Missile defense is NP-complete
smu160.github.io
smu160.github.io
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the pace of advance and changes in strategy, high production capacity is probably more beneficial than inventory.
50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense budget.
Closer to $3000. Pre-2022 it was around $800/shell for standard 155mm HE.
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.
If they strike desalination plants, Israel/us can do the same … really mass casualty event could follow.
And they might, at some point the Iranian gov might feel desperate enough to be like “fuck it, we have nothing to lose” … Dubai could end up with a lot more graves.
Almost all of their water comes from these plants, and humans can’t survive without water for more than 3 days …
There are reserves/stores sure, but how long will they last, and which part of the population do they cover? In a week you could have thousands of civilians dead on both sides.
So MAD keeps things in check.
I think this is whaly Iran has invested so much into rockets - they are very ineffective at providing decisive military victory by themselves, but without them, Iran will be at Israel’s mercy, and they have proven to not possess that in great amounts lately
1. It's not Iran's mercy, but deterrence. If Iran was to target critical infrastructure constantly, Israel and the U.S. would bomb its much more easily. Both sides currently avoid doing that for the same reason.
2. Targeting the same places again and again will mean they cannot target other places, like cities, where even a miss has greater impact. So the economy of munitions make them prefer to not do that.
The U.S. is on a path to spending trillions of dollars to putting missile defense (and offense) systems in space with the Golden Dome.
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
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.
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.
Sure, opponents thinking your "stick" is bigger in peacetime is nice, might save you some money and improve diplomatic outcomes, but those gains are marginal compared to overestimating yourself and then finding out the hard way...
> 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)
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.
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?
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.
Indeed, there are any number of very smart people who made up their mind 40 years ago in opposition to Reagan and SDI.
Surprisingly, very few of these folks have evolved their position over decades of changes in the strategic and technology pictures:
Defensive systems can’t work and are inherently destabilizing even though everyone knows they can’t work.
(I’m modestly agreed on the second point!)
All of those clauses are immensely important for everyone to understand.
First, "can't work"; because the math simply does not math, so to say.
Second, "inherently destabilizing"; among other reasons, if you think your imaginary "iron/golden dome" will protect you, you do all kinds of insane and reckless things that could quite literally at best be civilizational collapse, or even human life ending.
Third; "everyone knows they can't work" is not something I am at all convinced of, or at the very least those who should and really need to know that, don't actually know it, because "DC" is a self-licking ice cream cone that huffs its own farts to the point that the system reinforces those characteristics by selecting for them. The result is that the whole narcissistic system believes its own decadent nonsense.
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.
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_Munition...
Isn't that exactly what it was for? They never hid their paranoia of Iranian ballistic missiles or pretended iron dome would be a fool proof protection from them, did they?
> 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.
Ukraine's defenses are reported to intercept between 80-90% cruise missiles and 10%-40% of hypersonic and ballistic missiles, depending on what source you read and what stage of the cat and mouse game they are. It seems quite good.
> 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.
Yet Zelenskyy has been crying out for this "useless junk" and his military has been making good use of it. I think I will trust the person with real skin in the game and real experience in the battlefield as opposed to MIT Prof. Emeritus, Theodore Postol, claiming to have "mathematically proved fraud" from the safety of his ivory tower.
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.
Sun Tzu taught us: When you are weak, appear strong. When you are strong, appear weak.
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.
It is hard to compare this with China. Different goals and philosophies.
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.
They also have a lot of leverage points in their geography, in the fact that the US is at a historical low point in its military capabilities.
US and Israel strategy seems to be to completely destruct Iran's economy, but the problem is that this is a game where they can also shoot back.
It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.
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.
But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.
Lots of smugness about the supposed irrationality of the adversaries considering that backdrop.
How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million?
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.
¹ in a military sense; in a geopolitical sense obviously it's clear that Iran has been a misadventure
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were reports about three small aircraft being damaged in Ben Gurion, one of them caught a fire. I guess three millionaires will have nothing to fly until they collect their insurance money.
It is.... Entirely infeasible to deploy these against tactical ballistics like Iran is using.
>100 kids got murdered the first day of this "low stakes" war
Trump candid reaction to the Iranian school incident when asked by reporter was "I can live with that".
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.
Specifically: don't start wars thousand of miles away of your borders.
That’s why StarCraft players sends “scouts” into enemy bases in the early game.
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...
If by "a bunch" you mean one.
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/John_von_Neumann
> Claude Shannon called him "the smartest person I've ever met", a common opinion.
> Von Neumann founded the field of game theory as a mathematical discipline.
