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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.
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 regarding 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.
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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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