[bluGill]

There are too many potential attackers though, and not everyone is sane. So you don't really get a choice about it. The cost of the interceptors needs to be considered in relation to the cost of what it protects. If the interceptor means an attacker doesn't kill my kids then it was worth the cost. If the interceptor keeps a multi-million dollar building around then interceptor at a million dollars is still cheap, even if the missile it takes out was only $100.

Yes you should use diplomacy to ensure war doesn't happen in the first place. However if it does: they will send cheap drones and missiles at you in large quantifies.

[ceejayoz]

> If the interceptor keeps a multi-million dollar building around then interceptor at a million dollars is still cheap, even if the missile it takes out was only $100.

Not if it means you can't intercept the next one hitting much a more valuable/critical building.

[bluGill]

That is a trade off that hopefully you never need to consider, but it is a valid concern that does come up in the real world.

[hedora]

It's not a hypothetical:

Trump started blaming Biden for the US's interceptor shortage two days into the war. Third-party military analysts say there's a high probability Iran's drone stockpile will outlast the US's first-tier interceptor stockpile.

The first-order math checks out: At the beginning of the war, we (and allies) were using 800 x $1M patriot missiles per day. The global production capacity for patriots is 600 per year, so there's no way we've have been able to maintain that cadence now that we're in week 4 of the war (the patriot program has not existed for enough decades). Now we see things like successful strikes on Israel's nuclear complex.

If the math isn't good enough, note that Trump backed down over the weekend, after Iran reiterated that they'd target civilian infrastructure if the US did so first. If we still had adequate interceptor capabilities, calling his bluff would not have worked.

[wat10000]

Unfortunately, necessity doesn’t imply possibility. It could simultaneously be true that you must build interceptors to protect yourself, and that you can’t build enough.

It only makes sense to consider the cost of what’s protected if it’s actually protected. If your million-dollar interceptor protects a multi-million-dollar building from a $100 missile, and then that building is hit by a second $100 missile, was it worth it?

That’s the math that has prevented missile defenses from being deployed on a large scale despite being technologically possible for well over half a century now, and despite the fact that a single interceptor might be saving an entire city from a nuclear warhead.

An interceptor costs at least as much as what it intercepts. Take into account miss rates and the cost of defense is a multiple of the cost of offense. Add in the fact that the attacker can concentrate an attack but the defender has to defend everywhere, and multiple warheads on a single missile, and the cost of defense multiplies further.

If defense costs 10x more than offense (a conservative estimate, I’d say) then that means you need to dedicate 10x of your economic capacity to it than your attacker does. If your attacker dedicates more than 10% of what you can put into defense, you lose. Defense can work, but it needs to be against a far weaker enemy. Thats why the most prominent example is Israel defending against neighboring non-state actors. Israel is wealthy enough, and the groups shooting at them are poor enough, that the math works out in the defender’s favor. Iran is a rather different story. And of course defending the US against the likes of Russia and China is a fever dream.

[pc86]

> If your million-dollar interceptor protects a multi-million-dollar building from a $100 missile, and then that building is hit by a second $100 missile, was it worth it?

I mean the assumption is that if the first missile hit the building, the second missile would have been fired at something else, right? Still seems worth it at face value especially if there's enough time between the two missiles that there aren't people in the building anymore.

[wat10000]

My assumption would be that the attacker builds missiles based on the defenses they want to defeat. If you have no defenses, maybe the defender builds 1,000 missiles. If you have 1,000 interceptors with 100% accuracy, then maybe the defender builds 2,000 missiles.

This is why the superpowers mostly scrapped their ICBM defenses in the 70s. The technology worked fine. It's totally doable with 1970s technology if you're willing to put nuclear warheads on the interceptors. But for every ICBM interceptor you built, the other side could build another ICBM for the same cost or less. And you need more than one interceptor per ICBM since they can fail and the each interceptor only covers a small area. Add in multiple warheads on a single missile and decoys and suddenly you might need 10x or more. So the USA gave up on the idea of covering the entire country with interceptors, deployed a few interceptors to protect some missile silos, then shut it down after less than a year. The USSR built out a system to protect Moscow and only Moscow, which is still operational today. However, the British were able to maintain the ability to defeat that system and destroy Moscow with a single submarine, all on their own, never mind what the USA would throw at it.