> .. leading him to a large number of military consultancies and consequently his involvement in the Manhattan Project.
> In 1950, von Neumann became a consultant to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group..
> In 1955, von Neumann became a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which at the time was the highest official position available to scientists in the government.
> In his final years before his death from cancer, von Neumann headed the United States government's top-secret ICBM committee..
Towards the end of his life as cancer metastasised in his brain he would ask his visitors to give him sums to do to reassure himself that he was still there. Towards the end he wasn't and couldn't. One of the saddest things.
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...
But I agree with your point that it does remain difficult to intercept and poses the shot-exchange problem.
This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Iran graduates as many engineers as the US (70% women), but few of them are working on front-end A/B optimization of some boutique dating site.
And, having taken grad classes with folks graduated from Iranian universities, their training is excellent. The Persian kids were always at the top of their class.
EDIT: for the record the class I merely audited was graduate level (rational) mechanics - the class par excellence if you're going to build a hypersonic.
Some observations:
Half the class was Chinese, the academically better half was Persian.
I was the only Westerner (albeit also foreigner)
The girls were wearing veils.
According to the professor, the best mecanist (?) of the 20th century, Clifford Truesdelle, was an American
The Professor was Iranian.
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.
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)".
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.
... 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-...
> fast pursuit systems to hit Russian drones on launch
They haven't done much of that at all...
> cheap FPV drones for last-mile intercept
Where do you think these particular drones are made? I'll give you a hint - it's pretty sunny here.
I'm not saying the general thrust of your argument is wrong, quite the opposite. But that's a big number for one drone.
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.
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
That was a missile not a drone.
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).
My first thought looking at it: Why does Saudi Arabia have desal plants in Riyadh? It is 100s of km away from the Persian Gulf! Maybe they want some far away from the Gulf for security reasons? Else, it looks weird. I imagine that they need to pump sea (salty) water from the Gulf to Riyadh, desal it, then pump back the waste water. Quite a journey.
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.
It's somewhat similar to Russia waging a war in Ukraine, although I can see some reasons for Russia to attack Ukraine (mainly territory)
Cheap drones overwhelming defenses until the billion dollar radars and airfields got hit.
Then methodically hit everything according to a plan that forces allied forces to retreat to reliable water sources.
Whatever one thinks of Iran, the way they're waging this war is a masterclass in strategy.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine really reminded everyone that nuclear deterrence is a nice thing to have for you security, and I suspect the Israelo-American attack on Iran is going to be the nail in the coffin of nonproliferation.
I expect countries like Brazil, Japan, South Korea or even Taiwan or Vietnam to have the bomb within ten years at this point.
And given the current war and the dramatic consequences ahead, I now think that the world would have in fact been safer had the Mullah's regime actually got the bomb instead of playing the “under the threshold deterrence” game.
They're not just joking around when they say things like "Death to America" or "Death to Israel". They're not being hyperbolic when they say "We love death more that you love life".
They will absolutely use that bomb as soon as they have it, and it will trigger a response from the west when it happens.
It's the US that dismantled their democratic parliamentary system to maintain their hold on Irani oil. It's the US that shot down their domestic passenger jet with no apologies forthcoming. it's the US that foisted Saddam Hussein against them in a war where 30K Iranians perished to chemical weapons. I can understand why anyone who went through that would not like the US and its enablers much and I am not even Iranian or Muslim.
> There's a big difference between all the countries you named and Iran, the difference is jihad. You can't just let jihadists
Radical Islamism is very diverse, the Iranian regime is indeed an Islamic theocracy, but it's not jihadists, no more than Saudi Arabia or Qatar are.
> They're not being hyperbolic when they say "We love death more that you love life".
Well, the past 2 and a half years prove that it's not just hyperbolic, but complete bluff. They wouldn't have tried to appease Israel and the US after 10/7 if that was the case. They would have attacked Israel the first with all their might, including Hezbollah, like Sinwar wished they do. Instead they cowardly watched their entire proxy network being dismantled by Israel before being struck themselves. That's definitely not the behavior of someone not afraid of death.
> They will absolutely use that bomb as soon as they have it,
They wouldn't have accepted JCPOA if they wanted the bomb to use it. And they would have resumed their nuclear weapon program when Trump unilaterally left it, which they haven't.
Iran, like North Korea, is simply a corrupt authoritarian regime who wants to consolidate their power. Their bellicose rhetoric against the US or Israel is just that: rhetoric.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
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.
Not if it means you can't intercept the next one hitting much a more valuable/critical building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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). Koweït 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
Two-stage designs are far more cost-effective and compact.
