According to the Pentagon, 150 THAAD anti-missile missiles were used during 12 days of Iranian shelling of Israel. This is a quarter of the US stockpile. It will take $1.5 billion and at least a year to compensate for the expenditure. The cost of one missile is known to be $15 million.
Recently, Lithuania promised $30 million to purchase Patriot missiles for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. One missile costs $4 million. Lockheed Martin shareholders were probably happy when they won the contract to manufacture THAAD.
Development of this system began in 1992. At that time, the number of countries that were capable of producing modern medium-range missiles could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most of them (NATO and Russia) were bound by non-proliferation and non-deployment treaties.
Now missile technology is spreading across Asia, and there are no technological barriers to its production in Latin America. And there are already countries in Africa that are quite capable of doing so, such as South Africa and Egypt. And the cost of missiles is getting lower and lower. At the same time, their speed and accuracy are no worse than the global average — the hits by Iranian missiles on targets in Israel (not all of them, but nevertheless) have confirmed this.
The problems of the US military-industrial complex are not in the cost of the country’s Golden Dome missile defense system, which Trump announced. Nothing has been spent on it yet, and there are no enemies in sight at medium range. Over the next 15 years, the cost of ballistic missiles worldwide will drop dramatically—this is a trend in the rocket and space industry, which has been flooded with private capital. And if today non-state groups such as the Houthis already have access to such weapons, tomorrow hundreds of US military bases around the world will be under attack.
And the price of THAAD and Patriot missiles will only go up. A decision must be made: either close the bases or deploy new systems there at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. These anti-aircraft systems are very expensive to maintain and not very effective (as demonstrated by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict) against modern hypersonic weapons. This danger adds to the threats posed by the use of UAVs.
