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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • Ukraine used 700 patriot missiles since the beginning of the year. 2 days ago I posted another estimate that Gulf countries have collectively used 800, plus at least another 800 by Israel and US. (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10864542/7848443)

    🇺🇦🇺🇸Over the three months of winter, Ukraine used 700 anti-aircraft missiles for the Patriot system. This is the same amount that the US and its allies spent on missiles during several days of war with Iran, which jeopardizes new deliveries to Kiev, said European Commissioner for Defense Andrius Kubilius.

    According to him, Ukraine needed about 700 PAC-3 interceptor missiles for Patriot during the winter, while the American manufacturer Lockheed Martin was only able to produce 600 such missiles for the entire 2025 year. The large consumption of interceptor missiles is also due to the fact that Russia carried out more than 2,000 missile strikes on Ukraine during the entire 2025 year, and several anti-aircraft missiles are needed to intercept a ballistic missile.

    “The Americans will not be able to provide a sufficient number of these missiles for the Gulf countries, for their own army, and for Ukraine. The situation is really critical. We need to urgently and quickly increase the production of missiles,” said Kubilius.

    https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/176087

    Therefore, Ukraine has so far used up as much missiles as will be produced this year. All anti-air missiles used against Iran are coming out of the US strategic reserves. After a week of fighting we have seen about 2000 missiles (at least 1600 up to last Wednesday) used against Iran. Meanwhile, Ukraine is expected to use another 2000 missiles this year (700 in 3 months so far => 700 x 3 trimesters = 2100). The Europeans have already given most of their anti-air missile stocks to Ukraine, with the promise that they will be rearmed as soon as possible. We can expect at least a few thousands of missiles being earmarked for European arsenals (but will likely be moved down the priority list, whatever that means for European diplomatic relations with the US).

    Hence, Patriot missiles are most likely running low. It is unlikely the US can sustain this for more than 1-2 weeks. Most likely deliveries of missiles will stop in this order: Europe (not in direct conflict with anyone), Ukraine (Trump doesn’t care, but the Ukrainians did announce they agreed to exchange anti-drone technology for more missiles), Gulf states (comments by Hegseth and others keep praising Israel as a worthy and equal ally, but say nothing of their Arab friends, as if implying they deem them useless), USA (already seems to have accepted that its bases will either be destroyed by Iran or protected by Gulf states). Israel will likely maintain priority of deliveries, even at the cost of US air defense.

    Meanwhile the Gulf states seem to be angry at the US for their situation. Analysts speculate that missile deliveries to Israel seem to already take priority over the Emirates.





  • The talk in Cyprus and Greece is that the drones were not launched from Iran. Media are stating that the original drones launched from Lebanon (blaming Hezbollah). This is a baseless claim, as not even the governments have confirmed it.

    In fact yesterday there was a big scuffle on Greek TV when a prominent talk host stated that the drones launched from Lebanon, which was loudly disputed by a guest analyst. They got into a fight over who is spreading misinformation (here is the video, but it is in Greek: https://youtu.be/3lmKpLug5Lg)



  • According to various analysts, the US will likely transfer AA batteries and radars from East Asia to reinforce their force attacking Iran.

    Even then, I don’t expect China to invade Taiwan:

    1. China has repeatedly demonstrated that it prefers to sit back and let things take their course without overt interference, and certainly without flexing its military might.

    2. China expects Taiwan to come back to the fold through natural and peaceful processes. Right now the disintegration of the US military, political and global system are working out for China just as they are.

    3. China’s industrial capabilities have surpassed those of the US, and the US is still focused on producing “artisanal” systems, i.e. high-tech, over-designed, hard-to-produce, expensive hardware.

    4. Still, China’s weapons systems are largely untested in combat conditions. I’m pretty sure this is something the Chinese supreme command is bearing in mind when it comes to confronting the US. You can say what you will about the US systems, but at least they’ve been using them non-stop in combat conditions for the past 25 years.

    5. Also, do not forget that the military failure of the US is a specifically anti-missile capability failure. Perhaps a ground warfare capability failure too, considering the Ukraine war. That is not enough of an assurance that a war between US and China will be won by China with minimal or acceptable losses. Particularly since such a war will be prosecuted by the US using its “strong” assets, which is its naval, air and nuclear forces.

    However, having said all that, the removal of systems from East Asia in favour of West Asia is probably going to create a lot of friction within the US military command structure. And it will certainly make East Asian allies/vassals, who heavily rely on US production (e.g. South Korea, Japan) to seriously reconsider their relationship with the US.


  • Patriots are running low. Estimated that 1600 Patriot missiles have been used so far by US, Israel and Gulf states to repel Iranian strikes, with an annual production of 600 per year.

    The Iran war has triggered a shortage of missiles for Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems, Handelsblatt quotes military sources as saying.

    It said the Persian Gulf countries alone spent about 800 missiles in the early days of the conflict. The US and Israel spent “at least” the same number. Handelsblatt says that stocks of missiles for Patriot are a top secret, while the Americans emphasize they have enough ammunition. However, the paper says experts are increasingly doubtful about this.

    On top of the Persian Gulf states, Ukraine also needs missiles for Patriots, but their production capacity is limited. Lockheed Martin has tripled their output over the past three years, but this is only 600 missiles per year. In January, it promised to increase the capacity to 2,000 rockets a year from 2026.

    The production of missiles for Germany will only start at the end of the year with deliveries scheduled for the beginning of 2027.

    https://tass.com/world/2097275




  • According to the best estimates, the US makes about 200-400 Patriots per year. Realistically, they probably make about half that, considering that statistics are inflated by announcements like “we aim to increase production by this much at the end of the year”, and then when somebody checks up on that, the production numbers actually drop lower than before. At any rate, the Patriot is the most produced surface-to-air interceptor. After that they make all these other high-tech interceptors at really low numbers (THAADS come out to about 35 a year!).

    So in total, let’s say the US builds about 500 ground-to-air interceptors a year.

    Let’s add to this another 500 air-to-air plane-launched interceptors a year (no data, just being generous as it is said these numbers are actually even lower than the Patriots)

    By US estimates, Iran can produce 100 missiles per month, and probably (on its own, without factoring in Russia and China) 5000 drone per month. Iran probably has about 10 000 ballistic missiles and 100 000 drones. Actually Iran probably has way more ballistic missiles than that, since their armament efforts have been largely hidden from Western intelligence. The US lowballs their estimates, because they assume Iran has destroyed something like 10 000 missiles due to old age, or as a result of the deal with Obama.

    Iran fires about around 2000 drones and 300 ballistic missiles per day. If that number seems low to you due to the number of hits shown on various videos, consider that most modern Iranian missiles have cluster warheads, so each missile fired is more like 4-10 missiles hitting the ground. Also some Shahed types actually carry quite a decent load, so their explosions can be mistaken as missiles too.

    Israel uses on average 2 interceptors to shoot down 1 drone and 4 interceptors to shoot down 1 missile. We can assume the Gulf States use at least this much as well. They likely use more because their forces are extremely inexperienced and their regimes are extremely casualty-averse. But let’s be generous and use Israel’s ratios as a general rule.

    This means that the Epstein Coalition requires about 2000 x 2 + 300 x 4 = 4000 + 600 = 4600 interceptors per day!!!

    In one day, they eat 4 years worth of production of interceptors

    On the other hand, even if Iran stopped producing all munitions right now, it could still keep going at this rate of fire for another 50 days to run out of drones, and 35 days to run out of missiles. The Epstein Coalition can probably stretch it up the weekend.