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Ground report from the UAE
TLDR; Passing thougths from a UAE resident amidst the Iran war. Nothing groundbreaking, but you all might appreiate the perspective of someone closer to the action.
Where have you been?
I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.
How are you?
In the midst of the fog of war. I am barely sleeping. Not because I am scared, but because the emergency alerts are really loud. And because my girlfriend is scared and I stay with her on video call for support. I am typign this at 7:18AM GST.
Your experience may vary, but seeing missiles fly over my head and interceptors fire from less than a mile away changed me as a person. I am aware it can be much worse but I wasn't ever expecting to experience this!
To the point I could partion my life into 'before and after the missiles'. I was driving from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah at approximately 7PM on the 28th of February when interceptors started firing from less than a mile from me. I sped upto 120 miles/hour to GTFO of there. An overwhelming majority of the drivers did not speed up, they slowed down. Idiots!
From then on; emrgency alerts, booms and thuds and drones are a daily thing. I'm not really worried about me or my closed ones physical safety per se. But there is this background vibe that something is wrong no matter how much I try to ignore it. It's quite mentally draining, and this is despite me not being scared for my safety or livelihoood at all!
How is everyone else?
Seems to be roughly three camps of people broadly.
Business as usual
Unlike the last time something was supposed to last for 2 weeks. The government is encouraging you to carry on as normal, head outside even! For obvious reasons, the UAE's entire selling point is that it's safe, and now "it's safe, even with suice drone flying around". Sucks to see large swathes of people not only buy this shit wholesale but parrot it endlessly.
Social media idiocy is in full swing. The most grating are when someone reports hearing fighter jets in their area, and gets mobbed by the most sanctimonious people on earth "kindly" asking them to not share intel with the enemy. As if a forein adversary is relying on civilian reports from reddit of a jet flying at Mach 2. I can go on all day! To be fair, no one was mentally prepared for this, they are "doing their part", whatever helps them sleep at night.
A sad casuality of said idiocy was the abundance of on the ground footage that was available for the first 2 days. The government sent out warnings against posting said videos backed by heavy fines. Much fewer footage is being posted on social media, but they're circulating widely in whatsapp groups.
So what scares you?
"Things are never so bad they can't get worse"
Cue to the last time something was going to be over in "two weeks". Despite a handful of civilian casualities and a majority of the drones and missiles being intercepted, this is unsustainable. The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!
Oh also, the UAE imports 80% of its food and has vitually no fresh water. The Straight of Hormuz being closed off for long enough and a desalination plant being hit would turn into a nightmare to put it lightly! I would probably regret not evacuating at that point. I give a 20% chance of things getting that bad.
I am also skeptical of the success rate of the interceptions. Iran prety much hit everything they would have hit (This list is not exhaustive):
The government claims these were hit by debrey after interception. Oh wow, debrey just happend to land on 4/4 active airports!
Reported as AAQC.
Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through. The Gulf states are said to have intercepted 521 ballistic missiles out of 538 with an accuracy rate of 97% in the first four days of war; the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate. That's 1042 interceptors burned through on the very generous low end, or 260.5 per day. The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can). In other words, in the first four days they've consumed a year and a half's worth of interceptor production, it's likely the Gulf's stockpiles are running down fast. During the previous 12-day war the US burned through a quarter of its THAAD supply, and that was a relatively short war; interceptors are an extremely scarce resource.
Then again, Iranian missile facilities are also being bombed which limits its ability to wage a war of attrition, so it's going to be interesting to see which side wins the numbers game in the end. You better cross your fingers and hope Iran runs out before you do.
My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets, but I don't know that success has trickled down to the Gulf, or if the target set is such that they feel able to do this.
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Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.
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Can anyone explain why we live in a world in which we can scale any electronics but the military ones? Seems like no one including Russia can build missiles at scale any more. I am not specialist, but there is nothing in a rocket - tube, sensors array, cpu, explosive and propellant. Nothing of which is that complicated or with right design should require special labor or equipment.
Because you're literally hitting a bullet with a bullet (PAC-3 and THAAD are both hit-to-kill) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase can move at speeds of Mach 8-16? The extraordinary precision required to achieve interception is a pretty big technical feat that requires a lot of cost and time and stress-testing, including some very powerful avionics and computers that need to be not only small but deal with the conditions of being in a missile flying at Mach 8 and still working.
It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.
I am not sure this will be the case over the medium term. Small laser-guided rockets have already bent the cost curve backwards in certain situations for certain target sets; I think very large lasers might become effective against ballistic missiles as a point-defense weapon over the next decade or so.
The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.
These are, at least in the medium term, mostly point-defense weapons, meaning that if they mature ballistic missiles will likely continue to be effective as terror weapons but their ability to hit specific targets may decrease tremendously if those targets are protected by counter-missile systems.
Now, there are counter-countermeasures - the Oreshnik is probably well-positioned to make it past point-defenses, but there's also certain downsides to using submunitions, and forcing the enemy to rely on missiles that are maneuvering, hardened, or using submunitions will tend to drive the cost per missile up and/or efficiency per missile down compared to a unitary warhead.
