| Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up. The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down. Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions. "Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target. Everyone seems to be an expert today. It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here. There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost. I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months. |
It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.
Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.