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.
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.
There are many many countries who can afford 100 billion dollars for stored military equipment that has a long shelf life. The US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of about 10k per shell.
Given the pace of advance and changes in strategy, high production capacity is probably more beneficial than inventory.
50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense budget.
Closer to $3000. Pre-2022 it was around $800/shell for standard 155mm HE.
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.
1. It's not Iran's mercy, but deterrence. If Iran was to target critical infrastructure constantly, Israel and the U.S. would bomb its much more easily. Both sides currently avoid doing that for the same reason.
2. Targeting the same places again and again will mean they cannot target other places, like cities, where even a miss has greater impact. So the economy of munitions make them prefer to not do that.
If they strike desalination plants, Israel/us can do the same … really mass casualty event could follow.
And they might, at some point the Iranian gov might feel desperate enough to be like “fuck it, we have nothing to lose” … Dubai could end up with a lot more graves.
Almost all of their water comes from these plants, and humans can’t survive without water for more than 3 days …
There are reserves/stores sure, but how long will they last, and which part of the population do they cover? In a week you could have thousands of civilians dead on both sides.
So MAD keeps things in check.
I think this is whaly Iran has invested so much into rockets - they are very ineffective at providing decisive military victory by themselves, but without them, Iran will be at Israel’s mercy, and they have proven to not possess that in great amounts lately
The U.S. is on a path to spending trillions of dollars to putting missile defense (and offense) systems in space with the Golden Dome.
And what this site and you don't account for, is Iranian rather low missile accuracy.
If Israel was at the mercy of Iranian attacks, Iran could have simply struck Israeli airbases to the point they cannot be used, and then stop any Israeli attacks on its territory.
It's pretty obvious they don't have the capabilities of doing that
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.
The problem was command and coordination.
Darwin worked and Russians learned (as did Ukrainians).
Regarding your last point: In peace time, you want to prioritize hiding your true capabilities (perhaps inflating them in (misleading direction) to deter them from attacking). Once the ware breaks out, you want to improve your capabilities as fast as possible.
Sure, opponents thinking your "stick" is bigger in peacetime is nice, might save you some money and improve diplomatic outcomes, but those gains are marginal compared to overestimating yourself and then finding out the hard way...
> 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)
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?
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.
Indeed, there are any number of very smart people who made up their mind 40 years ago in opposition to Reagan and SDI.
Surprisingly, very few of these folks have evolved their position over decades of changes in the strategic and technology pictures:
Defensive systems can’t work and are inherently destabilizing even though everyone knows they can’t work.
(I’m modestly agreed on the second point!)
All of those clauses are immensely important for everyone to understand.
First, "can't work"; because the math simply does not math, so to say.
Second, "inherently destabilizing"; among other reasons, if you think your imaginary "iron/golden dome" will protect you, you do all kinds of insane and reckless things that could quite literally at best be civilizational collapse, or even human life ending.
Third; "everyone knows they can't work" is not something I am at all convinced of, or at the very least those who should and really need to know that, don't actually know it, because "DC" is a self-licking ice cream cone that huffs its own farts to the point that the system reinforces those characteristics by selecting for them. The result is that the whole narcissistic system believes its own decadent nonsense.
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.
Also not an expert, but I get the feeling that "cluster munitions" is pretty much an umbrella term.
Because of the CCM [1], we tend to associate the term with the "ligther" variants, which are used as anti-personnel weapons. These variants probably wouldn't be much more destructive than a few grenades.
But what Iran is currently using, appears to be missiles with 500-1000kg payload. This puts each submunition in the 50-100kg range. This should deliver a lot more of a punch than a grenade. Also, because of their weight, they probably wouldn't be covered by CCM, had Iran ratified it.
And, yes, it is unsettling geeking out on this stuff, that may actually be killing people as we write our comment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munition...
Isn't that exactly what it was for? They never hid their paranoia of Iranian ballistic missiles or pretended iron dome would be a fool proof protection from them, did they?
> That was a long time ago though.
> 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.
Ukraine's defenses are reported to intercept between 80-90% cruise missiles and 10%-40% of hypersonic and ballistic missiles, depending on what source you read and what stage of the cat and mouse game they are. It seems quite good.
> 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.
Yet Zelenskyy has been crying out for this "useless junk" and his military has been making good use of it. I think I will trust the person with real skin in the game and real experience in the battlefield as opposed to MIT Prof. Emeritus, Theodore Postol, claiming to have "mathematically proved fraud" from the safety of his ivory tower.
That depends on how far out of touch your reputation was with the facts. If you're not able to live up to your preexisting reputation, being tested is all downside even if it improves your actual capabilities.
