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.