If you have a certain amount of stuff you can build and you're deciding what to do with that capacity, it's not at all clear that missile interceptors are a good use of that capacity even if you're protecting objects that cost orders of magnitude more than the interceptors cost. It works if you're defending against a far less capable adversary (Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas, USA's GBI system against North Korea) but not with an enemy that's even vaguely close to being a peer.

[bluGill]

That worked in 1970 because there were exactly two players who had incentive to not spend all the money so they agreed to reduce the total ICBMs instead. In the current world there are too many actors - it won't work, they can make thousands of missles. Ukraine has already proven you don't get to control when you are attacked. Thus the only option today is cost reduce defense and produce enough to intercept several thousand per day.

[wat10000]

It doesn't matter if it's the only option if it's not possible to do it.

Maybe it is possible. It does seem like it may be possible to defend against cheap drones with cheaper systems. Use lasers or good old-fashioned projectile guns instead of interceptor missiles.

For defending against proper missiles, I don't see how it's possible with any near-future tech. Guns and lasers don't work. You have to use a missile and it's going to have a cost similar to the cost of what you're shooting down. Peer enemies will be able to out-build you and many missiles will get through your defenses.

Shooting some down is better than shooting none down, but your enemy won't ignore your defensive systems. Shooting down 1,000 and having 1,000 get through is not better than shooting down 0 and having 1,000 get through. If building defenses just provokes the other side to build more offense, it's not worth it. If they're going to build the same amount of offense either way, then it might make sense to build up defenses.

Here's something to consider. The US has interceptors capable of shooting down ICBMs and with enough range to protect the whole continental US. There are currently 44 such interceptors. They cost about $75 million each. Standard procedure is to shoot four interceptors at an incoming missile to increase the likelihood of a kill, so that's about $300 million per incoming missile you want to counter. That's very much worth the cost if it prevents a nuclear warhead from reaching its target.

Russia and China together have maybe 700 ICBMs if we take a high estimate. For $210 billion, we could have enough interceptors to shoot down almost all of them. Round it up to $300 billion to account for all the infrastructure they'd need. That's a bargain compared to saving hundreds of American cities. So the question is: should we do it? So far, the American government has said "no." I agree with them, despite it being a bargain. Do you?

[jandrewrogers]

The US Navy is largely responsible for long-range ballistic missile defense, since you have to cross an ocean to hit the US. They also have among the most sophisticated missiles for that purpose, capable of killing an ICBM at apogee. The inventory of these missiles is much larger, every destroyer carries them, and recent variants are often considered the most competent of the various ABM platforms out there.

These cost ~$30M. They are in the process of scaling up production to a few hundred per year, with some help from the Japanese. Unit costs are coming down. These same missiles are also being deployed for land-based ballistic missile defense, despite their naval origin.

In the long-term you are seeing a convergence of the missile platforms as more capabilities are compressed into fewer missile designs. The US is pretty clearly evolving their systems to more of a “missile truck” architecture that is optimizing for the number of targets they can kill simultaneously at the maximum ranges that make engineering sense. Many aspects of new platforms like the B-21 all point in that direction.

A historical limitation is that the rocket motors used by most air defense missiles really weren’t adequate for ballistic missile intercept purposes. The US has invested a lot in closing that gap.

[david_pearce]

>However, the British were able to maintain the ability to defeat that system and destroy Moscow with a single submarine, all on their own

What are you referring to here?

[wat10000]

The missiles on the UK's nuclear missile submarines were fitted with decoys. One of the three warheads carried by each missile was replaced with a dispenser that would deploy 27 decoys. A single submarine carried 16 missiles, so it could launch 32 warheads and 400+ decoys at Moscow. The Moscow defenses had 100 interceptors, so it was pretty much guaranteed that at least one warhead would make it through.

More recently, they upgraded to newer missiles which could carry 8 warheads each, allowing them to overwhelm Moscow's defenses without decoys.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevaline