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I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with much of what you're saying, but I'm curious as to your definition of cheap.
As it stands, it's looking like the US military expended:
Now this war has been profoundly cheap in terms of servicemembers' lives, praise be
I also am not getting into the cost of the political capital expended, both domestically and abroad, as those are hard to measure without hindsight and so can be left to argue about after the midterms lol
But it's materially degraded the stocks of offensive and defensive effectors in a way that is quite bad for a pending great power conflict against a heavily industrialized foe (rhymes with Carolina).
Was the war cheap in an absolute sense/in a vacuum? Maybe, perhaps even probably. Was the war, from an opportunity cost perspective, cheap? Less likely, and if China decides to get spicy in the SCS in the next 5 years, that becomes a resounding "no"
My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
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I think these claims were a hidden message that the entire thing is fake an a joke. There aren't many places these missiles can be fired from and hit Iran, and osint sources were pretty obviously reporting when they were used. And based on osint they were only used in a limited capacity in the latest round of strikes.
So either the US was firing off thousands of these from some secret place for most of the war, then all of a sudden decided to launch a few volleys from obvious and observable places, or the claims are complete bs.
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