Peloni: This is an important article. One thing of note is whether it is reasonable to believe that the US military would allow its stores of critical missile interceptors to run low and then to allow this information to enter the public view?
American missile defense is winning every engagement and losing the war. The remedy is an offensive campaign against Iran’s launchers
Gregg Roman | MEF | July 28, 2026
The Middle East Forum released a report, “The Magazine War: Regional Missile Defense Against Iran.” The essay below presents its central argument. The full report is available online.
American and allied air defenses have performed impressively in the war with Iran. Batteries in Israel and across the Gulf have intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones that Tehran has launched at them. Yet this tactical success conceals a strategic dead end. Last week, after 13 consecutive nights of American strikes, Washington suspended its escalation. It did so not because Iran relented or diplomacy advanced, but because the interceptors are running short. The defender, not the attacker, approached exhaustion first.
he cause is a deliberate Iranian strategy, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms. Iran fires inexpensive weapons and compels the United States to answer with expensive ones. A Kheibar Shekan, the solid-fuel workhorse of the Iranian arsenal, travels 1,450 kilometers behind a maneuvering warhead and now flies in formation with jet-powered drones that divide a defender’s radar. It costs a small fraction of the interceptor sent to destroy it. A single Patriot interceptor costs approximately $4 million; a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) round, approximately $15 million. Iran spends in the thousands and imposes costs in the millions, night after night. No defender, however capable, can sustain that exchange indefinitely.
The evidence of strain is substantial. American forces reportedly have expended more than 1,500 Patriot interceptors in this war and retain fewer than a thousand. The THAAD position is more precarious still. The United States has taken delivery of no new interceptors since August 2023, expects none before the spring of 2027, fields only eight batteries, and operates a mere 13 of the radars on which those batteries depend. Iran, recognizing the value of the sensors, has attacked them deliberately, since a radar requires far longer to replace than a missile requires to fly.
Old tech, obsolete and expensive, are replaced by new tech a lot cheaper and more precise.
No Big deal.
Lots of noise for nothing.
In spite of the Qatar religious war on the West the US Adm keeps using Qatar and Pakistan and even Turkey all three enemies of the West.
I wonder why?
Why did Trump not use Switzerland for example as intermediary?
The price argument is valid. The main point is that the price of Iranian drones is low because they need not be accurate or even hit a prescribed target or any target at all. They just need to cause the panic level required to induce the firing of expensive missiles at cheap targets. Were the USA or Israel to fire missiles indiscriminately at Iran without any thought of a particular target, that would even the balance and certainly hit civilians as collateral damage.
Since both the USA and Israel are overly sensitive to that kind of advertising, they reject this kind of retaliation. If they change their MO and start bombing city centers like the Russians and Ukrainians are doing or as the German axis and the allies did in WW2, or, for that matter, what the Iranians, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the other terror groups have been doing for decades now, the situation will change, much as it did in Japan at the end of WW2. The loss of civilian lives was a price too high to pay, with the peril of more of the same to come. If the enemy gets this message clearly presented, their MO will also adapt. If all the Jihadis continue to insist that their relatives can become collateral damage without limit, that will not change the scenario.
What’s left? Kill those driving the Jihad war in their places of rest and luxury. For lots of them, this is Qatar and Turkey and a few other places. That might cause significant change. We should not forget that these places are collaborating.
Why is the US not using MOABs to take out large swaths of IRAN?
They cost about $179k each and decimate an area about 5sq miles.