Iran's GDP PPP is 1.75 trillion. The capacity for Iran to produce domestic designs is far higher than Israel's. Iran's nominal GDP has fallen drastically because of sanctions, but in terms of domestically produced and domestically designed military equipment, PPP is far more accurate.
> It's estimated Iran went from 350 to 100 launchers in the war. Once you've levelled the launchers, you're defending against unguided rockets (which everyone in between will try to pot) and drones (which are cheaper and easier to destroy and cause less damage).
That's possible, although no one actually knows how many TELs Iran has, and no one knows how many have been destroyed : Israeli evidence to that effect has been very very slim. Iran's TELs are essentially a pneumatic piston and a FCS (read: Beidou GNSS receiver) bolted onto a domestically-designed 8x8 or 10x10 platform. Iran has far, far more than 400 8x8/10x10 military trucks, so it's essentially impossible to know how many of those they can or have configured as a TEL at any given moment, especially since those conversions are easily done in undergound facilities.
So the "they just need to destroy the launchers" theory is very thin, on the edge of wishcasting. The launchers being domestically produced and similar/lesser in cost to the missiles they fire suggest that even if it does work once, it's not a viable long term strategy.
Iran has a very large automotive industry - they produce over 1 million cars per year. If the main strategic hit was to destroy 200 trucks made in a country that cranks out 1 000 000 cars, I'm going to very skeptical about claims of neutering them.
You may be confusing the guidance mechanisms of early ballistic missiles, which relied entirely on on-board inertial guidance. These missiles therefore needed quite precise initial guidance and an expensive TEL with a myriad of expensive sensors in order to calibrate themselves. Modern ballistic missiles don't work like that : they have non-inertial GNSS guidance (and for the most sophisticated, some kind of active or optical guidance system in the mid course and terminal phase) to complement inertial guidance. That means that the TEL just needs to communicate an initial position, so nothing much more complicated than a GNSS receiver is needed, and to the extent that this is incorrect, the missile can correct itself.
> Rockets, sure. Missiles? No. The Shahab-3 reaches altitudes of 400 km [1]. That's where the ISS orbits [2].
What does that have to do with anything? The Shahab-3 missile has a small fraction of the dV necessary to reach orbit, and is therefore much smaller than the kind of rocket you need for that. We already know that they are stored in large numbers underground, so what's the bottleneck that prevents underground production?
In fact, in Masyaf, Syria, Iran placed the planetary mixers which are the most sensitive and expensive component underground. There is no clear reason why they wouldn't have done so at home.
The rest of the production of solid-fueled missiles is bottlenecked by casting pits. Iran has placed mant of these above ground - obviously we can't know if or how many they have placed underground, but they seem to have largely resisted Israeli airstrikes - they are not a sensitive target. See : https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1220847/guest-post-a... for an independent account of Iranian MRBM-scale solid fueled rocket motor production. The only easy target are the planetary mixers - Israel has claimed to have targeted them, but in Masyaf, Syria, they failed to destroy them using airstrikes and had to resort to a commando attack on the underground facility, so that theory is thin as well.
> Its smaller territory means it can concentrate air defences.
That's right, which is why Israel uses weapons designed to evade air defenses and exploit gaps, while Iran uses weapons that simply exhaust interceptors. The former is easier to exploit from the get go, but the latter fails catastrophically once the breaking point arrives.
> And with 10x fewer mouths to feed, it can devote more of that economy to its war machine in a spurt.
Yes, but Iran doesn't feed it's citizens in US dollars (at least not anymore), it feeds them using a PPP-adjusted basket of goods. And similarly while Israel's interceptors are in large part manufactured in the USA and paid for in USD, Iran's missiles are almost entirely manufactured domestically, with workers paid in a much cheaper basket of goods. In terms of exchaning interceptors and ballistic missiles, Iran is ahead.
The main issue Iran has is that their missiles are mostly not accurate enough to degrade Israeli force projection, and that while missile production is very high, it hasn't been for a long time and thus stockpiles are not great. That's a problem that has an expiration date, and that's why Israel attacked Iran, because the window is closing. Iran only very recently demonstrated the kind of technology that is needed to execute precision strikes using MRBMs: the first missile design they claim is able to do so is the Qassem Basir, which only entered service this year. If that works and if they can scale production, the advantage Israel has in being very concentrated and densely protected turns into a liability - Iran then has the ability to directly attack Israeli BMD radars, and then directly attack airbases. It's a serious threat, and that's exactly why the Israelis decided that they needed to attack.