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I fear that I am going to be repeating, until the end of time, that just because you read something in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true.
What I mean is, knowledge in the fog of war is unfalsifiable. The real information about how many interceptors America has is classified. So is the information about how many of them we used. It would take a lot of scrutiny to prove that what’s floating around on the internet has any credibility. A lot more scrutiny that what I’ve seen on social media.
I remember, for example, when Russia was going to run out of bullets weeks into its invasion of Ukraine. Or when Hillary was so far ahead of Trump that she didn’t even have to think about him anymore.
So when we start factoring out these unfalsifiable rumors, it seems pretty obvious to me who won. America can threaten Iran at will and they have no meaningful way to retaliate. Their only recourse is to attack shipping on the Strait, which can strain the global economy but is not nearly as dramatic of a lever as had once been imagined. America is in such a different weight class from Iran that we have to start inventing hopes that maybe America’s super weapons ran out of ammunition and the Iranian rockets will definitely blow something up next time, any day now.
This gap will grow as America is the only power capable of building into Space and the AI frontier.
That's not how wars work, though. You lost in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in every occasion you enjoyed vast military superiority by the end. "We can kill them, they can't kill us" is simplistic and part of the problem, which is a bronze age savage's theory of victory coupled with an actually cost-sensitive political and economic system.
As for interceptors, I find the alleged exhaustion rates plausible despite "classified" noise from your India-tier corrupt officials, for the following reasons: corrupt people are generally untrustworthy; we know 21st century America is generally subpar at physical production; we know that some arms sales were frozen and THAADs were harvested from Korea; we know that interception rates have declined over the war, esp. in Israel; we know the bases are wrecked.
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible? You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP. Is this just blind patriotism?
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