Costly Defense, Cheap Defeat

By no means is this the first time the efficacy of Western armaments has been called into question. A near-identical situation unfolded more than three decades ago during the US-led war on Iraq over its occupation of Kuwait. Official outlets gloried in the technical prowess of the weaponry brought to bear against the Ba’athist armed forces, with the media marveling at the proclaimed effectiveness of the Patriot missile defense system. Its success rate at shooting down Iraqi ballistic missiles was almost immediately challenged. A subsequent US government study into the Patriot system’s performance revised the initial claims of an 80 and 50 percent interception rate in Saudi Arabia and Israel respectively to 70 and 40 percent. The report further notes that, according to the “strongest evidence,” the overall success rate of the Patriot system during Desert Storm dwindled to 9 percent.

In the intervening three decades, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Theodore Postol has been one of the most consistent critics of missile defense systems, compellingly arguing they routinely fail to intercept their targets and are regularly known to misfire. A stark example of this occurred on April 13 of this year, when, after bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killing several senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Israel faced the largest combined drone and missile barrage in history as Iran and its regional allies responded.

Although Israel claimed to have intercepted “99 percent” of the ordnance, the Iron Dome system relied heavily on the support of US, French, British, Saudi, and Jordanian militaries to prevent Iranian munitions reaching their targets. Despite this, and despite Tehran’s warnings that a strike was imminent, some missiles evaded the combined Israeli air defenses and struck critical military targets such as the Nevatim air base in the Negev desert. The total cumulative cost of this seemingly impressive feat of missile defense (assuming we take Israel at its word) has been estimated at more than $1 billion for all of the interceptor munitions fired, whereas the cost of the Iranian operation was at most $80 to $100 million — one-tenth of the price.

In a related theater of the conflict, the Yemeni political and military movement Ansar Allah began launching drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb channel, in solidarity with Gaza. Instead of addressing the Houthis’ stated objectives, the West responded with armed force. Anticipating a US-led blitzkrieg against Yemen, one of the poorest Arab countries, online hawks warned Yemenis that they were “about to find out” why Americans “don’t have universal healthcare.” After eight months of the fiercest naval combat experienced since World War II, the unintended truth of that hollow bluster is more apparent than its authors could ever have intended.

Billion-Dollar Blunders

In June, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a supreme example of American hard power, was withdrawn from the Red Sea waters bordering Yemen. Conflicting reports emerged as to whether Ansar Allah had in fact successfully struck and damaged the vessel or whether it had simply exhausted its interceptors against the relentless barrage of disposable Shahed drones launched by the Yemeni movement. Regardless of the exact reason, the situation demonstrated that fielding the most powerful navy in history — and potentially losing its most powerful vessel — was prohibitively more expensive, in pure monetary terms, than the cost to its opponents of attacking it.

A relatively “low-tech” drone with a sufficient payload needs only to evade a carrier’s defenses and hit its target once, whereas these dollar defense systems must be successful every time. Comparing the cost of an interceptor missile (ranging from a minimum of $2 million apiece to as much as $28 million) to that of a Shahed drone ($20,000 to $50,000), this is a losing proposition in the long run. On top of this, the presence of this overwhelming firepower has done nothing to prevent Ansar Allah from strangling maritime traffic through the Red Sea and imposing yet another supply chain crisis on the global economy.

It may even be that the current spike in tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, possibly presaging a full-scale war, was brought on by exactly the kind of technical malfunction that Professor Postol has warned of. Israel’s July 30 assassination of the lead Hezbollah commander Fu’ad Shukr, which is expected to prompt imminent retaliation from Hezbollah, was claimed by Tel Aviv to have been in response for a missile strike on July 27 that killed twelve children in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights.

This claim overlooks the fact that the area is Israeli-occupied Syrian territory and its residents have refused Israeli citizenship along with the “sympathy” of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime. Furthermore, the narrative surrounding this “attack” quickly buried suspicions that the missile involved was an Iron Dome interceptor that veered wildly off course, striking the very territory it was supposed to be shielding. If this hypothesis proves true, then the potentially calamitous war that may result will have been triggered by an errant missile fired by a prohibitively expensive and dangerously unreliable missile defense system.

Squandering Public Supports

If all this technical wizardry isn’t meant to win wars, one wonders about its purpose. It’s reminiscent of Boeing’s plea deal with the US government to avoid legal consequences for substandard manufacturing, which at its worst, killed more than three hundred passengers in two separate crashes. The priority is to sell planes, not to make sure they stay in the air.

One of the few sectors seemingly impervious to the stock market crash at the start of this August has been the defense industry. Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics have all been in a sustained uptrend over the past year, spiking very conspicuously around October 7. Clearly the large-scale and repeated demonstration of their products’ ineffectiveness is no obstacle to long-term profitability.

The most notorious example of wastefulness in military spending is undoubtedly the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. From the program’s inception in 2006 to the present, the F-35 was projected to cost over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Persistent cost overruns and development woes have angered even the Pentagon itself, which opened the program up to competitive bidding in 2012. More than a decade later, the rapid spread of drone technology has made it possible for unmanned craft, sometimes referred to as “loitering munitions,” to perform many of the tasks traditionally handled by fighter jets — with little overengineering and none of the risk to an actual pilot. That the total budget of this program could eradicate all American student loan debt or cover half the cost of a national health system only adds to the obscenity of it all.

It is well-known that the military-industrial economy is dependent on public subsidy. The technology in mobile phones, computers, and the internet — essential to modern life —was not “invented” by figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but was instead developed by public investment. The initial funding came from decades of American taxpayer dollars.

Capitalism is not designed to be ethically consistent, but if it were, companies whose business model depends on state supports would be paying out dividends to every single American as a return on their initial investment.

In 2024, the US military budget reached an incredible $841 billion. If even a fraction of these funds were to be spent on restoring the education system to a level befitting the richest country on earth, canceling university tuition debt, or creating a national health system, it would achieve far greater benefits. While $1 trillion might not result in effective missile shields, it is very likely capable of creating a functioning health or educational system.