news

Quite a few factual errors in this article.

$800 million on THAAD Talon interceptors, at $12.7 million per Talon, is 63 interceptors. That's not 15-20% of the arsenal. 900 THAAD Talons were manufactured as of February this year. 192 of these were sent to the UAE, the only foreign operator. If you assume another 100+ fired in tests and to intercept ballistic missiles from Yemen, the arsenal was around 600, so only 10-11%.

This cost estimate is an estimate, based of this article. It's an estimate that takes the 39 or so THAAD interceptors seen on video from Jordan and assumes 60% more missiles were used. Here's the source of the actual numbers counted on video from Jordan.

THAAD struggles against low-flying, hypersonic threats.

It's not meant or designed to defend against threats like that. THAAD is designed for high altitude interception in the terminal stage, hence the acronym, terminal high altitude air defence. THAAD operates between altitudes of 36-150km. THAAD is designed to be deployed in an integrated air defence network, where other systems such as Patriot PAC 3 MSE, SM-6, and in the case of Israel, Arrow-2 and David's Sling, take care of the threats at lower altitudes, and systems such as SM-3 and Arrow 3 take care of midcourse phase intercepts. THAAD contributes two things in this setup, the niche ability to plug the endo exo atmospheric gap in terminal defence, that 36-150km altitude envelope. The article actually talks about this later, so I have no idea why this is even mentioned. The other contribution is it's TPY/2 radar, significantly more powerful than the radars aboard AEGIS equipped destroyers and ashore systems that fire SM-3 and SM-6 and Israel's Green Pine radars for Arrow 3.

Future defenses need lasers, AI-driven systems.

Lasers against ballistic missiles? Unless there's a plan for space based lasers, that's not going to work. The atmosphere is too thick for a ground based laser defence against such high speed and high altitude targets. Laser defence has only just reached operational capability for slow and flying drones and potentially counter rocket, artillery and mortar systems. Long way away from laser defence against ballistic missiles.

One can talk about the strategic limits to THAAD, but who has an equivalent? Russia does not, China is the only nation attempting to operate an equivalent with the HQ-19, first publicly displayed last year. This capability is not cheap, easy to engineer, or readily available. Pakistan wants an HQ-19 battery, but we'll see if it materialises.

As for limited interceptor stocks, yes they are limited, but the US, NATO, or Israel is not going to sit around and let the opponent fire hundreds of missiles without a response. We saw this in Iran, Israel quickly mobilised their air force, surveillance and covert on the ground assets to suppress Iranian ballistic missile launch facilities. Everyone in the alt media space was talking about how Israeli jets wouldn't dare enter Iranian airspace to bomb their missile force because of Iran's air defence, yet that's exactly what happened, and Iranian air defence didn't manage to shoot down a single manned aircraft. By the end of the war, Israel was bombing as far into Iran as Yadz, 1850km from Tel Aviv. How many Iranian ballistic missiles have a range greater than 1850km? What was the state of the Iranian missile force at this point? Did the Iranian missile force manage to reduce Israel's military capabilities in any way throughout the war, or accomplish anything more than bombing population centres? This is a far more pressing concern than the state of the USA/Israeli interceptor stockpile. You can't enter an attrition war to drain the aforementioned interceptor stockpile, if your capability to fire the missiles that drain this stockpile is vastly reduced. And if all the missile force can do is credibly threaten population centres, and can't counter military capabilities, it becomes a deterrent or compllence weapon, and not a weapon that can take the fight directly to the USA/Israeli military.