Like not giving 100 billion dollars to someone who actively wants to kill you.
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-...
Connection reset by Yugoslavs with microwave ovens
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.
It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.
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.
>100 kids got murdered the first day of this "low stakes" war
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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 cluster munitions (as a less bad option) every time.
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.
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]. 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...
If by "a bunch" you mean one.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
But I agree with your point that it does remain difficult to intercept and poses the shot-exchange problem.
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.
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
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The loser of a knife fight dies in the street. The winner dies in the hospital."
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.
dboreham•1h ago
trollbridge•1h ago
skywhopper•1h ago
* Small rockets can now land themselves.
Anything else?
sumtechguy•1h ago
BoredPositron•1h ago
XorNot•50m ago
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•1h ago
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.