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Yesterday the Pentagon announced that three service members were killed in action in the Iranian war. Today they announced that three F-15s had been shot down in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait. This war will continue to be more unpopular as stuff like this inevitably happens.
Sal Mercogliano, who runs the “What’s Going On With Shipping” YouTube channel, believes that the soldiers were killed in an Iranian attack on Bahrain. Sal’s a former member of the Merchant Marine and an expert on shipping logistics. In one of his recent videos, he noted that the US sure isn’t acting like they’re going to put significant troops on the ground, because all of the ships that would be used to transport troops are sitting in port with little or no indication that they’re going to be leaving soon. That’s the good news, I guess.
James Joyner at the OG Outside the Beltway blog has a good round up of the issues that the US and allies will have with a prolonged war. In short, we’re going to run out of expensive missiles. The economics of shooting down cheap drones with expensive missiles are stacked on Iran’s side. Here’s one of the sources James quotes:
The drones are where it gets truly punishing.
Iran spent ~$11–27M on 541 Shahed drones. The UAE fired interceptors averaging $500K–$1.5M per drone kill against 506 of them. UAE drone defense cost: ~$253M–$759M.
UAE spent:
Ballistic missile defense: ~$1.2–1.52B
Drone defense: ~$253–759M
*Total: ~$1.45–2.28B
The UAE spent 5–10x more defending than Iran spent attacking.
The drone ratio is the sharpest edge of this problem.
For every $1 Iran spent on drones, the UAE spent roughly $20–28 shooting them down.
The US has the same problem as the UAE — we’re quickly burning through missile stockpiles that will take years to build back up.
Our whole incredibly expensive military industrial complex is, like the rest of our institutions, corrupt, and it shows in our procurement failures. Instead of finding cheap ways to down cheap drones, we have a built-in 20-1 cost disadvantage in air defense. We also can’t build ships — 82% of the Navy’s shipbuilding is behind schedule.
When we had a Department of Defense, even though our whole defense procurement process was corrupt, it really didn’t matter because we would be more than able to defend ourselves and our NATO allies against any conceivable threat. But now that we have a Department of War, we’ll soon find out that lobbing bombs around indiscriminately is expensive and unsustainable. Hopefully someone will try to hang that around Trump’s neck.
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