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Yes, this war has not gone well for America, but that was hardly unexpected, there’s a reason no previous American president was dumb enough to do this, including HW and Jr. Disarming Hezbollah is equally flawed, Shias in Lebanon are loyal to it and will reform and rebuild it in whatever guise, whatever the case, and the country is too divided by sectarianism to stop them. I hesitate to say it’s over for Israel, it’s faced poor odds before, but the future certainly isn’t bright for it.
America has destroyed Iran's military and leadership and experienced a scant dozen casualties. In what sense has this war gone poorly?
Has it achieved any goals? At what cost?
I'd also score "we never really thought about what our goals are" as not achieving goals. Right now, the main goal seems to be an open Hormuz and stable markets... Which we had before the war started.
The war has definitely depleted Iranian munitions stockpiles (even if we assume that US efforts to strike those stockpiles were 0% effective, which they were not, and all of that depletion is from launching them at all and sundry.)
The US said that (besides self-defense) preventing Iran from projecting power and completing a nuclear weapon were its primary objectives on March 2.
Destroying their navy and missile inventory is a means of preventing Iran from projecting power.
Without inside knowledge of how effective US strikes are, what Iran's stockpiles look like, etc. I cannot tell exactly how effective this has been, but it definitely seems like Iran's ability to project power has been negatively impacted.
This is very true. But what do we do in 5 years when they.... make more?
There's a reason we are bombing their industrial defense production. And, from what I can tell, there's good reasons at this point to think that Israel will just keep bombing those production facilities, particularly if Iran does not agree to an arms control agreement.
But let's assume that "mowing the lawn" doesn't happen. Wanna see me do some really sloppy analysis?
Iran first started producing ballistic missiles in the mid-late 1980s, so completely destroying their production entirely sets them back by 35 years of infrastructure and production. However, that's a naive estimate, because part of what's difficult about ballistic missiles is accumulating the knowledge to build them. I think we can assume that the US and probably more especially Israeli are attacking that accumulated knowledge, but it's more difficult to do that than it is to blow up a bunch of static buildings.
One estimate I found guessed that Iran could build 300 ballistic missiles and an eye-watering 10,000 Shaheds per month in peacetime.
This works out, in a very, very simplistic evaluative way, of Iran having the capability to build the facilities to produce about, let's say, 10 ballistic missiles per month every year, building up from 0 in 1990 to 300/month today.
It's a bit harder to evaluate the Shahed, but let's just say that they started the program in 2016, since there is at least some evidence of it being used in 2019 (they may have acquired blueprints for a similar design around 2004 but I like 2016 since it gives us a nice round ten years). That suggests it takes a mere 1 year to build out the capability to produce 1000 Shaheds per month.
So if we assume for the sake of easy math that Iran has to rebuild their ballistic missile program entirely from scratch and progressively ramps up manufacturing, we find that their ballistic missile production ramps up like so:
720 sounds like a lot, but the US will have built 3000 Patriots in that time at 2026 production levels plus the excess Patriots manufactured as the US ramps up from 600 produced to 2000 produced per year between 2026 and 2033. It's unclear to me what the Israeli production rates are, but 200 annually of Stunner and Arrow-3 doesn't seem insane. So in 5 years it seems plausible that the Israeli or even a fraction of US interceptor capability will be able to handle the bulk of the Iranian ballistic missile threat.
Shahed numbers will be considerably higher, however, since our estimate is that they are 100 times as easy to produce. So in five years, we can expect 72,000 Shaheds, right around the 80,000 my source gives as an estimate of Iran's stockpiles at the start of this conflict. But, BAE is producing 25,000 APKWS guidance kits per year, and last year a new Iron Dome facility opened in Arkansas that is supposed to be able to produce 2,000 Iron Dome rockets per year. That works out to around 125,000 APKWS and 10,000 Iron Dome rockets to intercept the 72,000 Shaheds.
NOW, I don't think there's really any reason to think that the US will divert every single one of their APKWS to Israel, but there are a lot of cheap anti-drone systems coming online now, like the Martlet (which is expected, I think, to be sold to countries in the Gulf, although perhaps not Israel) and Iron Beam, and this doesn't take into account other defenses (like conventional air-to-air missiles or even the 30mm on Apaches). So it doesn't seem impossible that even against Shaheds, in 5 years there will be a lot of cheap defenses proliferated in the region.
Obviously, this is a VERY CRUDE TOY MODEL that is likely significantly off from what we will see in real life. It doesn't take into account cost, either, and from what I understand Iran in particular is under some financial strain at the moment, although they also are building relatively cheap offensive weapons. But the fun thing is that you can plug in whatever numbers you want (e.g. 500 baseline ballistic missiles and 2000 baseline Shaheds in stockpiles, or a residual production capability, or larger production numbers for the US+Israel to represent increasing Patriot and APKWS production, etc.) and see how the math works out.
While I don't think this is "realistic," I do think it suggests that Iran in 5 years will probably be less capable than they were at the start of this fight as regards ballistic missile stockpiles. Meanwhile we can anticipate advancements both technologically and in production from anti-missile systems over in the next 5 years. So there's actually at least some reason to think that the balance of power in the region will shift if Iran's production capabilities are significantly reduced.
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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