ones to be attacked next.
|
| If you're the guy that the others in the room know shoots
| first, you're also the guy the others in the room will shoot
| when he's reaching for something in his jacket pocket.
| delichon wrote:
| The prisoner's dilemma leads to mutual defection as the
| dominant equilibrium strategy in the one-shot version.
| Cooperation emerges as the equilibrium on repetition. The Han
| Solo gunfight is literally the one-shot version. When
| countries go to war that calculation is more complicated.
| jmyeet wrote:
| If you haven't, I'm going to recommend you to listen to an
| episode of Dan Carlin's _Hardcore History_ , specifically _The
| Destroyer of Worlds_ [1].
|
| Why? Because it goes into the change in strategic thinking
| brought on by the atomic age (and, soon thereafter, the
| thermonuclear age). And there was an element of US strategic
| thinking that argued for a preemptive strike against the USSR.
|
| The episode also goes into the arguments for and against the
| development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon that could never
| really be used and arguably not even necessary when we already
| had the atomic bomb.
|
| The outcome of those debates shaped American foreign policy
| from 1945 to the present day.
|
| [1]:https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-
| destroyer-...
| delichon wrote:
| With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of
| when. If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not
| today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one
| o'clock? -- John von Neumann, ~1950
|
| On the one hand he was one of the smartest people in history.
| On the other, his home country had recently been conquered by
| the Red Army so he may have been a little biased.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Decoys are greatly over-rated in ballistic missile systems.
| Sensors are so good at discriminating decoys from warheads that
| decoys are largely ineffective and have been for decades. This
| has borne out in Ukraine.
|
| A decoy sufficiently sophisticated to look real to good sensors
| will have weight and characteristics that approach that of a
| real warhead, at which point you might as well add another
| warhead. Decoys only make sense if the marginal cost of adding
| them is low.
| heyitsmedotjayb wrote:
| Would be interesting to know how the probabilities change once
| all your X band radars are destroyed. And then again how they
| change when all your L band radars are destroyed...
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > And then again how they change when all your L band radars
| are destroyed...
|
| Connection reset by Yugoslavs with microwave ovens
| jsw97 wrote:
| The author explains that this problem is actually adversarial, in
| the sense that the attacker gets to observe defenses and allocate
| warheads and decoys accordingly.
|
| Thinking of our current circumstances, this suggests another cost
| of war: our offensive capabilities, as well as our defensive
| capabilities become more observable. Our adversaries are studying
| our strengths and weaknesses in Iran, and they will have a much
| improved game plan for countering us in future conflicts.
| vasco wrote:
| If we really want to put a certain hat on we can also say those
| adversaries have an incentive to not prevent (or even
| incentivize) those wars for that same reason. Even if that's by
| helping along a guy that is easy to manipulate through a
| childlike ego become president.
| testaccount28 wrote:
| there is a benefit as well, though, as it makes your threats
| credible.
| SegfaultSeagull wrote:
| Or perhaps they will learn they are outmatched, lack the
| resources and technological capabilities to compete, and
| deterrence will have been established.
| biker142541 wrote:
| History would suggest otherwise; rarely is this ever the
| case.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You seem to be implying that there is a long history of
| countries starting wars against the USA?
| gzread wrote:
| More like the USA starting wars against countries, and
| those countries not immediately surrendering, to which
| the USA is shocked.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I think that there's a more general issue here with the
| US and the West in general having a mindset built up on
| playing Risk and Civ, which considers the foreign country
| as a whole as their opponent, whereas in practice, the
| adversaries are a multitude of individuals, for almost
| none of whom a surrender is the rational choice,
| especially (as sibling comments pointed out) when part of
| their reasoning and authority is based on a divine
| mandate.
| testaccount28 wrote:
| to be clear: your claim is that the us military is
| misinformed because key constituents have played too many
| board games?
|
| does hearing it back like that make it seem absurd to you
| as well?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, yes (except that Civ isn't a board game). And no,
| it doesn't make it seem absurd to me.
|
| My argument is that Western strategic thought (with games
| being a codification thereof, rather than the source of)
| generally considers countries as mostly atomic actors
| that can be defeated - the history of European warfare
| being filled with "gentlemanly" surrenders followed up by
| peace treaties, with guerrilla warfare being a very rare
| exception.
|
| On the other side, the reality in the East is that a
| state's collapse doesn't end the conflict, but just
| prolongs it. The army doesn't surrender, it goes home
| with its weapons and reconstitutes as insurgents. I can't
| actually think of a single proper surrender of an Eastern
| country ever, except for Japan in 1945.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Well, yes (except that Civ isn't a board game).
|
| It is actually several physical board games, the oldest
| of which is older than (and unrelated to) the computer
| game [0], as well as being a series of computer games
| that are basically digital board games.
|
| [0] Well, except for the computer game based on it and
| its expansion, which, because of the _other_ computer
| game, had the long-winded title "Avalon Hill's Advanced
| Civilization".
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Finland comes to mind.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > when part of their reasoning and authority is based on
| a divine mandate
|
| If you are atheist is becomes rational to surrender to
| the people that are invading your house and killing your
| friends at random?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| History doesn't necessarily make it clear when a war might
| have started but didn't because of some specific factor.
| Mainly you see the wars that did happen. (It has a strong
| survivorship bias in the sense that a war "survived"
| history if it went ahead for real rather than being
| considered and decided against.)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Iran has always known that the US is a higher tech nation,
| but you should not just expect them to surrender on that
| basis.
| deburo wrote:
| That's not what deterrence means. From google: the action
| of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt
| or fear of the consequences.
|
| It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and
| Taiwan.
| swat535 wrote:
| Iranian here, you're assuming sanity.
|
| That doesn't work when your opponents pray for death and
| see martyrdom as victory.
|
| This is genuinely how Shia extremists think. They have
| nothing to lose and will sacrifice everything and
| everyone for their cause. They don't care about Iran or
| Iranians or prosperity of the nation.
| varispeed wrote:
| You miss the fact that many adversaries will not act
| rationally.
| baxtr wrote:
| Especially when they're optimizing for afterlife.
| breppp wrote:
| The fact that many Iranian officials optimize stealing
| millions from the state, means they aren't optimizing for
| the afterlife
| keybored wrote:
| This thread is talking about how the adversaries will
| attack America based on the current events that Iran is
| counter-attacking Israel and American bases since Israel
| and America invaded them illegally.
|
| Lots of smugness about the supposed irrationality of the
| adversaries considering that backdrop.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Yes, if it was acting rationally the US Would not have
| spent billions trying to blow up an 80 year old man while
| massively increasing the price of oil and fertiliser
| globally leading to economic instability
|
| But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since
| January 2021.
| varispeed wrote:
| There could be a rational explanation if you assume US
| administration is compromised by Russia and Ayatollah's
| son wanted him out to assume power. One phone call to
| Putin, Putin's one phone call to Krasnov and everyone is
| happy. Son gets the power, Russia gets sanctions lifted,
| higher oil price, US and allies spend kit that cannot be
| now sold to Ukraine, Krasnov gets to play the stock
| market. Win-win-win.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Very few countries lack the technological capabilities to
| produce these kinds of drones.
|
| What most countries don't have is, for lack of a better term,
| the resolve Iran has shown. Venezuela could have built drones
| and resisted just the same, but it's internally divided
| enough that it was possible to strike a deal with an inside
| faction and have a coup from within.
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| The Iranians just hit an F35 with a proverbial box of scraps
| they put together in a cave. The Chinese military must have
| experienced collective euphoria when they saw that.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying
| low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an
| aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own
| eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown
| that way.
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| To be clear, Trump announced that the US had destroyed
| Iran's air defenses, missiles and missile launch
| capabilities. Trump also said that the US enjoyed air
| supremacy over Iran and were flying when and where they
| wished.
|
| Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with
| JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to
| try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth
| fighters can't fly over.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohttYlvFvU
| breppp wrote:
| B-52s takeoff with stand-in weapons when attacking Iran,
| as their air defense is largely destroyed
|
| https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/23/b-52s-launching-
| from-r...
| iso1631 wrote:
| You're holding it wrong?
|
| How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of
| one F35. 100k? A million?
| breppp wrote:
| None of these reached Israel from Iran this war, so maybe
| their superior quantity is not enough
| don_esteban wrote:
| Iran does not have a million of them, the numbers they
| have are better utilized on targets in Gulf states.
|
| If Iran launched 10000 Shaheds towards Isreal, you can be
| sure quite a few would get by.
|
| Maybe Ukrainian drone interceptors can be made cheap
| enough to be good enough against massed Shaheds.
|
| We are still early in the new paradigm, there will be
| significant developments.
| pjc50 wrote:
| In a direct conflict with China, the ICBM exchange would
| destroy the F35s on the ground.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| China doesn't seem to think so. China believes they need
| to fight those F35s in the air.
|
| Why would the opening salvo be ICBMs?
| don_esteban wrote:
| To deny the US the use of any nearby airfields (Okinawa,
| several others in Japan an Philippines). This will limit
| US airpower to carriers, which are few and sinkable.
|
| Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in
| the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them
| (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on)
| - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
|
| Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be
| peppered very early in the conflict.
| don_esteban wrote:
| There is a huge difference between 'deterrence' in the sense
| of deterring a country from taking aggressive action it might
| have otherwise considered, and 'deterrence' in the sense you
| are using here (surrender without fight, we are so much
| stronger than you).
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| That seems like an acceptable trade off to get some real world
| experience with what works and what doesn't with regards to
| massed drones and swarming. There is a lot we can learn in this
| conflict with relatively low stakes
| lejalv wrote:
| Stakes for whom?
|
| >100 kids got murdered the first day of this "low stakes" war
| keybored wrote:
| "Iranian kids may die... but that's a prize I'm willing to
| pay."
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| "I much prefer nuclear conflict"
| keybored wrote:
| Propose a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, propose a
| global nuclear free zone, propose to cooperate with other
| nuclear powers to disarm.
|
| But that's apparently not the real concern at all.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| The USA
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| How many protesters were killed leading up to it?
| keybored wrote:
| How does bombing a school help protesters?
| teleforce wrote:
| Imagine the NATO reaction if on the very first day of
| Russo-Ukrainian war offensive is by Russia performing
| missiles bombing murdering 100 kids studying in Ukraine
| primary school.
|
| Trump candid reaction to the Iranian school incident when
| asked by reporter was "I can live with that".
| pjc50 wrote:
| There were significant civilian casualties right from the
| start of the war in Ukraine, and several massacred
| villages.
|
| Russian air defense shot down a civilian airliner mostly
| full of Dutch nationals and the response was just
| condemnation and tweaking the sanctions a bit.
| varjag wrote:
| We don't need to imagine. Hundreds of kids sheltered in
| Mariupol theater building were killed in one attack in
| the first weeks of the war.
| myrmidon wrote:
| This is absolutely true, but there is a strong counterpoint:
| You also learn the limits of your _own_ systems and how to
| operate them most effectively _yourself_ (and better than
| adversaries can, too).
|
| Just to pick a recent example: Russian air defense in the early
| stages of the Ukraine war was _dismal_ (more specifically:
| defense against big, slow drones like Bayraktar), despite
| having sufficient AA capability "on paper"-- the war allowed
| them to _visibly_ improve.
|
| I'd expect much more value from validating and improving your
| equipment and its handling than the actual "cost" of revealing
| its capabilities to adversaries in almost every conflict.
| neutronicus wrote:
| "Data moats" are a problem for military tech, too, I guess.
| btown wrote:
| One very interesting instance of the "military data moat"
| is Ukraine's annotated database of drone footage, perhaps
| the first of its scale from live engagements [0]:
|
| > They can now draw on an enormous pool of real warfare
| information. Last year alone, Ukrainian drones recorded
| around 820,000 verified strikes against Russian targets...
| Meanwhile, the country's Avengers AI platform detects
| upwards of 12,000 enemy targets every week. Developers can
| now access these sources and the data that they gather to
| train their systems on the movements of a real Russian
| turtle tank or a camouflaged Lancet launcher.
|
| > "Ukraine currently possesses a unique body of battlefield
| data unmatched anywhere in the world," recently appointed
| Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a statement.
