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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That logic right there is why the US is going to lose. That math only works in isolation

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

The US already has “shoot the archer” doctrine which strategizes to target the site(s) launching cheap drones rather than the drones themselves. With US air superiority this seems feasible.

Ukraine has no feasible means to actually act offensively, meanwhile, the United States is a nuclear weapons state.

Pose a credible-enough threat and atomic deletion will ensue.

> meanwhile, the United States is a nuclear weapons state

This logic is outdated because it is pretty obvious that no one is going to employ nuclear warheads in a typical conventional war and thus the nuclear factor suddenly doesn't matter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

They’re not going to drop nukes but he’s right about the concept otherwise. We only have to intercept missiles until we blow them (and the factories that make them) all up which we can conceivably do just fine without nukes. That’s the strategy here, which is obvious but whether or not it can be achieved is less so.

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