I don't see how drones don't make all conflicts into WW1. 100 Billion dollars buys about 3.3 million Shaheds assuming the manufacturing is not made more efficient. There are many questions on whether its possible to spend 100 billion dollars on Shaheds, or launch all of them. But this is more than enough to destroy any logistics and transportation infrastructure necessary for a ground invasion.

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.

Air defenses do not need to be 100% effective to be... effective.

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.

> interception rate yet it's really at the mercy of Iran to not target their most vulnerable sites

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

Except this looks likely to exhaust the US/Israel alliance, if it continues long, leaving China in the "US in/after WWII" spot in the analogy.

MIT Prof. Emeritus, Theodore Postol, has been trying to warn about this basic, mathematically proved fraud for many years now.

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!)

I agree that a barrage of maneuvering missiles can be neigh impossible to defend against.

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.

One very interesting instance of the "military data moat" is Ukraine's annotated database of drone footage, perhaps the first of its scale from live engagements [0]:

> 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)

That's not what deterrence means. From google: the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences.

It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.

History doesn't necessarily make it clear when a war might have started but didn't because of some specific factor. Mainly you see the wars that did happen. (It has a strong survivorship bias in the sense that a war "survived" history if it went ahead for real rather than being considered and decided against.)

You seem to be implying that there is a long history of countries starting wars against the USA?

To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown that way.

Especially when they're optimizing for afterlife.

Yes, if it was acting rationally the US Would not have spent billions trying to blow up an 80 year old man while massively increasing the price of oil and fertiliser globally leading to economic instability

But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.

Russia regularly uses cluster warheads on their ballistic missiles to a devastating effect. It all depends on the type of the target.

Depends, blanketing Ben Gurion (or any airbase) with parked aircraft on the tarmac with carpet munition is a really bad day.

But yes, against protected targets cluster munitions do not achieve much.

If you have relatively few low-precision missiles, using single warheads means you are risking achieving NO damage (easier to intercept, a good chance that it will hit nothing), with a cluster munition you are guaranteeing at least some damage.

I think Iranians are mixing both types of warheads.

>The damage these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable, and they don't do much to create deterrence.

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.

Hm, Iran destroyed several of the radars used for seeing their missiles in the early stages of their trajectory.

Hitting Ballistic missiles "Midcourse" as you suggest requires interceptors that look more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_3

It is.... Entirely infeasible to deploy these against tactical ballistics like Iran is using.

How many protesters were killed leading up to it?

The USA

Imagine the NATO reaction if on the very first day of Russo-Ukrainian war offensive is by Russia performing missiles bombing murdering 100 kids studying in Ukraine primary school.

Trump candid reaction to the Iranian school incident when asked by reporter was "I can live with that".

“Iranian kids may die... but that’s a prize I’m willing to pay.”

It's heavily dependent on geography. Iran is geographically "lucky" it's positioned near the Strait of Hormuz and near the oil facilities of multiple Gulf states, allowing it to exert extreme asymmetric pressure through a small amount of drones etc. Most states can't replicate that luck. Good luck to South Africa if they ever decide to wage a similar war. Strategic depth also largely nullifies the role of one-way attack drones in combat, but it doesn't nullify the role of fighters and bombers who can exploit that range. I'm not discounting drones, they're highly important in many geographies, as Ukraine is showing, but I don't buy into this conventional wisdom online that they're the pinnacle in every situation.

This betrays your ignorance of drone defense tech.

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.

A trillion seems large but it's not that absurd. The drone that shut down 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity is said to have caused 20 billion USD worth of annual lost revenue. They said it'll take up to 5 years to rebuild so that could be 100 billion USD in lost revenue, plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild.

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.

In theory; in practice however, there's been rocket fire from Gaza towards Israel where the offence was literally a metallic tube with a bit of TNT at a cost of about $800 per rocket [0] while the defence was $100,000+ per interceptor [1]. This has been going on for years, and as far as I'm aware there was no depletion observed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

Not if you (a) destroy their production capacity while they don't destroy yours; (b) you destroy their stockpiles while they don't destroy yours; and (c) you've found a bottleneck on their side (launchers) and destroy it while they fail to inflict the same damage on you.

That is a trade off that hopefully you never need to consider, but it is a valid concern that does come up in the real world.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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!

They aren't using Patriots on Shahed drones. There are much cheaper purpose-built systems for that. While not practical everywhere, helicopter gun systems have proven effective in both the Middle East and Ukraine.

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.

No, what I said is not wrong just because there exists other things to intercept, that just changes the ratio.

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.

The problem there is you can't prove anything would have come down the chimney if the preemption is successful, so people will still be unhappy.

A thought experiment: would the world be a better place if the US had preemptively attacked the USSR in the 50s or early 60s when it was possible to do without more than “get[ting] our hair mussed” as General Turgidson put it?

> For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.

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...

I get the impression you didn't read the linked post. It goes into the details, atmospheric absorption for different wavelength, weather conditions, tracking time, interception time based on warhead hardness ratings and many more details. It's paper based, so in practice it will be more complicated and there are things it will have missed, and things we don't even know yet as being operational challenges for such systems. At the same time, it does present a compelling narrative and I'd much rather discuss individual assumptions or sources than dismiss it entirely based on a gut feeling.