| "This includes millions of annotated frames collected
| during tens of thousands of combat drone missions."
|
| With the latency and offline constraints of battlefield
| technology, smaller models, trained with better data, may
| prove to have a significant edge. But it's still early days
| on how data like this might prove advantageous in other
| environments.
|
| [0] https://resiliencemedia.co/how-ukraine-is-transforming-
| its-b... (unconfirmed source, this is not an endorsement)
| dlisboa wrote:
| There is an assumption here that the value in improving
| defenses is the same as improving offensive weapons. That is
| not the case in the assymetry that drones provide and Russia
| is the first example.
|
| Russia has not been able to improve AA capabilities to the
| point where it's "safe", for any definition of the word,
| neither has Israel. Israel and Gulf states often tout over
| 90% interception rate yet it's really at the mercy of Iran to
| not target their most vulnerable sites. If Iran was routinely
| targeting desalination plants and refineries it wouldn't
| matter if it was 99%: one hit is all it takes. Similarly
| Russia cannot keep Ukraine from targeting their oil
| infrastructure.
|
| Air defenses need to be 100% to prevent physical, economic
| and moral damage. That is an impossibility.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Air defenses do not need to be 100% effective to be...
| effective.
|
| Russia cannot keep Ukraine from targeting their oil
| infrastructure, yet here Russia is, still fighting on.
| Ukraine cannot prevent Russia from targeting their energy
| infrastructure or apartment buildings, yet here they are,
| still fighting on.
|
| If we're talking about strategic/civil air defense, then
| you must figure out what's tolerable to your population
| (and how to increase and maintain that tolerance), and then
| figure out all the means to reduce the incoming attacks to
| below that tolerance. That must include the full spectrum
| of offensive, counter offensive, defensive, and
| informational options.
| energy123 wrote:
| In the Ukraine-Russia war, air defense is used to deny
| air superiority to the enemy. Just a few days ago,
| Ukraine blew up Russia's helicopters in the air with
| drones. It's not the successful hits that matter, it's
| the capabilities that you deny by posing that credible
| threat.
| bojan wrote:
| The difference being, Ukraine has no choice but to fight
| on.
| breppp wrote:
| > interception rate yet it's really at the mercy of Iran to
| not target their most vulnerable sites
|
| And what this site and you don't account for, is Iranian
| rather low missile accuracy.
|
| If Israel was at the mercy of Iranian attacks, Iran could
| have simply struck Israeli airbases to the point they
| cannot be used, and then stop any Israeli attacks on its
| territory.
|
| It's pretty obvious they don't have the capabilities of
| doing that
| dlisboa wrote:
| You're making the same argument I am. If Iran had a small
| increase in accuracy they could hit targets that'd
| disable a lot of Israel military and civilian
| infrastructure. A lot of stuff is getting through. To
| counter that Israel has to achieve a perfect interception
| record. The balance is throughly on the side of offensive
| drone/missile warfare.
| breppp wrote:
| I don't think we are arguing the same thing. I am arguing
| that even without any air defense, Iran would have
| difficulty hitting its targets in Israel with ballistic
| missiles due to low accuracy. When adding interception
| rates they have a real problem in attacking strategic
| facilities, air bases is a good example, which would be
| much more important than desalination plants.
|
| You can then see that they shifted to completely
| attacking large cities, usually with cluster bomblets.
| The reason is when you are bombing a large area, aim is
| less of an issue, similar to WW2 carpet bombing
|
| Your post alludes to drones, these do not reach Israel
| (from Iran) at all and are all intercepted
| cheney_2004 wrote:
| Iran has successfully targeted countless bases around the
| Middle East, a lot of this news simply isn't being
| covered. Most of these strikes are on static assets like
| radar, depots, and other structures. If you are thinking
| about the F35s, strikes that hit runways are repaired in
| a matter of hours. As for the F35s themselves, they are
| constantly on the move or simply kept in the air. Service
| and storage is done on remote bases outside of the target
| zone. This has been standard practice since military
| aircraft has been introduced.
| breppp wrote:
| That's certainly what Iranian propaganda is saying, as if
| everybody is censoring their great successes. Fact is
| there is no meaningful reduction in Israeli attacks,
| while Iranian launching ability had greatly suffered. So
| these air bases are probably not being hit. Apart from it
| in the era of OSINT satellite imagery, it is no issue to
| publicize such damage, I don't know of any such imagery
|
| Regarding the gulf, there the Iranians are having better
| success as at those ranges intercepting drones is harder
| and due to the general military ineffectiveness of the
| gulf nations
| anonymous_user9 wrote:
| > Apart from it in the era of OSINT satellite imagery, it
| is no issue to publicize such damage, I don't know of any
| such imagery
|
| Not sure about other providers, but Planet Labs has
| applied a 14-day delay to satellite images of the middle
| east.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/satellite...
| tmnvix wrote:
| I haven't seen imagery of damage to Israeli airbases, but
| plenty of imagery showing damage to US military bases.
| e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0cIOMVBSbU . Worth
| keeping in mind that in the case of Israel, censorship is
| very effective.
|
| From the Iranian perspective, the overall strategy seems
| to have been:
|
| 1. Deplete intercepter stock and probe US/Israeli
| defences using large amounts of older less accurate
| missile stock and waves of drones.
|
| 2. Target radar and early warning systems.
|
| 3. After 'blinding', make further use of more vulnerable
| but cheaper and more accurate drones to target specific
| infrastructure.
|
| Given this approach it makes total sense to see their
| 'rate of fire' reduced by 90%. This is not necessarily an
| indication of reduced ability to launch attacks - their
| attacks are now more effective. They have demonstrated
| that each time the US and Israel escalate they
| successfully respond almost immediately. Talk of their
| capabilities being wiped out is demonstrably nonsense.
|
| Ted Postol makes much the same points. He also claims to
| be surprised by the accuracy of recent missiles launched
| by Iran and assumes that his earlier analysis
| underestimated this because it was done based on the
| older stock Iran was using.
|
| It seems pretty clear to me that Israel and the US are on
| the back foot here. Defences are inadequate. Economic
| pressure is building. Iran still has plenty of options to
| increase pressure (e.g. Houthi involvement, further
| infrastructure targeting, additional constrictions on the
| strait of Hormuz). By comparison US ability to increase
| pressure now seems limited to threatening major war
| crimes (wiping out Iran's power grid and putting the
| country into blackout). Not to say many of Iran's actions
| haven't also been war crimes.
|
| How much more damage can Iran accept? Nobody is about to
| be voted out of power there so I would think quite a bit
| (as unpleasant as that is for the millions of innocent
| people caught up in this madness). I think the truth of
| all of this is that the US and Israel have no way to wipe
| out Iran's missile and drone capabilities. Postol even
| suggests nukes wouldn't even accomplish that. So now
| what? Taco or push further for Iranian political unrest
| or division.
|
| My feeling is that this is going to get a lot worse for
| everyone involved.
| lumost wrote:
| I don't see how drones don't make all conflicts into WW1.
| 100 Billion dollars buys about 3.3 million Shaheds assuming
| the manufacturing is not made more efficient. There are
| many questions on whether its possible to spend 100 billion
| dollars on Shaheds, or launch all of them. But this is more
| than enough to destroy any logistics and transportation
| infrastructure necessary for a ground invasion.
|
| There are many many countries who can afford 100 billion
| dollars for stored military equipment that has a long shelf
| life. The US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost
| of about 10k per shell.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of
| about 10k per shell.
|
| 50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I
| suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense
| budget.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Now imagine for the same $10k cost making a cruise
| missile, instead. This is close to what a Shahed is --
| the estimate is $20k-$50k / unit, so close enough.
|
| This is bonkers. Countries can now afford for the same
| cost * to make not a 10-20 mile range artillery shell,
| but a 1500 mile effective range cruise missile.
|
| * Defense costs are "fake" to a large degree. A lot of
| that is really corruption with money flowing from the
| taxpayers to the arms manufacturers, but still if we go
| by the numbers...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| They are fake in the sense individual items are listed as
| having costs that are not accurate.
|
| But really the defense deals are very complicated, and
| not based around buying x number of items.
|
| You're making a not well-formed query. How much is a
| shell?
|
| Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands
| of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic
| here, but multipled by a thousand.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands
| of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic
| here, but multipled by a thousand.
|
| The shells are already made by the 10 and 100s of
| thousands, Shaheds are also not a research project, so
| either one is in amortized serial production now.
|
| What I meant is that a $10k shell doesn't cost that much.
| Russians are making the equivalent artillery shells for
| an _order_ of magnitude less for around $1k. A lot of
| defense costs are just overinflated simply because they
| can be. The government is spending taxpayer money, it's
| not really coming from the politicians' pockets. If the
| kickbacks are just right, they may in fact flow back into
| the politicians pockets.
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| From my extremely uneducated point of view it seems like
| that is true and probably what is already happening in
| Ukraine. However, at some point robots might be able to
| take and hold ground, and maybe they can be designed to
| require only decentralized, automated infrastructure to
| operate that is hard to strike economically even with
| drones. At that point, may the side with the most robots
| win.
| energy123 wrote:
| Practise is good, but exhaustion is bad. Russia is getting
| exhausted, which is why their influence collapsed in Syria,
| Azerbaijan and Armenia, allowing the US to overtake those
| vacuums.
|
| The US in WW2 staged their 20th century by letting others
| (China, South East Asia and the British/Soviets) get
| exhausted first. This was more an accident of geography
| rather than US grand strategy, but it worked all the same.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Except this looks likely to exhaust the US/Israel alliance,
| if it continues long, leaving China in the "US in/after
| WWII" spot in the analogy.
| elfly wrote:
| USA won't injure or kill 1 in 25 of young adults in the
| Iran war, unless somehow Iran does have a nuke and wants
| to use it, come on.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Raw manpower is hardly the only aspect of war.
|
| Especially in _modern_ war.
|
| Running out of fancy equipment, for example, causes quite
| a few problems if your opponent hasn't. Like interceptor
| missiles.
| jopsen wrote:
| Currently conflict is a really good sales pitch for
| buying more interceptors.
|
| You could expect order books to get so thick that
| production increases.
|
| I mean looking from the side lines, I could see why many
| countries might want to have a few interceptors on hand.
| Just in case, it's certainly a nice way to buy some time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite possibly would end up killing or injuring that many
| Iranians, though.
|
| Gaza is up to 10% of the population killed or injured in
| the Oct 7 reprisals:
| https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/HumanTollGaza
| roysting wrote:
| There is no amount of math that can make up for the lopsided
| dynamic of hypersonic missiles. The only reason the
| "iron/gold dome" con job was even plausible to plunder
| trillions in U.S. Monopoly money was because missiles were
| crude, slow, and not MIRVed or had decoys at one time. That
| was a long time ago though.
|
| MIT Prof. Emeritus, Theodore Postol, has been trying to warn
| about this basic, mathematically proved fraud for many years
| now. However between the indifference because the party was
| still in high swing and the plundering was making people rich
| who could pay professional lobbyists/liars, very few people
| were paying attention or really cared, even though it's clear
| fraud and just a false confidence; as is the objective of a
| con job, which comes from "confidence trick".
|
| There are several lectures he gives and more recent
| appearances on various YouTube channels where he clearly
| describes the inherent fraud in "missile defense".
|
| Here's the synopsis; it's like trying to prevent sand from
| hitting you once someone has thrown a fist full of dry sand
| at you.
|
| It's basically just the end game in a long history of
| American snake oil salesmen turned missile defense salesmen.
| You get useless junk, they run off with your wealth.
| srean wrote:
| I agree that a barrage of maneuvering missiles can be neigh
| impossible to defend against.
|
| Regarding these cluster munitions though, other than very
| densely populated areas, do they inflict much damage ? Are
| they more powerful than a grenade, say ?
|
| It's going to devastating to soft tissue surely, and pierce
| through ordinary sheet metal, but normal concrete walls
| might offer sufficient protection. Unless, of course, it
| punches through the ceiling by virtue of sheer kinetic
| energy.