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You are explaining me why it will be hard to R&D. Not why once you developed it you can only produce 600 and not 600000 per year.
Because, for the above reasons, it's super costly and the US can't commit infinite money to building and maintaining these. Also, you need to test every very complex component rigorously; quality control is not optional when the alternative is a missile taking out crucial infrastructure or killing hundreds/thousands. A single component failing rounds of testing can sometimes lead to production being halted out of QC concerns.
If we produced more the cost per unit will fall dramatically. If we produced more we wouldn't care that much about quality because we could afford to shoot more of them. If we decided that patriot is the only air defense system we will need - and our allies too - once again we should have produced more interceptors - so once again we get into the economy of scale.
In classic US acquisition fashion, we actually have several systems, with the Navy maintaining Aegis and using different missiles with AFAIK similar capabilities.
There's been discussion about putting Patriot missiles in the Navy VLS cells. Probably won't replace the higher-end Standards for niche rolls but might help spread the cost out for general air defense.
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This is what the US is currently trying to do but it's easier said than done, since there are many supply chain bottlenecks; you would need to scale production not only of the interceptors but also of their component parts like solid rocket motors and guidance seekers, which are quite underproduced. You'd need to significantly expand the base of skilled personnel and factory capacity across the supply chain, not only at Lockheed Martin but also at BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop, L3Harris and virtually anyone else involved, and many of these industries are hyperconsolidated as fuck. Many microelectronics, minerals and rare earths used in these interceptors are inherently limited in supply and also heavily leans on foreign sources, particularly China, which is a gigantic dependency of the US. And even then there's a limit to cost reduction through economies of scale.
Also, having quality uncertainties in something as critical as interceptors is a horrible idea even if you can manufacture a lot of them; having a somewhat accurate idea of your capabilities is crucial to war strategy.
If you need skilled workforce for manufacturing you fucked up royally during the design phase. Same for other stuff. And I keep hearing about those mythic rare earths and military and yet no one explains why they are needed in such quantities that to be a bottleneck compared to the obscene amounts we already throw away with the disposable vapes. And the biggest producer of semiconductors on earth will bend over backwards to allow us to produce more of those needed for interceptors if we just promise them to sell them some at any price.
And this is why any competent design is based on the assumption that everything will break and not work when you need it most, this is why stuff needs to be able to be produced at scale, with untrained personnel, sometimes under terrible conditions. Not treating any such system as a artisanal wunderwaffen.
With modern computers, cad cam, electronics - we should be able to design faster, iterate way faster, and produce more and cheaper. And that is obviously not true, at least until the war hits home - both Ukraine and Russia seems to be able to wage full scale next gen war with what could roughly be describes as US military toilet paper budget.
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FWIW, similar speculations have been aired in Finnish newspaper analyses about USA's short term available stockpiles for the war. Fancy defence missiles are expensive and limited while Iran's ballistic missiles and Shaheds are much cheaper. Further, Iran doesn't even have to hit all that regularly and as long as they can keep the threat level up, that's going to have a major effect on the economy of several of the gulf states and shipping (which in turn will have global economic effects). Iran can't win the war but they may be able to prevent USA also from winning.
This has historically been the case, but I have heard rumblings from Ukraine that mass production of drone interceptors for Shaheds has actually pushed the price of those to below that of the attack drones. On one hand, guidance for hitting a moving target is difficult, but the actual interceptors are pretty tiny compared to the bombs attack side, which is also more complex (decoys, maneuvering, hitting moving targets, non-GPS navigation). Modern manufacturing makes lots of small, complex electronics devices pretty cheaply and I can imagine materials cost starts dominating for moving bigger warheads longer distances at some point.
I would also be unsurprised if the quoted prices aren't quite even comparisons: are the attack side prices including R&D overhead, or just unit manufacturing costs? Most Western weapon costs I see quoted include overhead, but compare against per-unit costs. The "price" of interceptors, which we historically haven't bought huge numbers of, might have a lot of room to go down.
Or maybe that's an exercise in wish casting, but I think it's worth considering.
I doubt it, at least I certainly doubt it will equalise any time soon.
This source isn't exactly analogous to the situation in Iran and the Gulf since it largely deals with ICBMs in a nuclear-war scenario, but it is a pretty good attempt at assessing the difficulty of defence vs offence especially in a situation requiring moving large warheads long distances, and it turns out the unit cost of an ICBM is $42m if you include maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m after factoring in support and maintenance. The cost differential between offence and defence is massive, and if you want to filter out 90% of warheads shot you have to spend anywhere near 8-70 times as much as your attacker (8 times is a very best case scenario, 70 times is more realistic).
I suspect you're right on the ABM interceptors for now, but I remember people saying similar things about cruise missiles a few decades back. We've been able to intercept incoming mortar fire at least a decade at this point, which was probably incomprehensible back in, say, Vietnam.
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Doesn't that heavily incentivise people to go even harder on offense, because the only sustainable defense is actually preventing people from firing the missiles in the first place?
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