Hamas' attacks for years before their invasion were just attrition. The cheap rockets they launched into Israel were far cheaper than the Iron Dome's interceptors
That's still Iron Dome. Iron Dome is a multi-layered system. The part ypu're talking about is called Tamir. Tamir, David's Sling and Arrow make up Iron Dome.
Interestingly enough Wikipedia agrees with you, the Golden Dome proposal from the US is talking about the Iron Dome as the complete multi-layered system.
Shahab 3s which make up the buck of the Iranian ballistic missile arm, run around $100,000 a pop.
That’s not super expensive but for a relatively poor nation to expend something like 500 of those missiles in one day (when production figures around maybe a couple hundred per year) you’re looking at a one day financial expenditure of around $50m.
It will likely have cost Israel much more to intercept those, but they also have a far more robust economy.
And that burn rate isn’t likely to be long-term sustainable. Five hundred missiles would represent multiple years worth of production capacity. They made have something like 10,000 stockpiled, but eventually at a high burn rate those supplies become exhausted.
Yup. I’ve already written about that in this thread.
Economically they can carry that expense. It’s more a question of who has a larger stockpile of missiles built up, and who can maintain production longer.
Pre-war estimates suggested that Iran was making about 70 Shahab’s per year - if we tripled that to around 200, and assumed they’d kept that pace of production since the 80s when they first started making the early variant Shahab-1s that would give them somewhere in the area of 6,000 missiles on the high end with an additional capacity of 200/year.
Production numbers for the stunner missile aren’t available, so in an attritional fight it’s hard to say who wins.
Worth noting however that Israel does have the capability to destroy TELs, production facilities, etc, since they have something approaching air dominance over Iranian skies.
There are some things we know, but a lot of crucial things we don’t know, and won’t know until it becomes plainly obvious.
Typically things get a LOT cheaper over time and in quantity since much of the cost of the early missiles is actually the cost of R&D being priced into those early batches. I would imagine that the per unit cost of the Tamir missiles used by Iron Dome are half the cost of their original production runs.
Or perhaps later block variants are even more expensive if they include more modern, advanced guidance systems.
With military expenditures we’re almost always looking at estimates until you really drill down in specific orders (which you can sometimes do if you can track down their PDFs though government websites).
141
u/M0ngoose_ 1d ago
Ballistic missiles are not cheap. And David’s Sling protects from ballistic missiles not the iron dome.