|
| BTW I have no expertise in these matters, so corrections
| would be very welcome. I also recognize that I am
| commenting about something from the comfort and of being
| out of range and this discussion can be very distressing.
| reillyse wrote:
| Instead of a cluster of grenades think many drones, the
| numbers start looking pretty bad when you have 100s of
| drones rather than a couple of missiles.
| m000 wrote:
| > Regarding these cluster munitions though, other than
| very densely populated areas, do they inflict much damage
| ? Are they more powerful than a grenade, say ?
|
| Also not an expert, but I get the feeling that "cluster
| munitions" is pretty much an umbrella term.
|
| Because of the CCM [1], we tend to associate the term
| with the "ligther" variants, which are used as anti-
| personnel weapons. These variants probably wouldn't be
| much more destructive than a few grenades.
|
| But what Iran is currently using, appears to be missiles
| with 500-1000kg payload. This puts each submunition in
| the 50-100kg range. This should deliver a lot more of a
| punch than a grenade. Also, because of their weight, they
| probably wouldn't be covered by CCM, had Iran ratified
| it.
|
| And, yes, it is unsettling geeking out on this stuff,
| that may actually be killing people as we write our
| comment.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_M
| unition...
| maxglute wrote:
| >much more value from validating and improving your equipment
| and its handling than the actual "cost" of revealing its
| capabilities to adversaries in almost every conflict.
|
| The value of carrying a big stick is lost when others see the
| stick breaks after a few swings. There's value in maintaining
| military kayfabe - revealing hand in sideshows and losing
| deterrence for main events as result can be much costlier
| down the line. What was learned that wasn't already known and
| deliberately avoided in polite conversation?
| jsw97 wrote:
| Definitely, you have to weigh the benefit of experience
| against the cost of revelation. (And all the other costs of
| course.)
| don_esteban wrote:
| The defense against Bayraktar at the beginning (the big
| column to the north of Kiev) was dismal because AA assets
| were turned off, not because they were unable to shoot
| Bayraktars.
|
| The problem was command and coordination.
|
| Darwin worked and Russians learned (as did Ukrainians).
|
| Regarding your last point: In peace time, you want to
| prioritize hiding your true capabilities (perhaps inflating
| them in (misleading direction) to deter them from attacking).
| Once the ware breaks out, you want to improve your
| capabilities as fast as possible.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'd expect much more value from validating and improving
| your equipment and its handling than the actual "cost" of
| revealing its capabilities to adversaries in almost every
| conflict.
|
| That depends on how far out of touch your reputation was with
| the facts. If you're not able to live up to your preexisting
| reputation, being tested is all downside even if it improves
| your actual capabilities.
| p00dles wrote:
| who is our/us?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Veterancy is more valuable. Observers can tell only a certain
| amount about what you can do, but you know your limits much
| more deeply and you can adapt. In fact, it's much better we get
| our nose bloodied repeatedly now1 so that we learn how fallible
| we are and make sure our processes involve aircraft carriers
| not being put out of commission during wars because of dryer
| lint fires.
|
| 1 in a military sense; in a geopolitical sense obviously it's
| clear that Iran has been a misadventure
| DivingForGold wrote:
| Did I miss this ? Missing from the discussion is that Iran's
| cluster munitions in each single missle have absolutely
| overwhelmed Israels defense and would likely do the same to US
| military as well. Also to consider, Iran's $20,000 drones
| versus our $1 million dollar interceptors.
| wavefunction wrote:
| You could counter multipayload missiles by hitting the
| missile earlier in its trajectory before the payloads deploy,
| that was the plan for MIRV nukes but it requires usually
| forward interceptors or perhaps energy weapons we don't yet
| have.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Hitting Ballistic missiles "Midcourse" as you suggest
| requires interceptors that look more like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor or
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_3
|
| It is.... Entirely infeasible to deploy these against
| tactical ballistics like Iran is using.
| don_esteban wrote:
| Hm, Iran destroyed several of the radars used for seeing
| their missiles in the early stages of their trajectory.
| maratc wrote:
| Cluster munitions are great against infantry in open field;
| less so against population centres equipped with advance
| warning systems. As it stands, they fail to even cause the
| damage worth offsetting by firing interceptors. The damage
| these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable, and they don't
| do much to create deterrence.
|
| Given a choice of conventional 500-800 kg warhead or cluster
| munitions warhead, I think that the nations in the current
| conflict would prefer being on the receiving end of cluster
| munitions (as a less bad option) every time.
| mamonster wrote:
| >The damage these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable,
| and they don't do much to create deterrence.
|
| Has there been a study on this? What is the GDP loss of
| having however many Israelis go to bunkers due to incoming
| ballistics instead of working ?
|
| If a trash cluster missile that costs 100k USD to build
| causes 1mio USD worth of GDP to not be produced (numbers
| completely made up) then it's very worth it.
| maratc wrote:
| No idea about studies or GDP; just observing that the
| losses inflicted by Iran on Israel in June 2025 did
| nothing to deter Israel from going on offence again eight
| months later.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Ballistic missiles do not cost only 100k USD to build.
| They are very unlikely to ever be that cheap. Rocketry
| requires enough precision to not explode on the launcher.
| Ballistic missiles with conventional munitions are only
| useful for point targets. Cluster munitions like Iran
| uses are an admission that they aren't targeting specific
| systems, aren't expecting to penetrate defenses, or other
| reasons why they would waste a ballistic missile on the
| modern equivalent of the Paris Gun.
|
| Harassment weapons don't do much. None of the harassment
| campaigns done by the Nazis for example really amounted
| to anything.
|
| Modern Shaheds can be possibly built at a scale to affect
| that, but we really haven't seen it happen yet. That
| would be something like _thousands_ launched in a single
| wave against a single city or installation. But they
| still lack the precision and warhead to be targeted
| meaningfully.
|
| You need WW2 industrial scale manufacturing lines worth
| of Shaheds to get beyond harassment. You need to be
| producing hundreds a day or more. That kind of industry
| is nearly impossible to protect from your adversary so
| unlikely to take shape.
| don_esteban wrote:
| Depends, blanketing Ben Gurion (or any airbase) with parked
| aircraft on the tarmac with carpet munition is a really bad
| day.
|
| But yes, against protected targets cluster munitions do not
| achieve much.
|
| If you have relatively few low-precision missiles, using
| single warheads means you are risking achieving NO damage
| (easier to intercept, a good chance that it will hit
| nothing), with a cluster munition you are guaranteeing at
| least some damage.
|
| I think Iranians are mixing both types of warheads.
| varjag wrote:
| Russia regularly uses cluster warheads on their ballistic
| missiles to a devastating effect. It all depends on the
| type of the target.
| baxtr wrote:
| While this is true it's also impossible to avoid.
|
| So you could also argue that this war will help the US to gain
| experience it didn't have before which might be favorable in
| future conflicts with parties that didn't have this experience.
| jmyeet wrote:
| In strategic circles, this was a common thought in the 12 day
| war: Iran was essentially mapping and testing defenses.
|
| As evidence of this, the US was forced to hastily move THAAD
| ground station radar from South Korea because Iran destroyed a
| bunch of them in the Gulf [1][2]. Bear in mind there aren't
| many of these and they cost _half a billion dollars each_.
|
| Further evidence of this is how quickly it happened. Iran most
| likely had detailed contingencies and battle plans for this
| kind of event.
|
| As an aside, this is what militaries do. They plan for things.
| So whenever you see some conspiracy about how government X
| reacted to situation Y quickly and thus had foreknowledge, you
| can ignore it. Military planners are paid to make up fictional
| situations and figure out how to respond. That's what they do.
|
| Weapons are the ultimate export. You use them and blow them up
| and the customer has to come back and buy more.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/redeployment-u...
|
| [2]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-
| mis...
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > Iran destroyed a bunch of them
|
| If by "a bunch" you mean one.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| It doesn't have to be, defender reveals everything and attacker
| chooses best strategy.
|
| 1. The defender could use both electronic and physical decoys,
| use air and sea mobile platforms that are always in motion and
| are difficult to track.
|
| 2. The defender can fire at decoys, to convince the attacker
| the decoys work when they don't.
|
| 3. The defender could mix in cheap decoy interceptor missiles
| that miss so the attacker concludes defenders need 10 missiles
| to intercept when the real number if 3 and the attacker thinks
| the defenders are running low on interceptors, when in fact the
| defenders have held most of their interceptors in reserve.
|
| 4. Defender can pretend that expensive systems have been
| destroyed so that attacker adapts their strategy. For instance,
| if your defense hinges on a small number of extremely expensive
| fixed X-band radars and the attacker targets them. Allow some
| of them to be appear to be destroyed when in fact, you have
| disassembled them and moved them somewhere else to use later in
| the war.
|
| I see no evidence anyone is doing any of this today, I'm not
| making any sort of claims about deception operations in the
| current conflict.
| simonsarris wrote:
| On the other hand, the best way to improve your capabilities is
| to use them frequently.
|
| The Russian army assumed a state of readiness for the Ukraine
| invasion that turned out to be, well, less. Their special
| forces floundered, their logistics were (are still!?)
| unpalletized - using bespoke metal containers and wooden
| crates! Whereas the US military learned an awful lot from its
| (mis)adventures over the last decades.
| standardUser wrote:
| Take China for an example. No one knows China's true military
| capabilities, because they're rapidly evolving and because they
| virtually never use them. If there's an element of surprise to
| be had, they have it. But that cut's both ways, because China
| itself doesn't have experience exercising those capabilities.
| The learning curve could be noticeable. Meanwhile, no one
| doubts the ability of the US military to execute.
| u_sama wrote:
| Great nerd title, the maths made me nostalgic as I haven't seen a
| Sigma/Pi in a few years
| owenmarshall wrote:
| Two more sobering axes to introduce: cost and manufacturing
| capability.
|
| Numbers are hard to find for obvious security reasons, but using
| the numbers most optimistic to the defender[0] suggests an
| adversary using a Fatah type hypersonic is spending 1/3rd the
| cost of an Arrow interceptor, and is launching missiles that are
| produced at a much faster rate. Interception is deeply asymmetric
| in favor of the attacker.
|
| [0] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-
| news/article-82314...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Ah yes, but then you also have to add GDP + targetting/defense
| radii.
|
| Great Britian alone has 10x the GDP of Iran. So an interceptor
| costing 10:1 is (at first approx) breakeven just for GB, who
| would have to intercept much less than the total manufacturing
| capability of Iran anyway.
|
| Then you have every rich nation surrounding Iran as well. Let
| alone the USA who cannot be reached but throws their weight
| behind interceptions.
|
| And finally "total manufacturing capability" is set to decline
| in any prolonged engagement with an Iran-like nation, but GB,
| western EU, USA, et al, are likely to only increase production
| if an engagement played out.
|
| The math looks catastrophic on paper at 10:1, but I sincerely
| doubt that's the right analysis. An interceptor is worth what
| you're protecting, not what the attacking asset costs, so long
| as you can keep producing them.
| Thaxll wrote:
| This is wrong, for example Iran have thousands of Shahed
| drones, they cost almost nothing to build, to intercept just
| one the ratio is way way higher that 1:10. A single patriot
| missile is in the multi millions $ range.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| No, what I said is not wrong just because there exists
| other things to intercept, that just changes the ratio.
|
| You still have to consider whether it's worth it to spend a
| patriot missile to intercept a drone, vs letting the drone
| hit, say, a billion dollar radar installation or a dozen
| troops.
|
| On the manufacturing side, nobody said that all drones are
| intercepted with patriots. You have to look at the avg cost
| to intercept vs the average cost to attack, and if the
| ratio of those avg costs (across all attack/interceptions)
| is, say 100:1, and the combined GDP of the defending
| nations vs Iran is 1000:1, then what is the problem?
|
| There are lower cost ways to intercept already on the
| market and being rolled out. See for example:
| https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/09/11/uk-
| to-p...
|
| This whole "cost analysis of patriot vs drone" examines the
| worst case scenario at a fixed point in time and ignores
| layered defenses, the effect of combined GDP, learning,
| diminishing capabilities of attackers, and improvements by
| defenders.
