* Small rockets can now land themselves.
Anything else?
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".
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.
Like not giving 100 billion dollars to someone who actively wants to kill you.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
does hearing it back like that make it seem absurd to you as well?
My argument is that Western strategic thought (with games being a codification thereof, rather than the source of) generally considers countries as mostly atomic actors that can be defeated - the history of European warfare being filled with "gentlemanly" surrenders followed up by peace treaties, with guerrilla warfare being a very rare exception.
On the other side, the reality in the East is that a state's collapse doesn't end the conflict, but just prolongs it. The army doesn't surrender, it goes home with its weapons and reconstitutes as insurgents. I can't actually think of a single proper surrender of an Eastern country ever, except for Japan in 1945.
It is actually several physical board games, the oldest of which is older than (and unrelated to) the computer game [0], as well as being a series of computer games that are basically digital board games.
[0] Well, except for the computer game based on it and its expansion, which, because of the other computer game, had the long-winded title "Avalon Hill's Advanced Civilization".
It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.
But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.
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.
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million?
>100 kids got murdered the first day of this "low stakes" war
But that’s apparently not the real concern at all.
Trump candid reaction to the Iranian school incident when asked by reporter was "I can live with that".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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][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.
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.
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.
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.
However, we haven't converted our economy to just producing Patriots. We can only produce 600 / year. Drone production rates are orders of magnitude higher than that.
As for second order effects, the interception probabilities are less than one, so in this world where we're producing a million patriots per year, tens of thousands of drones (at minimum) are hitting their targets. On top of that, the offensive drones are more easily transported + retargeted, so the patriots would need to be stationed pretty much everywhere, and their adversary chooses where the attacks actually happen.
The only winning move is not to play.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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-...
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.
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).
It's somewhat similar to Russia waging a war in Ukraine, although I can see some reasons for Russia to attack Ukraine (mainly territory)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Because, boy, do I think you'll be missing out.
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...