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
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.
How are decoys discriminated? The acceleration due to gravity is the same for all. Radar reflectance could be manipulated. Drag and lift perhaps, but can't those be matched with the real thing ? What is it that gives up a decoy as a decoy ?
Yes I can distinguish a falling feather from a falling lead-shot. The more interesting questions is can one not make a featherweight that falls like lead-shot, reflects like lead-shot and be cheaper than lead-shot.
For a warhead decoy ten times lighter it needs to present an area ten times smaller to maintain drag induced deceleration parity. For radio parity the decoy needs to reflect more the actual warhead reflect less. Metal coated kevlar ribbons on the decoy might do it.
What I find interesting is that the curse of rocket equation makes decoys pretty expensive to propel. So if I am forced to incur that cost anyway, might as well put a real warhead on that.
Against this type of terminal guidance, a decoy must have the same shape, size, orientation, and spectral signature of a warhead, and maintain these properties while being ablated. As a matter of engineering, a decoy with these properties will necessarily have mass and volume costs that approach that of a warhead, with none of the benefits of a warhead.
From a weapon design perspective, effective decoys significantly reduce the range of the missiles they are attached to. That is not a tradeoff any weapon designers are willing to make because range is one of the most critical attributes of an effective weapon.
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.
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.
Your SSPK is way WAY too low. Also, the math on interceptions changes completely with multiple KKVs per interceptor (see NGI).
Decoys don't work even at the highest end (ICBMs), see Chevaline's history and its rapid decomissioning for an example of just that.
Higher threats are not exo atmosphere & midcourse that NGI targets, actual speculative high end threats (since we talking about speculative NGI capabilities) are hypersonic glide in upper atmosphere, which NGI can't target. It's even more extreme intercept problem, the intercept math for those class of threats is on paper even more lopsided against defender.
NGI basically ensure US keeps pace with modern penetration aids proliferation, i.e NKR tier adversaries if they ever improve RVs + decoys from shit tier to mid tier. Chevaline was 50 years ago, not really relevant example, since issue was really economics of decoys vs just spamming mirv. Regardless, NGI trying to maintain 3/4/5 interceptor ratio instead of 30/40/50/100s against exo threats, which on spectrum is low/medium end. It does 0 against actual future highend threats of glide phase interception, an entirely different category.
Hypersonic gliders can't be nearly as numerous as ballistic RVs because physics, and they are getting their own interceptor (GPI).
I think this conversation would benefit from splitting theatre ballistic threats (evidently, those are now being effectively countered without 30 to 1 ratios) from strategic threats. For strategic threats, the logic is substantially more complex: even 50% intercept rate greatly complicates counter-force strikes and is valuable. In practice, the rate is substantially higher than 50%.
Chevaline wasn't the only program, the US had its own they didn't end up deploying. Both countries concluded that effective decoys end up weighing roughly the same as warheads.
On terminal interception, RV weight less critical factor - the unfairness is RV kinematic requirements simply lower than KKV kinematic requirements, and ceiling where KKVs physically cannot intercept regardless of weight / sensor / motor quality is below theoretic ceiling for RV, and closer offense moves towards that ceiling (+speed, +maneuver even minor jiggles) the worse KKV approach (and economics) breaks down. Weight might be proxy for cost, i.e. salvo + interception math. Which is fair, but then we don't know NGI cost and we don't know if adversaries can simply build more missiles at lower cost to extend exchange ratio gap anyway.
On midcourse vs hypersonic, GPI like DEW vs high-end missiles is hypothetical/speculative interception stack, i.e. low technology readiness level, given actual harder interception physics / maneuver gap for non vacuum vs vacuum midcourse, there's no indication it will ever "work", i.e. stuck in TRL <4 "theory" wall, at least on relevant timelines.
>In practice, the rate is substantially higher than 50%.
For exo atmosphere midcourse, in practice we don't have any solid data (more accurately in on paper none actually exist) on midcourse interception rates vs highend, i.e. tier1 missiles + penaids. Only data we have is highly scripted/goldilocks FTM44 without penaids on maximum convenient interception conditions/geometry. Since SPKK doesn't scale linearly vs missile or penaid performance, SPKK of single digit approaching 0 is not out of question for missiles with complex penaids or improved kinematics.
> decoys end up weighing roughly the same as warheads.
Due to tech limitations 30-50 years ago. Modern missiles have massively reduced size of penaids vs payload, i.e. Iskander miniaturized (6) EW/active spoofing penaids is like ~5% of the warhead weight. High end ICBMs speculated to have 30-50.
Chevaline/early decoys were bruteforce mass/physics mimicry methods, and tier1 powers like like UK/US figured better off stuffing actual warheads for strategic/nuclear under those conditions. VS less capable adversaries who may have to go warhead + penaid route due to limitations, i.e. lower end adversaries only ground/TEL leg and limited nuclear warheads #s, who'd much better off spreading limited warheads over many missiles with penaids then hedge on MIRV stuffing.
>splitting ... strategic threats
I think more useful to split strategic threats by levels, NGI is designed to stay at pace or ahead of mid/low end adversaries modernizing ballistic threats... which granted is basically everyone except PRC and maybe RU. VS high end adversaries, if we look at the speculative roadmap of hypersonic glide vs glide phase interceptor and high end penaids, in terms of technology readiness and implementation, the gap could very well be increasing, i.e. PLARF with mass hypersonic glides 5-10 years from now has much higher chance of overmatching GPI progress. AFAIK, there isn't even a PROPOSED midcourse interception solution(golden dome mostly tracking) vs powered glide (i.e. scramjets) with sustained maneuverability. The TLDR is short/medium term forecasted missile defense (i.e. GPI is 2035s) is not even in the same room as deployed/fielded highend missile offense (assuming they work) and not in the same building as forecasted (highend) short/medium term missile offense.
[0] https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...
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.
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...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
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.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_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!
"The loser of a knife fight dies in the street. The winner dies in the hospital."
Connection reset by Yugoslavs with microwave ovens
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowing how government IT procurement works, I'm afraid it's going to stay >2h for the foreseeable future even if the COTS solutions will bring this time down to a subsecond calculation.
They can also manufacture launchers faster and cheaper than they can be countered. $30k drone vs interceptor at millions.
The U.S. and Israel will not accept the current regime staying in power.
Neither side wants to stop the war. Israel, Europe, the U.S., gulf states and others in missile range of Iran will not want the current regime to remain in power.
What happens next? Full invasion? Regime change Iraq style??
Here is a highly probable outcome before next year. Iran continues breaking the Iron Dome and firing on "allied" targets and infrastructure. The U.S.refuses or cant sustain a full invasion (because it is a death trap).
What happens next? It is obvious Israel will use tactical nukes on Tehran and other targets in Iran. It is going to be their only option.
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...
Also, a big omission in the post is NGI carrying multiple kill vehicles. Considering the relative cost of a launching system and a KKV, multiple KKVs flip the math quite significantly.
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.
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.
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".
* Small rockets can now land themselves.
Anything else?
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
It has been observed that military bureaucracies will do everything in their power to ignore the fact that their experience is now obsolete and requires a complete refactoring.
This is why the countries were still not ready for Shaheds despite tens of thousands of them having been shot into Ukraine and despite enormous ukrainian experience and military know-how being readily available.
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.
The Ukrainians don’t think about today’s tradeoff but also about tomorrows. They learned that when when a three day special operation turned into four years.
You have to match your best defenses against the best expected incoming attack- across time- even if it means taking a hit. Yes desalination plant included
The us doctrine of defend all the things all the time against everything has failed in light of modern drone warefare
Pose a credible-enough threat and atomic deletion will ensue.
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.
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.
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.
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac...
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/20361510681621877...
[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...
Because, boy, do I think you'll be missing out.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Ultimately if Iran locks down Hormuz long term they can transit tax their way to prosperity, and if they can convince PRC to be enforcer of petro-yuan (big if), they'll basically get unlimited hardware to do so. Not that burning bridges with GCC is PRC first choice, but if Iran can lock down Hormuz, they have leverage to compel PRC to accept arrangement because it's worse than no Hormuz energy. The spoiler obviously is US who would rather toast GCC oil than lose petro dollar. Or Israel being nuke happy.
Remember the US attacked Iran, not other way round. Iran didn't start a war they thought they could win.
The math is still brutal
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
Any time that I've raised this issue of unsufficient stockpiles and poor preparadness for a major conflict for about a year now on HN and the response is pretty poor and my comments are often downvoted and/or ignored.[0][1][2][3]
There doesn't seem to be a way out of this without a substantial and undeniable US military loss that wakens people to the severely dysfunctional state of military stockpiles and planning, but with that said I'm highly skeptical that this incarnation of America can rise to the occasion like previous generations did in WW1 and WW2.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42391816 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43693330 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44812177 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45054414
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.
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.
"Each GBI costs approximately $75 million, and as of 2024, 44 are deployed across Alaska and California [3]."
(Also, lower bounding the cost improves the argument that they're too expensive to be practical.)
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.