| lejalv wrote:
| But your analysis should also include what fraction of
| GDP diverted to arms (or what increase in gas price) is
| acceptable on either side.
| wat10000 wrote:
| For one thing, the entire world economy is not even close
| to 1000x Iran's.
| hedora wrote:
| $1M / $30 (patriot cost / drone cost) is only 33x. The US
| economy is about 31x larger than Iran's. So, to first
| order approximation, we could build enough patriots to
| sustainably stop their drones.
|
| However, we haven't converted our economy to just
| producing Patriots. We can only produce 600 / year. Drone
| production rates are orders of magnitude higher than
| that.
|
| As for second order effects, the interception
| probabilities are less than one, so in this world where
| we're producing a million patriots per year, tens of
| thousands of drones (at minimum) are hitting their
| targets. On top of that, the offensive drones are more
| easily transported + retargeted, so the patriots would
| need to be stationed pretty much everywhere, and their
| adversary chooses where the attacks actually happen.
|
| The only winning move is not to play.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| They aren't using Patriots on Shahed drones. There are much
| cheaper purpose-built systems for that. While not practical
| everywhere, helicopter gun systems have proven effective in
| both the Middle East and Ukraine.
|
| APKWS is quite popular and those cost less than the drones.
| A single fighter jet can carry 40. The Europeans are
| developing equivalent systems.
|
| While not widely deployed yet, the US has operational
| laser-based anti-drone systems that have been shooting down
| Shahed class drone for a couple years now.
|
| Ballistic missiles are more costly to deal with but
| ballistic missiles also cost much more.
| orwin wrote:
| > total manufacturing capability" is set to decline in any
| prolonged engagement with an Iran-like nation
|
| That was what Russia thought about Ukraine. Effectively, they
| needed East European tanks and munitions for the first two
| years, but munitions production ramped up, and now they
| produce more per year that what they received over two years.
| A resource-rich country like the Iran that is effectively
| fight a death war (that's the controlling party belief) can
| keep up a very long time. The fact that the US tried to get
| the Kurds and the Baloch/Sistanni involved show that they are
| well aware that the way out is through a permanent civil war
| and the country fracturation. And imho, while Kurds accepting
| to be betrayed by the US for the third time in less than two
| decade won't have any real long term impact, an independent
| Baluchistan can easily destabilise Pakistan. Also, that would
| be a third country in the area in which the Hanafi
| jurisprudence is pushing hard towards Deobandi/Salafi, and
| personally I'd rather have any Shi'a school than that.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| > And imho, while Kurds accepting to be betrayed by the US
| for the third time in less than two decade won't have any
| real long term impact, an independent Baluchistan can
| easily destabilise Pakistan.
|
| Not to confuse my prediction from prescription, but what
| prevents all the neighboring (direct or indirect over a
| sea) nation states from deciding to divide Iran like
| Germany was during the cold war? Thats not an independent
| Balochistan, at some point they will want reparations for
| all the damage, terrorism and intimidation they have
| incurred from Iran...
|
| At some point the people in Iran will have to be forced to
| teach their innocent children the equivalent of the
| Nuremberg trials: there is no excuse in order to stop
| thinking, just following orders is not a valid legal
| defense.
|
| Every population has the moral responsibility to keep the
| local aspiring autocrats in check, because if they don't
| and external power deconstructs the regime, the onus will
| be on the population!
| orwin wrote:
| Saddam was paid (in chemical weapons, but not only) by
| the US to invade Iran, it didn't work well for them at
| the time, despite the MEK helping them with hidden routes
| and a lot of local support they don't have anymore. The
| current Iraki leadership isn't stable enough to do the
| same anyway.
|
| Afghanistan and Pakistan are in a small war that will
| have some impact on Baluchistan, but official Pakistani
| ground troops are a no-no, because it will leave ground
| for the Taliban. Also India invested a lot in Baluchistan
| biggest port, and Pakistan threatening their investments
| will probably have them react (India love nothing more
| than helping Pakistan adversaries). Koweit is too small,
| Irak Kurds need to secure their autonomous region, and US
| promised are worth basically nothing. Azerbaijan used
| Iranian drones and artillery against Armenia like 2 years
| ago (maybe 3), and Iran apologised publicly after sending
| a missile to them.
|
| All of this to say: only the US have the manpower and
| will for a ground invasion.
| maxglute wrote:
| Probably scale, a few million jews, arabs - qataris and
| emirates and saudi royalty is unlikely enough to
| deconstruct Iran, unlike Germany vs multiple comparably
| or larger sized regional peers.
|
| Iran is 100m large country + 100s millions more shia core
| / axis of resistance supressed by small regional satraps
| empowered by outside forces. There are simply 10x more
| Muslims in region suppressed for decades under same
| framework where arc of history would would look kindly on
| Iran+co for destroying US influence and the greater
| Israeli project and look poorly upon satraps and
| compradors for failing their spiritual and moral duty of
| reclaiming the levant. The Nuremburg trials will be
| reserved for those who failed Islam for secular glitz and
| kindly on those who protected the faith. Iran simply has
| the size and spiritual/historic/civilization mandate to
| win the regional narrative and "moral" war versus gulf
| monarchs that choose to coexist with Israel. Gulf
| monarchs who are btw also definitionally autocrats whose
| contract to bribe populous with petro state proceeds goes
| away if this war drags on, of all autocrats they are the
| most likely to fall and least likely to normalize against
| autocrat regime change. This not to say Iran is
| "correct/moral" just they have scale and discourse
| legitimacy Germany didn't.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are too many potential attackers though, and not everyone
| is sane. So you don't really get a choice about it. The cost of
| the interceptors needs to be considered in relation to the cost
| of what it protects. If the interceptor means an attacker
| doesn't kill my kids then it was worth the cost. If the
| interceptor keeps a multi-million dollar building around then
| interceptor at a million dollars is still cheap, even if the
| missile it takes out was only $100.
|
| Yes you should use diplomacy to ensure war doesn't happen in
| the first place. However if it does: they will send cheap
| drones and missiles at you in large quantifies.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If the interceptor keeps a multi-million dollar building
| around then interceptor at a million dollars is still cheap,
| even if the missile it takes out was only $100.
|
| Not if it means you can't intercept the next one hitting much
| a more valuable/critical building.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a trade off that hopefully you never need to
| consider, but it is a valid concern that does come up in
| the real world.
| hedora wrote:
| It's not a hypothetical:
|
| Trump started blaming Biden for the US's interceptor
| shortage _two days_ into the war. Third-party military
| analysts say there 's a high probability Iran's drone
| stockpile will outlast the US's first-tier interceptor
| stockpile.
|
| The first-order math checks out: At the beginning of the
| war, we (and allies) were using 800 x $1M patriot
| missiles per day. The global production capacity for
| patriots is 600 per year, so there's no way we've have
| been able to maintain that cadence now that we're in week
| 4 of the war (the patriot program has not existed for
| enough decades). Now we see things like successful
| strikes on Israel's nuclear complex.
|
| If the math isn't good enough, note that Trump backed
| down over the weekend, after Iran reiterated that they'd
| target civilian infrastructure if the US did so first. If
| we still had adequate interceptor capabilities, calling
| his bluff would not have worked.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Unfortunately, necessity doesn't imply possibility. It could
| simultaneously be true that you must build interceptors to
| protect yourself, and that you can't build enough.
|
| It only makes sense to consider the cost of what's protected
| if it's actually protected. If your million-dollar
| interceptor protects a multi-million-dollar building from a
| $100 missile, and then that building is hit by a second $100
| missile, was it worth it?
|
| That's the math that has prevented missile defenses from
| being deployed on a large scale despite being technologically
| possible for well over half a century now, and despite the
| fact that a single interceptor might be saving an entire city
| from a nuclear warhead.
|
| An interceptor costs at least as much as what it intercepts.
| Take into account miss rates and the cost of defense is a
| multiple of the cost of offense. Add in the fact that the
| attacker can concentrate an attack but the defender has to
| defend everywhere, and multiple warheads on a single missile,
| and the cost of defense multiplies further.
|
| If defense costs 10x more than offense (a conservative
| estimate, I'd say) then that means you need to dedicate 10x
| of your economic capacity to it than your attacker does. If
| your attacker dedicates more than 10% of what you can put
| into defense, you lose. Defense can work, but it needs to be
| against a far weaker enemy. Thats why the most prominent
| example is Israel defending against neighboring non-state
| actors. Israel is wealthy enough, and the groups shooting at
| them are poor enough, that the math works out in the
| defender's favor. Iran is a rather different story. And of
| course defending the US against the likes of Russia and China
| is a fever dream.
| pc86 wrote:
| > If your million-dollar interceptor protects a multi-
| million-dollar building from a $100 missile, and then that
| building is hit by a second $100 missile, was it worth it?
|
| I mean the assumption is that if the first missile hit the
| building, the second missile would have been fired at
| something else, right? Still seems worth it at face value
| especially if there's enough time between the two missiles
| that there aren't people in the building anymore.
| wat10000 wrote:
| My assumption would be that the attacker builds missiles
| based on the defenses they want to defeat. If you have no
| defenses, maybe the defender builds 1,000 missiles. If
| you have 1,000 interceptors with 100% accuracy, then
| maybe the defender builds 2,000 missiles.
|
| This is why the superpowers mostly scrapped their ICBM
| defenses in the 70s. The technology worked fine. It's
| totally doable with 1970s technology if you're willing to
| put nuclear warheads on the interceptors. But for every
| ICBM interceptor you built, the other side could build
| another ICBM for the same cost or less. And you need more
| than one interceptor per ICBM since they can fail and the
| each interceptor only covers a small area. Add in
| multiple warheads on a single missile and decoys and
| suddenly you might need 10x or more. So the USA gave up
| on the idea of covering the entire country with
| interceptors, deployed a few interceptors to protect some
| missile silos, then shut it down after less than a year.
| The USSR built out a system to protect Moscow and only
| Moscow, which is still operational today. However, the
| British were able to maintain the ability to defeat that
| system and destroy Moscow with a single submarine, all on
| their own, never mind what the USA would throw at it.
|
| If you have a certain amount of stuff you can build and
| you're deciding what to do with that capacity, it's not
| at all clear that missile interceptors are a good use of
| that capacity even if you're protecting objects that cost
| orders of magnitude more than the interceptors cost. It
| works if you're defending against a far less capable
| adversary (Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas, USA's GBI
| system against North Korea) but not with an enemy that's
| even vaguely close to being a peer.
| maratc wrote:
| That's a false comparison. You want to compare between the
| actual options you have, which are either (a) firing an
| interceptor (or several); or (b) repairing the damage caused by
| a non-intercepted missile.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| Your first option comes with the major caveat that each
| interceptor you fire comes from a limited stockpile whose
| replacement rate[0] today isn't sufficient for even going
| 1:1, let alone accepting that multiple interceptors are
| required.
|
| I'd say the real options in the near term when faced with an
| inbound missile is a) deciding to deplete your stockpile of
| interceptors with an incredibly limited replenishment rate;
| or b) risking a hit to a lower-value target.
|
| Could the US go to a war economy footing and scale
| production? _Maybe_? I'm not entirely convinced the US can
| stomach the costs.
|
| [0]: again, numbers are hard to find, but
| https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-
| us/news/features/2026/Lock... gives a flavor of just what
| defenders are up against.
| maratc wrote:
| In theory; in practice however, there's been rocket fire
| from Gaza towards Israel where the offence was literally a
| metallic tube with a bit of TNT at a cost of about $800 per
| rocket [0] while the defence was $100,000+ per interceptor
| [1]. This has been going on _for years_ , and as far as I'm
| aware there was no depletion observed.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't know the economic numbers off the top of my head
| but I have to imagine it's hard to find Israelis who
| think they're spending too much money on rocket
| interceptors.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's far more complicated than that. The choice is often
| between firing an interceptor against this missile aimed at
| this target, or firing that interceptor against the next
| missile aimed at a target you can't yet know. Because unless
| your production capacity far outstrips theirs, you're going
| to run out first.
| maratc wrote:
| Not if you (a) destroy their production capacity while they
| don't destroy yours; (b) you destroy their stockpiles while
| they don't destroy yours; and (c) you've found a bottleneck
| on their side (launchers) and destroy it while they fail to
| inflict the same damage on you.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's true, but feels very much like "draw the rest of
| the owl." And even if you can do it, you'd have to do it
| against any country that starts to build this capacity
| that you think might somebody potentially use it against
| you, even if they aren't currently, unless you're
| confident that you can destroy their launchers and
| stockpiles so quickly that they can't be used in any
| significant number. (And if the USA couldn't manage to do
| that to Iran....)
| pc86 wrote:
| Yes, it's complicated. There's almost 1,000 generals and
| officers spread across the US military. They (and the
| tens of thousands of people directly supporting them)
| spend a lot of time on these things.
|
| Sometimes "draw the rest of the owl" makes sense when
| you've got 20,000 people actively drawing owls all day
| every day.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that there are
| a lot of experts doing expert things who know better
| about these things than some idiot sitting at his
| computer i.e. me.
|
| But in this particular case, we're in the middle of a war
| where the owl didn't get drawn and the enemy has
| successfully launched thousands of drones and missiles at
| our forces and our allies, causing enough damage to
| severely disrupt the world economy.
| keybored wrote:
| Sobering how asymmetric Iran's attacks on Israel are after
| Israel attacked Iran.
| jonaslanglotz wrote:
| Calling a Fattah hypersonic is a misleading claim. It is simply
| a ballistic missile that reaches hypersonic speeds, which is
| different from a true hypersonic weapon in its flight path and
| ability to maneuver. This distinction is important because it
| makes it significantly easier to shoot down than something like
| a hypersonic glide vehicle or hypersonic cruise missile.
|
| But I agree with your point that it does remain difficult to
| intercept and poses the shot-exchange problem.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Depends on the school. https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDe
| fense/comments/1at8gj4...
