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Comment by maratc | Hacker News Reader

That's a false comparison. You want to compare between the actual options you have, which are either (a) firing an interceptor (or several); or (b) repairing the damage caused by a non-intercepted missile.

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Your first option comes with the major caveat that each interceptor you fire comes from a limited stockpile whose replacement rate[0] today isn't sufficient for even going 1:1, let alone accepting that multiple interceptors are required.

I'd say the real options in the near term when faced with an inbound missile is a) deciding to deplete your stockpile of interceptors with an incredibly limited replenishment rate; or b) risking a hit to a lower-value target.

Could the US go to a war economy footing and scale production? _Maybe_? I'm not entirely convinced the US can stomach the costs.

[0]: again, numbers are hard to find, but https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2026/Lock... gives a flavor of just what defenders are up against.

In theory; in practice however, there's been rocket fire from Gaza towards Israel where the offence was literally a metallic tube with a bit of TNT at a cost of about $800 per rocket [0] while the defence was $100,000+ per interceptor [1]. This has been going on for years, and as far as I'm aware there was no depletion observed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

I don't know the economic numbers off the top of my head but I have to imagine it's hard to find Israelis who think they're spending too much money on rocket interceptors.

If Mexico as a nation state intentionally launched a single offensive rocket from Juarez to El Paso, we would just invade.

Interceptors are an unnecessary expense in the ways that they have been used in the past 15 years.

It’s far more complicated than that. The choice is often between firing an interceptor against this missile aimed at this target, or firing that interceptor against the next missile aimed at a target you can’t yet know. Because unless your production capacity far outstrips theirs, you’re going to run out first.

Not if you (a) destroy their production capacity while they don't destroy yours; (b) you destroy their stockpiles while they don't destroy yours; and (c) you've found a bottleneck on their side (launchers) and destroy it while they fail to inflict the same damage on you.

That's true, but feels very much like "draw the rest of the owl." And even if you can do it, you'd have to do it against any country that starts to build this capacity that you think might somebody potentially use it against you, even if they aren't currently, unless you're confident that you can destroy their launchers and stockpiles so quickly that they can't be used in any significant number. (And if the USA couldn't manage to do that to Iran....)

Yes, it's complicated. There's almost 1,000 generals and officers spread across the US military. They (and the tens of thousands of people directly supporting them) spend a lot of time on these things.

Sometimes "draw the rest of the owl" makes sense when you've got 20,000 people actively drawing owls all day every day.

I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that there are a lot of experts doing expert things who know better about these things than some idiot sitting at his computer i.e. me.

But in this particular case, we're in the middle of a war where the owl didn't get drawn and the enemy has successfully launched thousands of drones and missiles at our forces and our allies, causing enough damage to severely disrupt the world economy.

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