Posted by O3marchnative 14 hours ago
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
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.
The Ukrainians don’t think about today’s tradeoff but also about tomorrows. They learned that when when a three day special operation turned into four years.
You have to match your best defenses against the best expected incoming attack- across time- even if it means taking a hit. Yes desalination plant included
The us doctrine of defend all the things all the time against everything has failed in light of modern drone warefare
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...
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...
Even if you can can deliver enough energy for long enough, there is no fuel to burn and it might not be easy to detonate or disable the warhead.
For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.
But that's very much not near-future.
Lasers might still be useful for rockets, drones and cruise missiles of course.
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...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
For one thing, it can do little to nothing about low flying nuclear tipped cruise missiles, especially in less than ideal weather. These already exist, so the Golden Dome system is already inadequate on day one.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
> President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the United States Armed Forces to construct the [...] Golden Dome
Well, that's just taking the piss!
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.
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.
Whatever you want to call them, they are "hypersonic" traveling over 15k mph.
They definitely look fast too in the videos where they smash into Israeli housing destroying everything in an instant.
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.
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.
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.
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...