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Notes -
I probably should have said 10 years given how hard Iran's ass is getting kicked.
They could speed things up given that Russia is now the premier Shaheed manufacturer. And Russia is no slouch on missile production either. I doubt China would sell them much offensive stuff.
Your analysis is largely sound, western production should have a nice edge on Iran in the near term, ideally. But yeah, only a fraction of it goes to ME. Everyone and their sister wants patriots/Interceptors right now.
I actually think your comment on the attack/defense power ratio is the most important point. No idea how that will go, but I think Iran's power in 10 years (assuming the current situation ends with a status quo except Iran's military-industrial complex is much flatter) is actually entirely out of their hands.
Either, 1) it remains much easier and cheaper to chuck drones at stuff than it is to blow them up, and Iran will inevitably regain an edge due to this dynamic
Or 2) it becomes quite cheap and easy to blow up cheap drones/missiles and then the only way to deliver warheads to foreheads is stealth cruise missiles or hypersonic ballistic missiles and then Iran is just fucked because they simply don't have the economy to do this and "mowing the lawn" becomes laughably easy as the "stealth cruise missile" supply chain is 100 to 1000x easier to break than a cottage industry making shaheeds in distributed basements.
I tend to agree with what you've said here. I will offer two notes: firstly, from what I can tell, Russia has historically been extremely leery of giving Iran anything that could actually hurt Israel). I am not sure, however, if this would rule out bulk Shaheds. Also, there is no reason Israel can't just build their own Shaheds. The US does it. So it's possible (if unlikely) that in 2036 the Gulf region is just "everyone has 500,000 Shaheds" which would be sort of funny in a dark way, I suppose.
Shaheed wars is kind of funny. It reminds me of a Phillip K Dick short story where the cold war goes hot and both sides have massive underground missile factories and after the initial nuclear exchange, both sides go underground and proceed to systemically level each other's continent grid square by grid square with the missiles they make that day.
Maybe it's not that funny, idk
I do wonder if shaheeds/their derivatives (i.e. cruise missiles lol) will become meta though. Especially once you can get little target detection AI on there for terminal targeting and start networking them together and such.
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