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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.
This may have effect on future wars but has no effect on the current war on Iran or even other near term wars the US participates in, particularly given how slow such procedures change in the US military.
For the moment the attack side has significant cost advantage.
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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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