I don't see how drones don't make all conflicts into WW1. 100 Billion dollars buys about 3.3 million Shaheds assuming the manufacturing is not made more efficient. There are many questions on whether its possible to spend 100 billion dollars on Shaheds, or launch all of them. But this is more than enough to destroy any logistics and transportation infrastructure necessary for a ground invasion.

There are many many countries who can afford 100 billion dollars for stored military equipment that has a long shelf life. The US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of about 10k per shell.

Air defenses do not need to be 100% effective to be... effective.

Russia cannot keep Ukraine from targeting their oil infrastructure, yet here Russia is, still fighting on. Ukraine cannot prevent Russia from targeting their energy infrastructure or apartment buildings, yet here they are, still fighting on.

If we're talking about strategic/civil air defense, then you must figure out what's tolerable to your population (and how to increase and maintain that tolerance), and then figure out all the means to reduce the incoming attacks to below that tolerance. That must include the full spectrum of offensive, counter offensive, defensive, and informational options.

> interception rate yet it's really at the mercy of Iran to not target their most vulnerable sites

And what this site and you don't account for, is Iranian rather low missile accuracy.

If Israel was at the mercy of Iranian attacks, Iran could have simply struck Israeli airbases to the point they cannot be used, and then stop any Israeli attacks on its territory.

It's pretty obvious they don't have the capabilities of doing that

Except this looks likely to exhaust the US/Israel alliance, if it continues long, leaving China in the "US in/after WWII" spot in the analogy.

With Bayraktar it was a software update for radar that allowed for Russian to destroy them. The radar signature of Bayraktar was way off from a typical target that radars were looking for at the beginning of the war.

One very interesting instance of the "military data moat" is Ukraine's annotated database of drone footage, perhaps the first of its scale from live engagements [0]:

> They can now draw on an enormous pool of real warfare information. Last year alone, Ukrainian drones recorded around 820,000 verified strikes against Russian targets... Meanwhile, the country’s Avengers AI platform detects upwards of 12,000 enemy targets every week. Developers can now access these sources and the data that they gather to train their systems on the movements of a real Russian turtle tank or a camouflaged Lancet launcher.

> “Ukraine currently possesses a unique body of battlefield data unmatched anywhere in the world,” recently appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a statement. “This includes millions of annotated frames collected during tens of thousands of combat drone missions.”

With the latency and offline constraints of battlefield technology, smaller models, trained with better data, may prove to have a significant edge. But it's still early days on how data like this might prove advantageous in other environments.

[0] https://resiliencemedia.co/how-ukraine-is-transforming-its-b... (unconfirmed source, this is not an endorsement)

MIT Prof. Emeritus, Theodore Postol, has been trying to warn about this basic, mathematically proved fraud for many years now.

Indeed, there are any number of very smart people who made up their mind 40 years ago in opposition to Reagan and SDI.

Surprisingly, very few of these folks have evolved their position over decades of changes in the strategic and technology pictures:

Defensive systems can’t work and are inherently destabilizing even though everyone knows they can’t work.

(I’m modestly agreed on the second point!)

I agree that a barrage of maneuvering missiles can be neigh impossible to defend against.

Regarding these cluster munitions though, other than very densely populated areas, do they inflict much damage ? Are they more powerful than a grenade, say ?

It's going to devastating to soft tissue surely, and pierce through ordinary sheet metal, but normal concrete walls might offer sufficient protection. Unless, of course, it punches through the ceiling by virtue of sheer kinetic energy.

BTW I have no expertise in these matters, so corrections would be very welcome. I also recognize that I am commenting about something from the comfort and of being out of range and this discussion can be very distressing.

That's not what deterrence means. From google: the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences.

It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.

History doesn't necessarily make it clear when a war might have started but didn't because of some specific factor. Mainly you see the wars that did happen. (It has a strong survivorship bias in the sense that a war "survived" history if it went ahead for real rather than being considered and decided against.)

You seem to be implying that there is a long history of countries starting wars against the USA?

To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown that way.

Yes, if it was acting rationally the US Would not have spent billions trying to blow up an 80 year old man while massively increasing the price of oil and fertiliser globally leading to economic instability

But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.

Especially when they're optimizing for afterlife.

Depends, blanketing Ben Gurion (or any airbase) with parked aircraft on the tarmac with carpet munition is a really bad day.

But yes, against protected targets cluster munitions do not achieve much.

If you have relatively few low-precision missiles, using single warheads means you are risking achieving NO damage (easier to intercept, a good chance that it will hit nothing), with a cluster munition you are guaranteeing at least some damage.

I think Iranians are mixing both types of warheads.

Russia regularly uses cluster warheads on their ballistic missiles to a devastating effect. It all depends on the type of the target.

>The damage these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable, and they don't do much to create deterrence.

Has there been a study on this? What is the GDP loss of having however many Israelis go to bunkers due to incoming ballistics instead of working ?

If a trash cluster missile that costs 100k USD to build causes 1mio USD worth of GDP to not be produced (numbers completely made up) then it's very worth it.

Hm, Iran destroyed several of the radars used for seeing their missiles in the early stages of their trajectory.

Hitting Ballistic missiles "Midcourse" as you suggest requires interceptors that look more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_3

It is.... Entirely infeasible to deploy these against tactical ballistics like Iran is using.

How many protesters were killed leading up to it?

The USA

Imagine the NATO reaction if on the very first day of Russo-Ukrainian war offensive is by Russia performing missiles bombing murdering 100 kids studying in Ukraine primary school.

Trump candid reaction to the Iranian school incident when asked by reporter was "I can live with that".

“Iranian kids may die... but that’s a prize I’m willing to pay.”