[gota]

I don't know about stupid. If you can spend X dollars to "force" your opponent to spend X*10 dollars it can be a viable strategy.

I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense

[toss1]

Sure, that may be the initial ratio, but if it becomes a regular thing, as in sufficiently regular to strain one of our budgets beyond (substituting a few live target shootings for training exercises), we can rapidly develop an appropriate response.

E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem.

Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production.

Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.

[ocdtrekkie]

I looked it up, and an AIM 9X is just shy of a half a million dollars a unit.

[roflyear]

So we can shoot down 1m balloons before we have to worry about it?