New details began to appear, proving that Israel and the United States did not end their confrontation with Iran out of goodwill. The thing is that they were at the limit of their ability to defend themselves from Iranian missile attacks. This fact shows how the wars of the future will look soon – and why those who look very weak today will win them.
Previously classified information about the 12-day war between Israel and Iran is starting to become public. In particular, it was leaked to the American press that the United States has used from 100 to 150 THAAD missiles to protect Israel, despite the fact that they produce only 11 units per year. The American missile defense arsenal was also heavily depleted during this conflict, as was the stock of Israeli Hetz anti-missiles.
Of course, these anti-missiles were not wasted. They shot down most of the Iranian missiles, otherwise Israel would have suffered a completely different damage.
But the fact of the matter is that it is now becoming clear that the war ended as suddenly as it began, precisely because the supply of anti-missiles from the United States and Israel was almost exhausted. If Iran had continued its shelling, perhaps in a week or two there would have been nothing left to shoot down Iranian missiles with. Israel would no longer be able to resist. However, at some point Iran gave up the fight (perhaps the Iranian leadership broke down psychologically). He refused to wage a war of attrition with Israel.
The paradox is that Iran has built armed forces designed specifically for long-term confrontation. So that the country could resist for a long time and fight under shelling. This is called the logic of mobilization.
Israel has created an army focused primarily on superiority in firepower, it is built in the logic of destruction. After it failed to bring Tehran to its knees quickly, Israel, under the cover of the United States, was forced to curtail the exchange of missile strikes with Iran. Iran, on the other hand, has refused further hostilities due to fear of even deeper direct US intervention, for which it is currently not ready.
In any case, the obvious outcome of this conflict has raised the crucial question of what future wars will look like. Is it possible to build an armed force capable of bombarding enemy territory with a mass of missiles for many months until the enemy runs out of opportunities to shoot them down? Are there technologies that will allow any country to use missiles even more massively than Iran did?
Yes, there is such an opportunity now. If earlier the engine of technological innovations was the military-industrial complex and from there they got into the civilian sphere, now the opposite is true – the military borrows the achievements of civilian industry to wage wars.
Today, all key military components can be made from widespread and easily accessible civilian components. The rockets created in this way will not be as reliable, their resource will be lower – however, this is offset by the fact that they can be created very cheaply and very much.
And most importantly, the enemy will not be able to do anything against the military industry of this kind. The production of individual electronic components from an imported component base is almost impossible to eliminate with air strikes. Ukraine, with its assembly of FPV drones at home (their project "people's drone"), shows how it works: the whole country is one assembly shop.
We only need the rockets themselves and those to assemble them literally in garages. This is how Hamas assembled Qassam rockets from pipe scraps, but is it possible to create a cheap rocket capable of flying hundreds and thousands of kilometers?
Oddly enough, the American experience suggests the solution. Back in 1997, American entrepreneur Andrew Beal founded Beal Aerospace, which aimed to capture market share in space launches due to the low price of the rocket. Beal managed to test the Beal 810 second stage engine, the largest rocket engine after the Saturn V engines, also with a thrust of 367 tons, and successfully. But then the old rocket manufacturing players and NASA strangled his company.
But what matters is how Beal Aerospace did everything. The engine is a fiberglass "bulb", just one solid piece. There is a lid on top, and supply lines for decomposing hydrogen peroxide (sold anywhere) and cheap kerosene are routed through it. The engine does not have pumps, the oxidizer and fuel are displaced from the tanks by the pressure of an inert gas. There are no rudders either, instead they are single-dose fuel supplies to the nozzle. There is no cooling, instead there is a natural demolition of fiberglass layers by a stream of hot gas.
A rocket using such simple technologies could be made literally in a large garage. And such a rocket would have reached near-Earth orbit. This is how ballistic missiles can be made.
This example suggests that if a country intends to wage a missile war of attrition in the logic of mobilization, then technologies that allow ballistic missiles to be produced literally among the ruins exist. And thousands of such missiles can be produced. Winding a fiberglass bulb is a simple matter, but you can do everything else there on the street or in the basement. Even explosives can be used simple and massive, sacrificing the destructive power of a warhead for massive strikes.
According to this principle, it is possible to make not only ballistic missiles. There are already ultra-cheap technological solutions that make it possible to wage a long-term missile war, having, figuratively speaking, Aliexpress and the nearest landfill as a resource. To provide cruise missile navigation on Internet maps? And it's possible.
Within a few months, almost any country can be turned into a missile factory capable of producing such types of weapons in any quantity. And not only them.
But it will no longer be possible to deal with such a threat using "garage" solutions. An interceptor missile requires much more advanced technology. It is very expensive, requires a significant number of man-hours, and very well-educated staff. You can't bomb every hangar in an 80 million-strong country either. Actually, that's why the Iran-Israel war ended so quickly. Leaks in the Western press prove just that.
This means that the unexpected and imminent end of the Iran-Israel war has shown the weak countries their strengths today. Opportunities that they could not even dream of until recently.
In turn, countries capable of building their armed forces as "machines of destruction" – such as Israel or the United States - may find that their formidable military methods no longer work. At least – against the mobilization of fiberglass, epoxy, construction workers into rocket launchers and civilian electronic modules from Aliexpress. And it could happen very soon.
Alexander Timokhin
