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.
Of course, once loitering, intelligent munitions make it too dangerous to be an economically valuable human outside of a bunker, we'll need robots running the robot factories, then we get Philip K. Dick's scenario in The Second Variety.
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.
This is bonkers. Countries can now afford for the same cost * to make not a 10-20 mile range artillery shell, but a 1500 mile effective range cruise missile.
* Defense costs are "fake" to a large degree. A lot of that is really corruption with money flowing from the taxpayers to the arms manufacturers, but still if we go by the numbers...
Closer to $3000. Pre-2022 it was around $800/shell for standard 155mm HE.
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
Regarding the gulf, there the Iranians are having better success as at those ranges intercepting drones is harder and due to the general military ineffectiveness of the gulf nations
You can then see that they shifted to completely attacking large cities, usually with cluster bomblets. The reason is when you are bombing a large area, aim is less of an issue, similar to WW2 carpet bombing
Your post alludes to drones, these do not reach Israel (from Iran) at all and are all intercepted
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.
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
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.
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.