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| There's videos from Israel showing Iranian missiles
| performing AD evading maneuvers that western media was saying
| was impossible a few months ago.
| hedora wrote:
| Currently, we're using $1M interceptors to take out $30K
| drones. This asymmetry is here to stay.
|
| The end game probably involves < $1000 autonomous drones that
| target IR or RF and drop something like hand grenades. On the
| defense side, there would similarly-priced interceptors with
| bolas, backed up with sharp-shooters for important targets.
|
| At that point, it turns into a logistics problem that's much
| easier for the attacker than the defender. Iran's already
| demonstrated that one successful drone can do $100B-1T in
| damages, so a hit rate of 0.1% means a 1:100K cost:damage
| ratio.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| This leans towards my belief that the US is fundamentally
| fighting last century's war against adversaries that have
| _massively_ evolved.
|
| Look at the Ukranians: they are currently fielding an entire
| suite of counter-drone tech: fast pursuit systems to hit
| Russian drones on launch, cheap FPV drones for last-mile
| intercept, integrated radar/acoustic monitoring to target and
| respond to launches... and of course, the Russians are
| responding with IR floodlights and air to air launchers on
| their drones, or even just launching a bunch of cheap foam
| decoy Gerbera's in the middle of their Shahed's to soak up
| intercepts. Meanwhile, the front lines are basically static
| -- any infantry from either side that tries to go into the
| kill box gets picked off by loitering drones.
|
| And the best the US can field today is "$1mm per Patriot" or
| "cover a tiny area with Land Phalanx (which also costs
| something like $4k/second burst)".
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This betrays your ignorance of drone defense tech.
|
| The US had APKWS (anti-drone guided missiles) operational
| in the 2010s and these have been widely deployed. They are
| effective and cost less than a Shahed. These are just mods
| of an existing dirt-cheap rocket for which the US has an
| effectively unlimited supply. The Europeans have similar
| systems under development.
|
| The US has deployed high-power anti-drone laser systems for
| a few years now with several operational kills. These are
| still new but are expected to replace CIWS. It can kill a
| drone for the cost of a Starbucks coffee and has a
| virtually unlimited magazine.
|
| US pioneered military drones and defenses decades before
| the Ukraine/Russia war. There are many operational lessons
| to be learned from that war but both sides are using drone
| defense tech that is considerably less sophisticated than
| what the US has available.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| > The US had APKWS (anti-drone guided missiles)
| operational in the 2010s and these have been widely
| deployed
|
| ... on 4th/5th gen fighters that cost tens of thousands
| per flight hour[0] based on current evidence of
| deployment. We're still killing mosquitoes with hand
| grenades.
|
| Iron Beam/the US systems are certainly interesting, but
| haven't been scaled up to meaningful deployments yet.
|
| Meanwhile, those "considerably less sophisticated"
| systems were fielded in exercises by the Ukranians
| against NATO doctrine and won handily[1].
|
| [0] https://www.defenseone.com/defense-
| systems/2026/03/fighter-j...
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/nato-has-seen-the-future-
| and-is-...
| pc86 wrote:
| What Iranian drone did a trillion dollars in damages?
|
| I'm not saying the general thrust of your argument is wrong,
| quite the opposite. But that's a big number for one drone.
| dlisboa wrote:
| A trillion seems large but it's not that absurd. The drone
| that shut down 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity is said to have
| caused 20 billion USD worth of annual lost revenue. They
| said it'll take up to 5 years to rebuild so that could be
| 100 billion USD in lost revenue, plus whatever it costs to
| do the rebuild.
|
| A trillion dollars worth of damage seems possible if spread
| over some years for some countries in the Gulf where
| shutting down a desalination plant would cause
| depopulation.
| maratc wrote:
| > that could be 100 billion USD in lost revenue
|
| that could be 100 billion USD in _deferred_ revenue, if
| we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it
| 's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and
| sold later
|
| > plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild
|
| That is the real cost, which I would assume is nowhere
| near billions
| dlisboa wrote:
| > that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if
| we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever
| it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted
| and sold later
|
| That's not how revenue works at all.
| maratc wrote:
| I don't think anyone should have _any concern whatsoever_
| regarding Qatar revenues vs. Qatar budgets, as they are
| nowhere near bankruptcy, with this setback or without.
| Their position by projected GDP per capita may decrease
| from 6th (currently) to maybe 10th place in the world,
| which is still better than about 180 other countries.
| logicchains wrote:
| >The drone that shut down 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity is
| said to have caused 20 billion USD worth of annual lost
| revenue.
|
| That was a missile not a drone.
| energy123 wrote:
| The best missile defense is offsense: degrading the launchers,
| stockpiles and defense industrial base, with cheap stand-in
| munitions after SEAD, leveraging air and intelligence
| superiority. Expensive interceptors are only a stop-gap that
| buys you time for the offensive degradation. Expensive stand-
| off munitions, likewise, are a short-term stopgap until SEAD is
| complete.
| hedora wrote:
| Offense doesn't work at scale.
|
| As the cost of drones goes to zero, the expected damage you
| take is roughly proportional to how much you have to lose.
| This means larger / richer economies cannot win these sorts
| of wars. To see what I mean, check out this desalination
| plant map:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/23/iran-threat-
| to...
|
| It doesn't help if your commander in chief is incompetent and
| your invasion strategy involves treating desalination plants
| as legitimate military targets.
|
| Of course, blowing up desalination plants in the middle east
| don't hurt the US all that much, but blowing up industrial
| supply chains does. We're something like 4 days away from a
| global chip manufacturing industry shut down (barring some
| logistic miracle, since we recently sold off our strategic
| helium reserves).
| energy123 wrote:
| It's heavily dependent on geography. Iran is geographically
| "lucky" it's positioned near the Strait of Hormuz and near
| the oil facilities of multiple Gulf states, allowing it to
| exert extreme asymmetric pressure through a small amount of
| drones etc. Most states can't replicate that luck. Good
| luck to South Africa if they ever decide to wage a similar
| war. Strategic depth also largely nullifies the role of
| one-way attack drones in combat, but it doesn't nullify the
| role of fighters and bombers who can exploit that range.
| I'm not discounting drones, they're highly important in
| many geographies, as Ukraine is showing, but I don't buy
| into this conventional wisdom online that they're the
| pinnacle in every situation.
| iso1631 wrote:
| It's America that's waging this war, having attacked Iran
| for no reason the world can see
|
| It's somewhat similar to Russia waging a war in Ukraine,
| although I can see some reasons for Russia to attack
| Ukraine (mainly territory)
| pc86 wrote:
| If "I want this land" is a legitimate reason to initiate
| a war then basically anything is a legitimate reason.
| elfly wrote:
| Ah yes, Russia, the famously territory starved country.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Israel is similiarly lucky that it is surrounded by
| neighbors with US bases that can intercept missiles and
| drones before they get to it. All of its more competent
| enemies are very far away. In a different scenario
| there'd be no motivation for a country like Iraq or
| Jordan to help.
|
| They can afford to try to destroy Iran's offensive
| capabilities because in-between countries allow their
| airspace to be used.
|
| Wars are usually between neighbors. If a neighbor has a
| huge stockpile of drones they can launch a first salvo
| that'll overwhelm whatever defensive capabilities the
| other country has before they even get to the point of
| destroying launchers/manufacturing.
|
| Threats of massive drones strikes are the closest
| deterrent a country can get to nuclear weapons without
| developing nuclear weapons. If Iran had 5 million drones
| instead of 50 thousand this war wouldn't even be
| happening.
| hedora wrote:
| Russia is already shipping containers full of Iranian
| drones to the Ukrainian front. It doesn't take much
| imagination to see how geographic location is going to
| matter less and less as technology improves.
| srean wrote:
| Game theory would be useful for these kinds of modeling.
|
| Perhaps the government should have and advisory body that employs
| the smartest mathematicians for running these scenarios. Of
| course a lot of randomness needs to be modeled too. Wonder what
| would be a good name for such a body :)
|
| Paradoxically, if anyone leaks unpalatable information from the
| inside that would be a problem for the government.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation
| quotemstr wrote:
| The sole mention of directed energy:
|
| > Directed energy has been proposed as a cost-effective
| alternative, but introduces its own scheduling constraints --
| dwell time, platform coverage, atmospheric degradation -- with
| similar scaling issues
|
| The author is doing the thing where a writer tries to bamboozle
| the reader into a conclusion without having to prove it by
| overwhelming the reader with nouns. Life is too short for shitty
| gosh gallops.
| myrmidon wrote:
| You are basically complaining that the article is not about a
| your preferred, different topic.
|
| Directed energy defense does not really compete with a system
| like GMD _at all_ , because the range is extremely limited by
| comparison.
|
| The US might be able to justify throwing a few billion at a few
| dozens of ICBM interceptors stationed in a handful of sites,
| but protecting every potential target (city, military base)
| with some kind of laser array is obviously unrealistic.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| Gotta say, did not know direct energy weapons were actually
| leaving science fiction and entering the real world yet, but
| it seems they're. It's obviously not star trek level, but
| it's way more advanced than I expected
| hedora wrote:
| They are, but only have a range of 1.2 miles in earth's
| atmosphere. Since they're on the ground, and presumably
| near the target (not the launcher), that means they're
| aimed at the warhead just before it hits the ground.
|
| I looked up the numbers, and, interestingly, ICBMs have to
| slow down before they hit their target. In the midrange
| flight, they travel at 15,000 mph, but at re-entry the
| warheads are only traveling at 1900 mph, or 0.58 miles per
| second.
|
| So, in the best case (the warhead is headed to the laser),
| the laser only gets 2.5 seconds of dwell time to intercept
| it. This rapidly decreases as the distance from the laser
| to the target increases (to 0 seconds of dwell time at 1.2
| miles). Also, if the ICBM fires multiple warheads, or
| chaff, then you'd need to scale up the number of lasers or
| scale down the dwell time linearly, assuming they're all
| conveniently aimed within a small fraction of a mile of the
| laser (again, I'm assuming best-case).
|
| Current direct energy weapons have only been demoed against
| UAVs, probably for this reason.
|
| edit: my math is completely wrong: Modern nukes are
| optimally detonated at about 5000 ft above ground level.
| So, you get about 0.33 seconds of dwell time, assuming the
| attacker doesn't just set the warhead to detonate at a non-
| optimal (but still devastating) 1.2 mile altitude.
|
| https://remm.hhs.gov/zones_nucleardetonation.htm
| OrangePilled wrote:
| Bearing in mind the three constraints quoted, which of these do
| you think a country's _deployed_ directed-energy weapons (e.g.,
| US, Israel, Russia) would be useful against:
|
| https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/iran/
| hedora wrote:
| You don't really have to guess. None of those countries are
| using directed energy weapons, and they're all repeatedly
| getting hit by Iranian technology (so they have an incentive
| to test whatever they have).
| OrangePilled wrote:
| > None of those countries are using directed energy weapons
|
| The USS Preble is equipped with HELIOS and is in Iran. [0]
| The US has also used "dazzlers" there too (as mentioned in
| the linked X thread). [1]
|
| Israel's Iron Beam was used against Hezbollah's drones
| (Iranian tech), with apparently limited return for it, this
| could explain why it won't be seeing action in Iran. [3][4]
|
| The only alleged case of Russia using DEWs was in August
| 2025. [5] Admittedly, it was a reach for me to even name
| them.
|
| As cost-effective (and cool-sounding) as DEWs are meant to
| be, there's a reason the US and Gulf states are beckoning
| Ukraine for help. At the same time, the Pentagon want's to
| ramp up development with 3 years and the US military at
| large seems to be bullish on lasers...[6]
|
| [0]: https://xcancel.com/sebastienroblin/status/20361510681
| 621877...
|
| [1]: https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/navy-
| news/2026/u-s-navy...
|
| [3]: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-889677
|
| [4]: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-889701
|
| [5]: https://t.me/milinfolive/154597?single/
|
| [6]: https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2026/03
| /18/th...
