I can provide explanations for these observations.
Russia and Ukraine is like this because they lack F-35s. This is what an air parity war looks like. Air parity wars are qualitatively different phenomena, and should not be conceptually clustered alongside air superiority wars during analysis.
Iran: Strategic outcomes are irrelevant to the question of unit economics in airpower. The amount of JDAMs they've dropped and the amount of money they've saved by using JDAMs instead of ballistic missiles is actually insane. Israel, for example, used over 20 Sparrow ballistic missiles to assassinate Khamenei, but they did this for an explicit tactical purpose and generally prefer to use reusable aircraft (as does any modern airforce who are fighting an air superiority war). If you would advocate for using ballistic missiles instead of JDAMs, why would this cause a different outcome, and why would this cost less money than using JDAMs? Regarding Shahed one-way attack drones, they aren't much cheaper than JDAMs and they're significantly less effective. They also do not provide a platform for forward telemetry like F-35s and ISR drones do.
> Strategic outcomes are irrelevant to the question of unit economics in airpower.
lol
> look at how much cheaper expensive bombs are than expensive ballistic missiles are
Right, to drop a JDAM you need to be within 30km of a target. Any 70s era SAM can prevent that since they usually cover an area of 150ish km if Serbia could shoot down an F-117, then it can shoot down an F-16. I’m using Serbia as an example here because they operated 60s era Soviet SAM systems, and that’s the floor for Iranian capabilities.
F-35 is a joke too, evidenced by checks notes 0 sorties over Iran in the last two months.
So, with that out of the way, since a plane costs 30mil for F-16 and 80-100mil for an F-35, both equally useless against near-peer much less peer level adversary, a ballistic missile is suddenly much MUCH cheaper option.
The way to defeat air defences is saturation, you want 30-100 of 10k/unit one-way drones to exhaust the air defences, just aim them at the launcher sites or the radars. That’s 300k-1mil for a saturation, and then let’s say another 6 million for 6 JASSM cruise missiles for total of 6000lbs of ordinance delivery to hit whatever it is you’re actually trying to hit.
Alternate is you fly 3 F-16s each loaded with 4 500lbs JDAMs, so that’s 90mil lost when they get shot down by a MANPADs along the way to the target which will probably be somewhere in the middle of the country and another 1mil lost in one-way drones. Plus the political cost of losing pilots.
There's been zero sorties over Iran in the last two months because the war aims in the current round of fighting are narrowly scoped to Hormuz. That's not a commentary on the capability of the F-35.
You mention MANPADs as if it is a significant vulnerability, but there's been only one or two shootdowns of jets by Iran during the previous two rounds of fighting. I encourage you to look at the number of jets shot down in the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War to understand how insane this is.
One way attack drones are not a solution in any conflict with significant strategic depth and against an opponent with air superiority. You cannot protect your industrial base if you sacrifice air superiority due to the opponent possessing F-35s. Which means you cannot pump the volumes required to achieve the kind of attentional effects we see in Russia-Ukraine. This is the reason why it's analytically flawed to bundle air parity wars with air superiority wars in analysis.
“Narrowly scoped to Hormuz” yeah because anything more than that apparently is too great of a scope for the US military. Check the latest reports on stocks in Washington Post.
What air superiority? In the Middle East? With what, let me guess F-35? With 25% operational readiness and 13h of maintenance for every 1h of flight? With gym plates in the nose instead of actual radars?
And don’t quote Vietnam as some sort of a success story, especially when the US lost that one fighting against farmers in flip flops armed with AK-47, so of course nothing got shot down.
There’s a reason why Russia and Ukraine are lobbing ballistic missiles and cheap drones at each other.
There’s a reason why Iran conflict looks the way it does.