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.
This logic is outdated because it is pretty obvious that no one is going to employ nuclear warheads in a typical conventional war and thus the nuclear factor suddenly doesn't matter for war economics.