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| could use some investigation of the ukranians techniques -- the
| number of interceptors the U.S. used within the first four days
| of the war eclipsed the total amount Ukranians have had for the
| war
| OrangePilled wrote:
| " _Lessons US and Gulf could learn from Ukraine's air defence
| warriors_ "
|
| https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/us...
|
| " _Ukraine's low-cost Shahed killers draw US and Gulf interest,
| but a wartime ban blocks sales_ "
|
| https://apnews.com/article/iran-ukraine-shahed-russia-drone-...
|
| " _Ukraine Helps U.S. Bases in the Mideast With Stopping
| Drones_ "
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/world/middleeast/ukraine-...
|
| " _Ukraine deploys units to five Middle East countries to
| intercept drones_ "
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-deploys-units-i...
| Maken wrote:
| What the USA learned from Ukraine is that the Shaheds are
| amazing and they want them too [1], apparently.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-
| cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac...
| energy123 wrote:
| What is the steady state? Assume you have two competent
| superpowers, both researching missile offense and defense, over
| the next 1000 years. What are the asymptotics of the interception
| rate from 0 to 1000?
| bob1029 wrote:
| The steady state would look like a sinusoidal signal. This is
| more of a cycle than a hill climbing thing.
| energy123 wrote:
| Are you sure there isn't a structural advantage to either
| offense or defense that will reveal itself with more
| iterations, and we won't converge to either 0% or 100%?
| adampunk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...
|
| That's the steady state. Interceptors are expensive; missiles
| are (relatively) cheap. There's no sine wave or cat and mouse
| game. If you're trying to defend against a peer, missile
| defense loses.
| energy123 wrote:
| I'm talking about interception probability, not the relative
| cost. I get that interceptors will probably be more expensive
| indefinitely (unless we start putting lasers into orbit to
| get around atmosphere, or something unexpected like that).
| adampunk wrote:
| Well there the cost plays a part! It's not independent. If
| I can build 1000 missiles for every 1 interceptor, the
| probability of interception hardly matters.
|
| This actually was why we planned to put lasers in space:
| the economics of one nuclear-pumped laser reflected through
| Unobtanium were better than any other interceptor. And even
| that if the effect worked (it didn't, they could not prove
| lasing and fired an engineer who blew the whistle on that),
| the system could be defeated by a staggered salvo.
| hedora wrote:
| OK, assume infinite resources, but the attacker only has
| one missile, and the defender only has one interceptor.
|
| Optimal strategy for the attacker: Figure out how fast the
| interceptor can reach your missile, and have it split into
| a dozen warheads on different trajectories a mile before
| that. Include the blast radius of the interceptor in the
| calculation in case the defender decides to set of high-
| altitude nukes to defend itself against your missile.
|
| The non-proliferation treaties we just pulled out of banned
| multi-warhead ICBMs decades ago because there's no feasible
| counter-move. That's bad for the missile business.
|
| Back in reality, the attacker just builds 100,000
| conventional drones, and 1 identical looking one with a
| nuke in it. Eventually, the defender runs out of
| interceptors, so the intercept probability trends to 0. At
| that point, the attacker sends the nuke without varying the
| behavior of the conventional drones.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Pardon the pun but this is an arms race and the defenders are
| going to lose. There are broadly five classes of missiles (one
| isn't a missile per se):
|
| 1. Ballistic. These are traditional rockets, basically. While
| rockets are designed to reach orbit or leave the Earth, a
| ballistic missile basically goes straight up and comes down. The
| higher it goes, the further away it can get because of the
| ballistic trajectory and the rotation of the Earth.
|
| Ballistic missiles are most vulnerable in the boost phase ie when
| they're just launched. Since you have little to no warning of
| that, that's not really helpful.
|
| But one weakness of ballistic missiles is you pretty much know
| the target within a fairly narrow range as soon as they launch.
| That's the point of early-warning radar: to determine if a launch
| is a threat so defenses can be prepared.
|
| Attackers can confuse or defeat defenses in multiple ways such as
| making small course corrections on approach, splitting into
| multiple warheads, using decoys for some of these warheads,
| deploying anti-radar or anti-heat seeking defenses at key points
| and breaking into many small munitions, sometimes called cluster
| munitions on the news but traditionally that's not what a cluster
| bomb is or was. In more sophisticated launch vehicles, the
| multiple warheads can be independently targeted. These are called
| MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles).
|
| Economicallky, depending on range and capability, a ballistic
| missile might cost anywhere from $100k+ to $10M+.
|
| 2. Rockets. Militarily this is different to a rocket in a
| civilian context. It's not much different to a hobby rocket,
| actually. Often these are "dumb" but some have sensors and
| guidance capability or might be heat-seeking.
|
| These tend to be incredibly cheap to produce and not terribly
| accurate but that's not really the point. The point is they're
| cheap and easy to produce and the interceptors are much more
| expensive.
|
| 3. Cruise missiles. Rather than a ballistic trajectory, these
| have more sophisticated guidance and travel much closer to the
| ground, usually to avoid radar. The Tomahawk missile is a prime
| example of this. These tend to be relatively expensive and much
| slower than ballistic missiles.
|
| 4. Hypersonic missiles. This is a relatively new invention that's
| kind of like a cruise-ballistic hybrid. It flies in the
| atmosphere for part or all of the time and, unlike cruise
| missiles, will fly faster than the speed of sound, usually
| significantly so (eg Mach 4-10). Such high speed makes
| interception near-impossible currently.
|
| The big advantage of a hypersonic missile is that it has the
| speed of a ballistic missiles without the predictability of the
| target area. Plus it can be retargeted in-flight.
|
| 5. Drones (honorable mention). Not technically a missile but they
| fit in this space regardless. This is basically a scaled up
| commercial drone with an explosive payload. These are
| significantly slower than cruise missiles or rockets but can be
| live-targeted, re-targeted and have a variety of types ranging
| from dropping hand grenades from a height (eg as has happened in
| Ukraine) to suicide-type drones that explode on impact.
|
| Drones are typically so slow that you could shoot them down with
| an shotgun in some cases. But they're incredibly cheap and easy
| to produce.
| sgtsteaks wrote:
| You cannot shoot a drone down with a shotgun. The range on a
| shotgun is nothing.
|
| Do you know that it actually fires bb's out in a cone shape? If
| you aim a shotgun up in the air, you are not taking out any
| drones.
|
| Look up the video of the drone hitting the hotel in Bahrain to
| get an idea of the speed and altitude.
| ultimafan wrote:
| I think you and the previous comment are talking about
| different types of drones- the smaller commercial quadcopters
| used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict can be shot down with
| shotguns fairly effectively.
|
| Both sides have been seen with one member of a squad carrying
| around an issued shotgun in an anti-drone role- the fact that
| it shoots pellets in a cone is precisely why it's so
| effective. Skeet shooting is a great example of how
| relatively small fast moving targets can be hit consistently
| at range with a shotgun and they are usually using much
| smaller/lighter pellets with poorer velocity/range, I would
| assume the loads used in an anti-drone role are bigger.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Maybe the winning strategy is always attack and never be the
| one defending. That's unfortunate.
| captainswirly wrote:
| This is rocket defense, not missile defense.
|
| Pretty much nothing can stop those ICBMs - those aren't rockets.
|
| If you dig deeper than mainstream news - Iran is lighting Israel
| up with those ICBMs, but they don't use them too often.
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| Technically Iran fires SRBMs and MRBMs not ICBMs. They
| intentionally gimp their missiles to avoid advertising ICBM
| range as a way of placating Europe.
| captainswirly wrote:
| Cope harder. I saw the videos that Israel tried to ban.
|
| Whatever you want to call them, they are "hypersonic"
| traveling over 15k mph.
|
| They definitely look fast too in the videos where they smash
| into Israeli housing destroying everything in an instant.
| Maken wrote:
| ICBM means the missile is able to be launched into other
| continent (more than 5K kilometers in range), not about its
| effective warhead. Iranian missiles are fast and efficient,
| but their effective range is essentially being able to
| target Israel and the Gulf States, which means they are not
| ICBMs. Also, the one country in the Middle East who does
| have ICBM missiles and _can_ target Europe is Israel, not
| Iran.
| echoangle wrote:
| The IC in ICBM mean Intercontinental and specifies the
| range, not how impressive it looks in videos.
| vaporwario wrote:
| Not sure if it applies exactly but this discussion brings to mind
| this saying...
|
| "The loser of a knife fight dies in the street. The winner dies
| in the hospital."
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Why does a ground based interceptor cost $75M? High idiot index?
| hedora wrote:
| $1M, but we can only make 600 / year, globally.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| From the article,
|
| "Each GBI costs approximately $75 million, and as of 2024, 44
| are deployed across Alaska and California [3]."
| hedora wrote:
| I'm quoting the missile cost. I think they're quoting the
| launchers + a few missiles.
|
| (Also, lower bounding the cost improves the argument that
| they're too expensive to be practical.)
| O3marchnative wrote:
| Author here. The $75M is specifically for Ground Based
| Interceptors (GBIs). This is the U.S.'s ICBM mid-course
| interceptor. There are other interceptor types in the
| current U.S. arsenal:
|
| Patriot PAC-3 (~$4M): Nations burnt through 600-800 in
| the first few days of Operation Epic Fury. There are
| reports that they're being used for drone defense.
|
| SM-3 (~$10-30M): Ship-launched
|
| SM-6 (~$4-5M): Ship-launched
|
| THAAD (~$12-15M): Terminal phase, high altitude
|
| GBI (~$75M): intended for interception of ICBMs (reported
| as the hardest type of missile to intercept)
|
| Each type of interceptor is optimal for certain type of
| threats, which is yet another constraint on the
| optimization problem.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In what world would a specialized, niche, high precision, high
| readiness rocket meant to loft a very advanced interceptor
| munition into an extremely high velocity interception ever be
| cheap?
|
| These things are closing at like mach 20. Physics says that's
| hard to do. That means it's expensive.
|
| For reference, $75 million is in the realm of a Falcon 9
| launch, which is a very cost optimized platform that _doesn 't_
| have to place a very very precision instrument payload in a
| very very specific point in space to prepare it for a high
| energy, extremely difficult interception.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Does it being very high precision or whatever mean that it
| must cost $75M per unit? Is it made of gold?
| echoangle wrote:
| The cost primarily comes from the work needed to be done to
| make sure it works, not the raw materials. But there
| probably are some pretty expensive materials in it too.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_S
| p...
