This Is Not Sustainable

Business Insider reports that "The US Navy has fired off nearly $1 billion in weapons fighting threats from Iran and the Houthis." The article notes:

    Since October, American warships and aircraft operating in the Red Sea have shot down scores of Houthi missiles and drones, and carried out preemptive strikes against the militants directly in Yemen.

    More recently, over the weekend, American warships operating in the eastern Mediterranean Sea intercepted multiple Iranian ballistic missiles during Tehran's unprecedented attack on Israel.

    "We have actually countered over 130 direct attacks on US Navy ships and merchant ships," Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said at a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense budget hearing for the upcoming fiscal year.

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    The various munitions that the Navy has used to intercept threats in the air and also conduct preemptive strikes on the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen are not cheap, and because these engagements have occurred regularly over the past six months, the costs add up. A Standard Missile-2 interceptor, for instance, is estimated to cost around $2 million.

    The massive national security supplemental package which has been at the center of months of concerns over the future of US military aid to Ukraine includes $2.4 billion in funding to address the Navy's fight in the Red Sea, including the depletion of munitions.

To put this in perspective, the estimated cost to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is $400 million. 

    Meanwhile the drones being used by the Houthis are less than $100,000 per unit. While our military has--at least in theory--placed more emphasis on quality rather than quantity, as Joseph Stalin once observed, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

• More: For a counterargument, see "Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts" from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).