It is easy to treat guns and point-defense systems as tactical housekeeping and missile interceptors as the "real" air defense. The Iran war suggests the opposite. A RUSI analysis of Operation Epic Fury's first 16 days shows that coalition forces fired approximately 509,500 rounds from C-RAM and similar gun systems at a cost of roughly $25 million. Missile interceptors, meanwhile, consumed at least $19 billion.
The contrast, reported by "Hvylya", illustrates what the authors call the doctrine of "cheap defeat." In a saturated theater flooded with thousands of drones and decoys, cheap layers are what keep premium layers from being bankrupted by the sheer volume of threats. The question, the analysis argues, is not whether a coalition can intercept but whether it can intercept efficiently enough to keep fighting after the opening weekend.
The concept draws on a hard lesson. Iran's daily missile and drone attacks dropped 80 to 90 percent from their initial peak but continued at a sustained pace: an average of 33 missile and 94 drone strikes per day from day five onward. Without cheap defeat mechanisms handling the lower-end threats, premium interceptors would have depleted even faster than they already have.
But cheap does not mean disconnected. The analysis reveals what it calls a "coupling trap": the inexpensive gun ammunition shares upstream supply chains with the most sophisticated missiles. The cheap-defeat layer alone consumed nearly 29,000 kilograms of propellant and over 10,000 kilograms of explosives - flowing through the same constrained Holston and Radford facilities that supply Tomahawk, JASSM, and Patriot production lines.
The authors point to Ukraine's improvised "FrankenSAM" systems as a preview of where this logic leads. When premium interceptors become the bottleneck, the doctrine must shift from optimizing boutique systems to fielding what they call a "reloadable, adaptive patchwork shield" - mating available sensors to mass-producible missiles and cheaper alternatives like high-energy lasers, which have already seen use in the conflict. A layered defense, they conclude, is not just a technical architecture but an industrial survival strategy built around cheap defeat mechanisms that preserve critical munitions for the targets only they can stop.
Previously, "Hvylya" reported on how Foreign Policy warned that Ukraine's combat experience foreshadows challenges dozens of other states will face.