|
| This is what we had to build in the 60s to allow a missile
| to know where it physically existed precisely enough to
| allow it to 50% of the time hit within a circle of ~50
| meters.
|
| When you get to certain points in physics, certain energy
| regimes, you no longer are building machines or tools or
| something mass market. You are building artisan scientific
| instruments, and then sometimes gluing explosives to them.
|
| Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner
| table with the precision and accuracy of the above
| _singular_ component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was
| a long time ago.
|
| "Tech" and some of the developments of the past few decades
| have really confused people. The miniaturization of the
| transistor, and building billions of transistors on a small
| slice of silicon is an aberration, an anomaly. Most things
| _don 't_ get "Better and better and cheaper and cheaper"
| like that because shit just doesn't scale infinitely and in
| general materials science isn't that precise.
|
| For these ground based midcourse interceptors, they have to
| precisely loft the interceptor package at an incoming
| projectile. They have to shoot a bullet with a bullet,
| except the target bullet might even be moving around a bit,
| and your ability to precisely quantify the _exact_
| parameters of it 's position and velocity is already
| limited. Is your position and velocity measurement an inch
| off? Two inches? Is that too much?
|
| How well have you quantified the thrust of your rocket
| engine? THIS specific rocket engine, not a random one from
| the batch. Will you be off in a direction by a few meters
| per second? That might be enough to scuttle your
| interception.
|
| IIRC this is the interception payload, a kinetic kill
| vehicle:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
|
| Then, are any of those nozzles slightly less smooth than
| they should be? That's a miss. Did propellant slosh in an
| unexpected way? That's a miss, Chicago is now a smoldering
| crater. Incoming round bounce your rader signal in just a
| slightly different way than you had the data to know about?
| Miss, San Fransisco now has significantly cheaper real
| estate. Chaotic properties of hot expanding gas slightly
| different than your simulation in the unluckiest way? Miss.
|
| You have to exhaustively inspect, reinspect, quality
| control, test, simulate, retest, catalogue, document, every
| single component. You have to be able to predict, almost
| perfectly, how every single component will act and perform
| in a situation you will never get a test for.
|
| High energy physics is always going to be hard, never
| cheap, because high concentrations of energy are literally
| what the universe itself is trying to reduce. The rules of
| reality itself are against you.
|
| A creator on youtube named Alexander the Ok has done
| wonderful videos on a lot of the technology that goes into
| these systems, especially older, less classified systems.
| fisherwoman wrote:
| Those rockets are lobbed in high arcs and glow in the sky then
| slowly fall down - they are so slow they almost look like flares.
|
| Your so-called missile defense does nothing at all against a real
| missile like Iran's supersonic ICBMs which can exceed 24,000+
| km/h.
| sgtsteaks wrote:
| What are you gonna do when Iran destroys the missile defense
| system itself, oops already happened
| contravariant wrote:
| > Note that a more complete model would multiply each term by
| P(track)_j -- the common-mode detection-tracking-classification
| factor developed in the previous section -- but the standard WTA
| formulation assumes perfect tracking.
|
| I'm not sure that is a useful model, or more complete. I don't
| think you _can_ assign interceptors to undetected missiles, so
| considering their effect on the value is rather pointless. It 's
| effectively a sunk cost.
|
| Multiplying with the probability also makes no sense from an
| optimisation point of view. Why would you assign lower value to a
| target about to be hit simply because you were unlikely to detect
| the missile?
|
| The tracking probability only shows up in the meta game described
| at the end, where one side is trying to optimise their ability to
| hit valuable targets and the other is trying to optimise their
| ability to prevent that from happening.
| maxglute wrote:
| >Hence, for one warhead, a defender can launch 4 interceptors and
| have a 96% chance of successfully intercepting the incoming
| warhead. >Unfortunately, those numbers are optimistic.
|
| This part worth stressing, ceiling for more performant missiles,
| i.e. faster, terminal maneuvering, decoys are geometrically
| harder to intercept. Past mach ~10 terminal and functionally
| impossible because intercept kinematics will break interceptor
| airframes apart.
|
| AFAIK there hasn't been tests (i.e. FTM series) done on anything
| but staged/choreographed "icbm representative" targets. Iran
| arsenal charitably pretty shit, including high end. Hypothetical
| high end missile with 10%-20% single shot probability of kill
| requires 20-40 interceptors for 98% confidence, before decoys,
| i.e. 40x6=240 interceptors for 1 missile with 5 credible decoys.
|
| The math / economics breaks HARD with offensive missile
| improvements.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Lasers. No really, near-future laser systems with adaptive
| optics and good spotting - for example distributed SAR
| satellites - dramatically shift that balance [0].
|
| [0] https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-
| pa...
| gpderetta wrote:
| I doubt a MW laser can reliably intercept a reentry vehicle.
| A lot of energy is lost through the atmosphere when
| intercepting a warhead in space, from a land based laser.
| Once it reenters the atmosphere there might not be enough
| time. You also need to burn through the heatshield that the
| warhead is equipped with for reentry.
|
| Even if you can can deliver enough energy for long enough,
| there is no fuel to burn and it might not be easy to detonate
| or disable the warhead.
|
| For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered
| lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.
|
| But that's very much not near-future.
|
| Lasers might still be useful for rockets, drones and cruise
| missiles of course.
| O3marchnative wrote:
| > For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered
| lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.
|
| Author here. Thank you for your insight.
|
| I took some time to read about the recently proposed
| "Golden Dome" defense system, and what you laid out seems
| to be the end goal [0]. It's difficult to tell how
| realistic this actually is. The size of the constellation
| of satellites needed seems prohibitive, to say the least.
|
| [0] https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-golden-dome/
|
| [1] https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2026/02/space-based-
| interce...
| Voultapher wrote:
| I get the impression you didn't read the linked post. It
| goes into the details, atmospheric absorption for different
| wavelength, weather conditions, tracking time, interception
| time based on warhead hardness ratings and many more
| details. It's paper based, so in practice it will be more
| complicated and there are things it will have missed, and
| things we don't even know yet as being operational
| challenges for such systems. At the same time, it does
| present a compelling narrative and I'd much rather discuss
| individual assumptions or sources than dismiss it entirely
| based on a gut feeling.
| maxglute wrote:
| Maybe for subsonic, high end missiles I'm extremely
| skeptical. Need 5-10MW to get useful dwell power on high end
| hypersonic inherently shielded against reentry thermals.
| Speculative laser defense are infra size defense, not mobile
| trailer size. Factor in duty cycles (i.e. shots per minute)
| and it seems dead end. Half of economics of missile defense
| is mobility - building density relative to threats by moving
| platforms. Last 2 parts real constraints, high-end
| adversaries coordinate salvos to arrive in time. Interceptor
| magazine depth limited = still throw 100s of interceptors to
| engage multiple targets if required. Lasers = serial visual
| range engagement. Figure out dwell time + duty cycle to
| saturate. Hypersonic can go from over horizonal to hit target
| in 10 seconds, a laser couldn't engage more than 1-2 missiles
| in that time. Technically 1, because by the time you fried
| 1st target the 2nd is so close the shrapnel will hit on
| momentum.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Lasers are not "all weather" weapons as far as I am aware.
| Clouds, snow, fog, rain, and just humidity all degrade their
| performance greatly.
| O3marchnative wrote:
| The recently announced "Golden Dome" project intends to get
| around this issue by putting a vast constellation of
| satellites into orbit. Each satellite would likely need a
| serious source of power in order to use its laser. Assuming
| that's just an engineering problem, then the issue becomes
| coverage. That is, depending on the adversary's
| capabilities, you'd need an absolutely massive
| constellation in orbit [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defe
| nse_s...
| consumer451 wrote:
| This is such an insane plan, and I don't mean that in a
| good way.
|
| For one thing, it can do little to nothing about low
| flying nuclear tipped cruise missiles, especially in less
| than ideal weather. These already exist, so the Golden
| Dome system is already inadequate on day one.
| gpderetta wrote:
| The idea has been around for a while:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defe
| nse_s...
|
| > President Donald Trump signed an executive order
| directing the United States Armed Forces to construct the
| [...] Golden Dome
|
| Well, that's just taking the piss!
| Voultapher wrote:
| The linked article covers that in depth, it's not
| implausible to punch a hole through a storm with pulsed
| laser of that class. Honestly we don't know enough about
| these systems to know their operational limits but we know
| weather will play a role.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| Try that on my spinning, mirror-coated missile!
| jcul wrote:
| Really interesting.
|
| Forgive my ignorance, but I thought Israel's "iron dome" offered
| a very effective defense.
|
| Is this just from short distance missiles from neighbouring
| countries?
|
| This article seems to indicate it's very difficult to achieve a
| high success rate against multiple missiles.
|
| Admittedly I probably need to read up on this more.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| There are multiple tiers of missile (and ballistic missile
| defense).
|
| Especially with ballistic missiles, the longer the range, the
| faster the inbound warhead will be in the terminal phase
| (roughly). So longer range ~= faster meaning more difficult to
| intercept.
|
| "Iron Dome" is the name generally used to describe Israel's
| lowest tier set of defenses. Very roughly Iron Dome is designed
| to defend against stuff that you could plausibly fire from the
| back of a truck, and have a max range of around ~50km.
|
| Very roughly, these were intended to take on something like
| GMLRS (realistically, massed volleys of unguided rockets) -
| these are rockets that one or two people could conceivably
| manhandle, and are traveling in the neighborhood of Mach 2-3.
| One of the key innovations of Iron Dome is its ability to
| quickly ascertain and design on which rockets were unlikely to
| strike valuable areas, and only engage the actually threatening
| ones.
|
| The next tier up is David's Sling, and then Israel's wider set
| of high performance anti-ballistic missile systems. Returning
| the the range <-> speed thing, we'd need something like a
| medium range ballistic missile to get from Iran to Israel. For
| something like the Shahab-3, that's like ~Mach 7 during re-
| entry.
|
| If we step up to IRBMs (so something that China might use to
| strike at Guam), we're probably talking like Mach 10.
| jcul wrote:
| Interesting stuff, thanks for the long and detailed response.
| EGreg wrote:
| What happened to Iron Beam / lasers and those vaunted "space
| lasers" dubbed "star wars"?
| hedora wrote:
| Apparently, Iron Beam still exists (or at least was demoed in
| 2024).
|
| Originally, the lasers were going to be mobile, but now they
| have to be stationary, so it will work like the game Missile
| Command, except you have unlimited ammo, but no concurrent
| shots, and the missiles can't be rotating (like a rifled bullet
| would).
|
| That's much more feasible-sounding that I'd assumed (coming
| from low expectations).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam
| EGreg wrote:
| I seriously can't wait for this technology.
|
| It can be purely defensive, and shoot down all aerial attacks
| - drones, etc. over your country's airspace.
|
| So... no wild weasel, no successful air raids, etc. We're
| back to ground invasions, and frankly, a country can defend
| against those a lot easier.
|
| And it also means countries not lobbing missiles at each
| other, and at oil fields and igniting them, or destroying
| shipping etc.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The US has deployed operational anti-drone lasers for a few
| years now, though not widely. They are still quite new but they
| have several kills. This is probably operational field testing
| for fine-tuning the design prior to producing them at scale
| though.
| ozgung wrote:
| As an alternative formulation of the same problem, maintaining
| peace has linear cost, completely solvable in linear time and
| rewards are unbounded for all parties.
| OrangePilled wrote:
| If you're looking for a job and are still squeamish about working
| in the defense industry...I'm sorry to hear about that.
|
| Because, boy, do I think you'll be missing out.
| inaros wrote:
| I spent some time reconstructing the current US missile defense
| interceptor numbers. This was done from open source DoD data,
| CSIS P-21 procurement exhibits, and CRS reports, that are are in
| depth, non partisan, objective policy analyses written by experts
| at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) specifically for U.S.
| Congress members. Also used Lockheed/RTX financial disclosures.
|
| The numbers are pretty bad... Way worse than the headlines
| suggest. But anyway nowadays, investigative journalism has been
| decimated....For example experts like Kelly Grieco at Stimson
| estimated that at 12 day war consumption rates, the entire US
| interceptor stockpile depletes in 4 to 5 weeks. We are now in
| week 4...
