An Israeli missile has hit Iran, two US officials have told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
Iranian state media is reporting that flights have been suspended over several cities, according to Associated Press.
Iran has been on high alert after Israel said it would respond to an Iranian attack against it on Saturday night
It was costly, but the relative cost to Iran to launch the attack was far larger.
Source? Because the articles I can find such as this one from Reuters say very much the opposite: “Although Israeli officials have given no details, according to calculations by a number of analysts, the price of Iran’s attack probably amounted to $80 million to $100 million — but cost Israel and its allies around $1 billion to repel.”
Here’s another analysis: “Experts have calculated the cost of the April 13 attack for Iran at $100-$200 million — perhaps five to ten times less than what Israel spent to repel it. That means a huge recurring bill if Iran were to keep attacking.” They go through the math of it and cite specific weapon systems costs.
I’ll wait to see if you can back up your assertion, but I’m quite skeptical at time of writing.
Key word relative. The US did the vast majority of the heavy lifting. $1B is 0.0625% of the US military budget. $100M is 0.4% of Iran’s, nearly an order of magnitude more costly relatively, more than one if it’s on the high side.
That would only be a fair comparison if the US was willing to devote it’s entire military budget to these actions the way Iran can. It would also assume that the US can (and is willing to) spend 1 billion dollars + costs required with overseas operations every time Iran spends 100M on missiles. Iran broke the top 15 for military spending a few years ago so they’re going to have decent capabilities when it comes to being a pain.
It also ignores the cost of dealing with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthi, which has Pentagon officials worried as detailed in this article “A $2M missile vs. a $2,000 drone: Pentagon worried over cost of Houthi attacks.”. I’m definitely not cheering for Iran, but I don’t think your total budget vs. total budget comparison is true to the actual economics of a US defense of Israel in the case of sustained attacks. Or even relative cost given that the US has it’s budget spread across many more pursuits than this region.
To add to that, every commitment to defending Israel while it is provoking and escalating things in the region, means less resources to Ukraine. So if the western European countries are committing more to helping Israel in its bullshit, that shifts the power balance in Europe more in Putins favor.
So it is not only about the relative cost to cost and relative cost to economy/budget but also relative from budget to budget.