Missile defense is NP-complete

Shot exchange is a huge problem, made even worse by the arrival of cheap drones. But you're implicitly assuming that the adversary is on roughly equal economic footing. If your defense budget is $800 billion and your adversary's defense budget is $8 billion, you can afford to spend 100x as much shooting down their missiles as they spend lofting them.

There's also a danger in projecting linearly from the beginning of a war, where invading forces both tend to use more expensive stand-off munitions and also have to deal with more aggressive missile launches. As the defender's own air defense system gets degraded, the invader can switch from expensive long range stand-off munitions to cheaper stand-in munitions (like glide bombs) launched from much shorter range. Additionally, the invader will be able to diminish the defender's ability to launch missile strikes in the first place, either by destroying the launchers, the missiles themselves, or their production, thus reducing the demand on expensive high-capability interceptors.

Drones and mines continue to offer asymmetric warfare options that are very hard to counter without a robust low side on the high-low mix. Ukraine are the world's leading experts in this currently, and hopefully are involved with US and Gulf forces to try to improve this shot exchange ratio.

I am assuming nobody is using nukes though. That completely changes the picture. One must always assume "(some of) the missiles will get through". Traditional MAD does not require boots on the ground - merely the assurance that if Iran gets one nuke through and hits New York, the USA will respond with 100+ nukes. The real question then is what the other "large" nuclear powers (Russia and China, primarily) will do in response to that.

I haven't seen imagery of damage to Israeli airbases, but plenty of imagery showing damage to US military bases. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0cIOMVBSbU . Worth keeping in mind that in the case of Israel, censorship is very effective.

From the Iranian perspective, the overall strategy seems to have been:

1. Deplete intercepter stock and probe US/Israeli defences using large amounts of older less accurate missile stock and waves of drones.

2. Target radar and early warning systems.

3. After 'blinding', make further use of more vulnerable but cheaper and more accurate drones to target specific infrastructure.

Given this approach it makes total sense to see their 'rate of fire' reduced by 90%. This is not necessarily an indication of reduced ability to launch attacks - their attacks are now more effective. They have demonstrated that each time the US and Israel escalate they successfully respond almost immediately. Talk of their capabilities being wiped out is demonstrably nonsense.

Ted Postol makes much the same points. He also claims to be surprised by the accuracy of recent missiles launched by Iran and assumes that his earlier analysis underestimated this because it was done based on the older stock Iran was using.

It seems pretty clear to me that Israel and the US are on the back foot here. Defences are inadequate. Economic pressure is building. Iran still has plenty of options to increase pressure (e.g. Houthi involvement, further infrastructure targeting, additional constrictions on the strait of Hormuz). By comparison US ability to increase pressure now seems limited to threatening major war crimes (wiping out Iran's power grid and putting the country into blackout). Not to say many of Iran's actions haven't also been war crimes.

How much more damage can Iran accept? Nobody is about to be voted out of power there so I would think quite a bit (as unpleasant as that is for the millions of innocent people caught up in this madness). I think the truth of all of this is that the US and Israel have no way to wipe out Iran's missile and drone capabilities. Postol even suggests nukes wouldn't even accomplish that. So now what? Taco or push further for Iranian political unrest or division.

My feeling is that this is going to get a lot worse for everyone involved.

i don't think complete invulnerability was ever the goal of missile defense. It was meant to be a countermeasure to something where before there was none. I'm actually surprised it works as well as it does. Back when these things were first being developed and tested the thought was intercepting nuclear armed ICBMs, they were supposed to be massively destabilizing with respect to MAD and could conceivably give a nation first strike advantage. First strike advantage means just bare minimum survival not that you never get hit at all. Fortunately, that never really materialized.

We don't need to imagine. Hundreds of kids sheltered in Mariupol theater building were killed in one attack in the first weeks of the war.

> the cost of interceptors is greatly more expensive than the cost of building the conventional missiles

And the same thing is true with this comparison. The cost comparison is not interceptor vs conventional missile.

It's interceptor vs conventional missile + the damage the missile would have done.

Yes, you don't want to use Patriots to intercept Shaheds but that's an argument for using the right tool for the job. It's not an argument that the economics of interception are completely broken.

Ukraine has interceptors that are cheaper than Shaheds.