|
| As of December 2025, CSIS documented delivery of 534 THAAD
| interceptors and 414 SM-3. The 12 day War burned through around
| 150 THAADs (that is 28% of inventory) and about 80 SM-3s. The
| current war has been drawing down from that already depleted
| starting point for 25 days straight...
|
| Gulf states reportedly expended around 600 to 800 PAC-3 MSE
| interceptors in the first 72 hours of Epic Fury alone, and that
| is more than the entire global 2025 production ( about 620
| units).
|
| Meanwhile THAAD production is 96 per year....with a recent
| Lockheed commitment to quadruple to 400 per year, but that will
| only deliver these additional missiles after 2027 or later. For
| example the sole ammonium perchlorate supplier for every US solid
| rocket motor runs one plant in Utah, and the sole HMX/RDX source
| is a WWII facility in Tennessee...
|
| The US has procured roughly 270 PAC-3 MSE ( the Patriots ) per
| year since 2015, but has diverted around 600 to Ukraine over four
| years. The exact remaining US stockpile is not known with the
| same precision as THAAD/SM-3, so they could not have more than
| 3000 before Epic Fury...
|
| But it is known as I said above, Gulf allies burned through 600
| to 800 or more PAC-3 MSE in the first 72 hours of Epic Fury alone
| from their own stocks. Since they have zero domestic production
| capacity, and will be competing with the US for the same Lockheed
| production line that only makes about 600 per year, Iran really
| has them by the balls.
|
| By the way, the cost so far in munitions is 20 billion ( check
| references...).
|
| Then on Intelligence...
|
| Iran has 13 satellites of their own, and it is known to be
| receiving intelligence from the Russians. This data allows them
| to know exactly how many Patriots or THAAD were fired so far.
| They are also probably customers of MizarVision, a Chinese AI
| startup, that has been cataloguing every significant American
| military asset in the Middle East. Every base, every carrier
| strike group, every F-22 deployment, every THAAD battery, every
| Patriot missile position, tracked, labeled, analyzed, and posted
| publicly.
|
| So...
|
| Unless the US escalates to a Ground Invasion (most likely
| scenario...), or negotiates a deal with Iran, if Iran can keep
| their industrial production of missiles, or maybe move them far
| up and inside tunnels in its Northern Mountains, and...if the USA
| does not escalate to a ground invasion due to the political
| risks, they can actually win this war both from the political and
| strategic aspects, as incredible as that might seem.
|
| Who is truly screwed are the Gulf countries, as their stocks of
| US missiles get progressively depleted... And they wont get a
| refill soon.
|
| Russia strategic interests are in helping Iran, since it weakens
| the US and strengthens their hand in Ukraine.
|
| What might make it worst for the Iranians is the Chinese view of
| this. I speculate they will prefer to help the US and its
| economy, by forcing the US to do a great commercial interesting
| deal for them, then using their strong leverage on Iran to come
| to an agreement.
|
| Strategically, over the next four to six months: Russian wins,
| Iran wins (despite all the destruction), China wins, Israel
| loses, the US loses. Trump truly is the biggest loser...
|
| "Are We Running Out of Missile Defense Interceptors?" -
| https://www.csis.org/events/are-we-running-out-missile-defen...
|
| "'Race of attrition': US military's finite interceptor stockpile
| is being tested" - https://www.defensenews.com/news/your-
| military/2026/03/06/ra...
|
| "The Depleting Missile Defense Interceptor Inventory" -
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-inte...
|
| "Over 5,000 Munitions Shot in the First 96 Hours" -
| https://www.fpri.org/article/2026/03/over-5000-munitions-sho...
|
| "A Chinese AI Startup With 200 Employees Is Mapping Every US
| Military Asset in the Middle East -- In Real Time" -
| https://breached.company/mizarvision-chinese-ai-satellite-us...
|
| https://www.mizarvision.com/
| keybored wrote:
| Hopefully the bad side will lose.
| inaros wrote:
| A wonderfully ambiguous and diplomatic statement...
| keybored wrote:
| How it can be ambigiuous who the bad guys are in this
| context is beyond me. It's obviously Israel and America.
| aftbit wrote:
| How does this guarantee a political and strategic win for Iran?
|
| Iran was already teetering on the edge of being a failed state:
| socially, economically, environmentally, and agriculturally.
| Iran is expending expensive ballistic missiles to force those
| THAAD and Arrow shoot-downs. Yes, they're winning the shot
| exchange ratio, but their economy is orders of magnitude
| smaller than the US. Besides, unlike the Gulf states, the US
| and Israel are not just sitting around playing defense. They
| are systematically destroying substantial fractions of the
| Iranian war machine and have both threatened and attacked
| domestic and international energy production, the lifeblood of
| the Iranian economy.
|
| The only true winner of this war, however it shakes out in the
| end, is Russia. All of the Middle Eastern powers aligned with
| the US are going to be desperate to rebuild their interceptor
| stockpiles and will surely get priority over Ukraine, likely
| for a very long time as the production rates are very low as
| you've pointed out. Plus, Russian gas and oil are worth a lot
| more than they were prior to this war, and are being allowed to
| trade more openly as well.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| The democratisation (if that's the right word) of high quality
| satellite imagery is really something.
|
| Of course top military powers will have even better images, but
| there are random Twitter users and YouTubers commissioning
| imagery of Russian tank bases and as long as there's no clouds
| on the day in question the quality is pretty good.
|
| Things that move (ships) are still very hard to find and that's
| where the top powers still have a real advantage, but military
| bases, storage depots etc. are all impossible to hide in 2026.
| Even your local ragtag jihadist group can get coordinates for
| all your bases with a small amount of money and effort if they
| need them.
|
| Making missiles that are accurate enough to take advantage of
| all the targeting data is still quite hard though
| granoIacowboy wrote:
| Not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, but you
| aren't factoring in other European or Korean interceptors the
| GC have been using. Israeli production. Fighters and other
| systems can be used for drone defense - lasers, AA guns,
| Manpads, EW, microwaves - Ukraine's drone on drone defense and
| other solutions will be implemented asap.
|
| The math is still brutal
| blueblisters wrote:
| Gaming this out for peer adversaries is mostly moot, right? The
| post-Cold War strategic balance has mostly hung on MAD. And
| Russia, in particular, has responded to any attempt at building
| missile shields with more capable missiles.
|
| It's likely more relevant for asymmetric conflicts that involve
| conventional weapons, and would enable an otherwise less
| resourced adversary to become a near peer.
|
| Dennis Bushnell from NASA presented this deck in 2001, and is
| quite prescient about UAVs and distributed warfare.
|
| https://alachuacounty.us/Depts/epd/EPAC/Future%20Strategic%2...
| deepsun wrote:
| And that is the answer to Fermi paradox "why we don't see any
| other civilizations in the galaxy".
| solatic wrote:
| The math and economics on missile defense are broken.
|
| If your adversary uses nuclear-tipped missiles: within hours if
| not days, you are virtually guaranteed to suffer impact.
| Congratulations, New York is under a mushroom cloud. Lose.
|
| If your adversary _doesn 't_ use nuclear-tipped missiles, you
| have a war of attrition whereby the cost of interceptors is
| greatly more expensive than the cost of building the conventional
| missiles. Congratulations, you wrecked your economy, if you can
| even keep up production of interceptors for long enough. Lose.
|
| The only winning moves are to either use ground troops to invade
| and dismantle your opponents' missiles to prevent that risk from
| being realized, or to play mutually-assured destruction games
| trying to convince the other side that you're just an insult away
| from doing it anyway. And a Western world that seems desperate to
| keep boots off the ground is not playing that winning move.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| The _" if only one nuke gets through, you lose and the whole
| thing is pointless"_ is completely wrong. Even if surrender
| were mandatory after one nuke, all the other intercepted nukes
| would be thousands if not millions of lives saved.
| Brybry wrote:
| > the cost of interceptors is greatly more expensive than the
| cost of building the conventional missiles
|
| And the same thing is true with this comparison. The cost
| comparison is not interceptor vs conventional missile.
|
| It's interceptor vs conventional missile + the damage the
| missile would have done.
|
| Yes, you don't want to use Patriots to intercept Shaheds but
| that's an argument for using the right tool for the job. It's
| not an argument that the economics of interception are
| completely broken.
|
| Ukraine has interceptors that are cheaper than Shaheds.
| aftbit wrote:
| Shot exchange is a huge problem, made even worse by the arrival
| of cheap drones. But you're implicitly assuming that the
| adversary is on roughly equal economic footing. If your defense
| budget is $800 billion and your adversary's defense budget is
| $8 billion, you can afford to spend 100x as much shooting down
| their missiles as they spend lofting them.
|
| There's also a danger in projecting linearly from the beginning
| of a war, where invading forces both tend to use more expensive
| stand-off munitions and also have to deal with more aggressive
| missile launches. As the defender's own air defense system gets
| degraded, the invader can switch from expensive long range
| stand-off munitions to cheaper stand-in munitions (like glide
| bombs) launched from much shorter range. Additionally, the
| invader will be able to diminish the defender's ability to
| launch missile strikes in the first place, either by destroying
| the launchers, the missiles themselves, or their production,
| thus reducing the demand on expensive high-capability
| interceptors.
|
| Drones and mines continue to offer asymmetric warfare options
| that are very hard to counter without a robust low side on the
| high-low mix. Ukraine are the world's leading experts in this
| currently, and hopefully are involved with US and Gulf forces
| to try to improve this shot exchange ratio.
|
| I am assuming nobody is using nukes though. That completely
| changes the picture. One must always assume "(some of) the
| missiles will get through". Traditional MAD does not require
| boots on the ground - merely the assurance that if Iran gets
| one nuke through and hits New York, the USA will respond with
| 100+ nukes. The real question then is what the other "large"
| nuclear powers (Russia and China, primarily) will do in
| response to that.
| kurthr wrote:
| The losing move is using missile interceptors.
|
| Whether it's high altitude drone swarms, terminally guided
| artillery munitions, hypersonic rail guns, or high energy laser
| defense, all are orders of magnitude cheaper than the
| interceptors and could be less than the cost of the (nuclear?)
| missile. It's true that generically defending against nukes is
| basically a fools errand, but if they're (also stupidly)
| limited to putting them on ICBMs with non-detonating fail
| safes, then it's probably economically doable and cheaper than
| the $10T forever war.
|
| I'm sorry, the whole framing of this (OP) question/answer seems
| artificial and fundamentally silly.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i don't think complete invulnerability was ever the goal of
| missile defense. It was meant to be a countermeasure to
| something where before there was none. I'm actually surprised
| it works as well as it does. Back when these things were first
| being developed and tested the thought was intercepting nuclear
| armed ICBMs, they were supposed to be massively destabilizing
| with respect to MAD and could conceivably give a nation first
| strike advantage. First strike advantage means just bare
| minimum survival not that you never get hit at all.
| Fortunately, that never really materialized.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Ground troops that can't advance due to a cheap nonstop drone
| and missile barrage is also not a solution as you are going to
| run out of troops before ypur enemy runs out of drones.
| Havoc wrote:
| There is also a big real world experience element that is hard to
| account for mathematically.
|
| There are stories of ukrainian operators expressing bewilderment
| and BCC countries sending 8x interceptors at millions a pop at a
| 20k shaheed. The world doesn't seem to have acclimatized to
| well...how the world works now.
|
| There is a very fundamental disconnect at play here and I fear
| it'll get us all into trouble
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Well, it's less about the value of the interceptor and more
| about the value of what the drones are heading for. If it's a
| desalination plant that makes 20% of your freshwater, eight
| missiles are probably well worth it because a lot of people can
| die.
|
| Middle Eastern countries have much more condensed critical
| infrastructure and economic targets than we do.
|
| Iran has expected a war like this for decades and been
| continuously preparing, most of the other nations they have
| not.
| enaaem wrote:
| Yeah this is really bad news for Israel. America does not have
| the resolve for a major ground invasion, and Israel cannot
| intercept missiles indefinitely.
| MoonWalk wrote:
| Whatever that means.
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