| ▲ | wat10000 11 hours ago | |
For one thing, the entire world economy is not even close to 1000x Iran’s. | ||
| ▲ | hedora 11 hours ago | parent [-] | |
$1M / $30 (patriot cost / drone cost) is only 33x. The US economy is about 31x larger than Iran's. So, to first order approximation, we could build enough patriots to sustainably stop their drones. However, we haven't converted our economy to just producing Patriots. We can only produce 600 / year. Drone production rates are orders of magnitude higher than that. As for second order effects, the interception probabilities are less than one, so in this world where we're producing a million patriots per year, tens of thousands of drones (at minimum) are hitting their targets. On top of that, the offensive drones are more easily transported + retargeted, so the patriots would need to be stationed pretty much everywhere, and their adversary chooses where the attacks actually happen. The only winning move is not to play. | ||