The recently announced "Golden Dome" project intends to get around this issue by putting a vast constellation of satellites into orbit. Each satellite would likely need a serious source of power in order to use its laser. Assuming that's just an engineering problem, then the issue becomes coverage. That is, depending on the adversary's capabilities, you'd need an absolutely massive constellation in orbit [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

The linked article covers that in depth, it's not implausible to punch a hole through a storm with pulsed laser of that class. Honestly we don't know enough about these systems to know their operational limits but we know weather will play a role.

ICBM means the missile is able to be launched into other continent (more than 5K kilometers in range), not about its effective warhead. Iranian missiles are fast and efficient, but their effective range is essentially being able to target Israel and the Gulf States, which means they are not ICBMs. Also, the one country in the Middle East who does have ICBM missiles and can target Europe is Israel, not Iran.

The IC in ICBM mean Intercontinental and specifies the range, not how impressive it looks in videos.

OK, assume infinite resources, but the attacker only has one missile, and the defender only has one interceptor.

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.

Well there the cost plays a part! It’s not independent. If I can build 1000 missiles for every 1 interceptor, the probability of interception hardly matters.

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.

Computer guidance? Better materials? Better telemetry?

How it can be ambigiuous who the bad guys are in this context is beyond me. It’s obviously Israel and America.

I'm quoting the missile cost. I think they're quoting the launchers + a few missiles.

(Also, lower bounding the cost improves the argument that they're too expensive to be practical.)

The cost primarily comes from the work needed to be done to make sure it works, not the raw materials. But there probably are some pretty expensive materials in it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sp...

This is what we had to build in the 60s to allow a missile to know where it physically existed precisely enough to allow it to 50% of the time hit within a circle of ~50 meters.

When you get to certain points in physics, certain energy regimes, you no longer are building machines or tools or something mass market. You are building artisan scientific instruments, and then sometimes gluing explosives to them.

Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner table with the precision and accuracy of the above singular component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was a long time ago.

"Tech" and some of the developments of the past few decades have really confused people. The miniaturization of the transistor, and building billions of transistors on a small slice of silicon is an aberration, an anomaly. Most things don't get "Better and better and cheaper and cheaper" like that because shit just doesn't scale infinitely and in general materials science isn't that precise.

For these ground based midcourse interceptors, they have to precisely loft the interceptor package at an incoming projectile. They have to shoot a bullet with a bullet, except the target bullet might even be moving around a bit, and your ability to precisely quantify the exact parameters of it's position and velocity is already limited. Is your position and velocity measurement an inch off? Two inches? Is that too much?

How well have you quantified the thrust of your rocket engine? THIS specific rocket engine, not a random one from the batch. Will you be off in a direction by a few meters per second? That might be enough to scuttle your interception.

IIRC this is the interception payload, a kinetic kill vehicle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM

Then, are any of those nozzles slightly less smooth than they should be? That's a miss. Did propellant slosh in an unexpected way? That's a miss, Chicago is now a smoldering crater. Incoming round bounce your rader signal in just a slightly different way than you had the data to know about? Miss, San Fransisco now has significantly cheaper real estate. Chaotic properties of hot expanding gas slightly different than your simulation in the unluckiest way? Miss.

You have to exhaustively inspect, reinspect, quality control, test, simulate, retest, catalogue, document, every single component. You have to be able to predict, almost perfectly, how every single component will act and perform in a situation you will never get a test for.

High energy physics is always going to be hard, never cheap, because high concentrations of energy are literally what the universe itself is trying to reduce. The rules of reality itself are against you.

A creator on youtube named Alexander the Ok has done wonderful videos on a lot of the technology that goes into these systems, especially older, less classified systems.

They are, but only have a range of 1.2 miles in earth's atmosphere. Since they're on the ground, and presumably near the target (not the launcher), that means they're aimed at the warhead just before it hits the ground.

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://remm.hhs.gov/zones_nucleardetonation.htm

> None of those countries are using directed energy weapons

The USS Preble is equipped with HELIOS and is in Iran. [0] The US has also used "dazzlers" there too (as mentioned in the linked X thread). [1]

Israel's Iron Beam was used against Hezbollah's drones (Iranian tech), with apparently limited return for it, this could explain why it won't be seeing action in Iran. [3][4]

The only alleged case of Russia using DEWs was in August 2025. [5] Admittedly, it was a reach for me to even name them.

As cost-effective (and cool-sounding) as DEWs are meant to be, there's a reason the US and Gulf states are beckoning Ukraine for help. At the same time, the Pentagon want's to ramp up development with 3 years and the US military at large seems to be bullish on lasers...[6]

[0]: https://xcancel.com/sebastienroblin/status/20361510681621877...

[1]: https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/navy-news/2026/u-s-navy...

[3]: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-889677

[4]: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-889701

[5]: https://t.me/milinfolive/154597?single/

[6]: https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2026/03/18/th...