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.
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.
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.
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.
¹ in a military sense; in a geopolitical sense obviously it's clear that Iran has been a misadventure
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...
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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...
"The loser of a knife fight dies in the street. The winner dies in the hospital."
Connection reset by Yugoslavs with microwave ovens
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
