that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and sold later
> plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild
That is the real cost, which I would assume is nowhere near billions
> that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and sold later
I don't think anyone should have any concern whatsoever regarding Qatar revenues vs. Qatar budgets, as they are nowhere near bankruptcy, with this setback or without. Their position by projected GDP per capita may decrease from 6th (currently) to maybe 10th place in the world, which is still better than about 180 other countries.
Cluster munitions are great against infantry in open field; less so against population centres equipped with advance warning systems. As it stands, they fail to even cause the damage worth offsetting by firing interceptors. The damage these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable, and they don't do much to create deterrence.
Given a choice of conventional 500-800 kg warhead or cluster munitions warhead, I think that the nations in the current conflict would prefer being on the receiving end of cluster munitions (as a less bad option) every time.
>The damage these inflict on Israel is not unsustainable, and they don't do much to create deterrence.
Has there been a study on this? What is the GDP loss of having however many Israelis go to bunkers due to incoming ballistics instead of working ?
If a trash cluster missile that costs 100k USD to build causes 1mio USD worth of GDP to not be produced (numbers completely made up) then it's very worth it.
No idea about studies or GDP; just observing that the losses inflicted by Iran on Israel in June 2025 did nothing to deter Israel from going on offence again eight months later.
Ballistic missiles do not cost only 100k USD to build. They are very unlikely to ever be that cheap. Rocketry requires enough precision to not explode on the launcher. Ballistic missiles with conventional munitions are only useful for point targets. Cluster munitions like Iran uses are an admission that they aren't targeting specific systems, aren't expecting to penetrate defenses, or other reasons why they would waste a ballistic missile on the modern equivalent of the Paris Gun.
Harassment weapons don't do much. None of the harassment campaigns done by the Nazis for example really amounted to anything.
Modern Shaheds can be possibly built at a scale to affect that, but we really haven't seen it happen yet. That would be something like thousands launched in a single wave against a single city or installation. But they still lack the precision and warhead to be targeted meaningfully.
You need WW2 industrial scale manufacturing lines worth of Shaheds to get beyond harassment. You need to be producing hundreds a day or more. That kind of industry is nearly impossible to protect from your adversary so unlikely to take shape.
> None of the harassment campaigns done by the Nazis for example really amounted to anything.
I hate to say it, but the aerial bombing campaign against Germany in WW2 was not terribly effective. The Germans were quick to decentralize the factories, and burning down houses did not impair the war effort much.
What did work was bombing the oil infrastructure. Germany ran out of gas.
What also worked was using the B-17 fleet as bait for the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe could not help but rise to defend the country, and then they were shot down by P-51s and P-47s and Spits. The goal was to erase the Luftwaffe, and it worked. (Even though German warplane production increased, the pilots were dead and irreplaceable.)
Depends, blanketing Ben Gurion (or any airbase) with parked aircraft on the tarmac with carpet munition is a really bad day.
But yes, against protected targets cluster munitions do not achieve much.
If you have relatively few low-precision missiles, using single warheads means you are risking achieving NO damage (easier to intercept, a good chance that it will hit nothing), with a cluster munition you are guaranteeing at least some damage.
I think Iranians are mixing both types of warheads.
Tarmacs are really hard to hit exactly, especially so when you fire from 1500 miles away. Each angular second turns into a big miss. Also, the launch goes towards the area where GPS denial is assumed. This denial can come in many forms.
There were reports about three small aircraft being damaged in Ben Gurion, one of them caught a fire. I guess three millionaires will have nothing to fly until they collect their insurance money.
That's a false comparison. You want to compare between the actual options you have, which are either (a) firing an interceptor (or several); or (b) repairing the damage caused by a non-intercepted missile.
Your first option comes with the major caveat that each interceptor you fire comes from a limited stockpile whose replacement rate[0] today isn't sufficient for even going 1:1, let alone accepting that multiple interceptors are required.
I'd say the real options in the near term when faced with an inbound missile is a) deciding to deplete your stockpile of interceptors with an incredibly limited replenishment rate; or b) risking a hit to a lower-value target.
Could the US go to a war economy footing and scale production? _Maybe_? I'm not entirely convinced the US can stomach the costs.
In theory; in practice however, there's been rocket fire from Gaza towards Israel where the offence was literally a metallic tube with a bit of TNT at a cost of about $800 per rocket [0] while the defence was $100,000+ per interceptor [1]. This has been going on for years, and as far as I'm aware there was no depletion observed.
I don't know the economic numbers off the top of my head but I have to imagine it's hard to find Israelis who think they're spending too much money on rocket interceptors.
It’s far more complicated than that. The choice is often between firing an interceptor against this missile aimed at this target, or firing that interceptor against the next missile aimed at a target you can’t yet know. Because unless your production capacity far outstrips theirs, you’re going to run out first.
Not if you (a) destroy their production capacity while they don't destroy yours; (b) you destroy their stockpiles while they don't destroy yours; and (c) you've found a bottleneck on their side (launchers) and destroy it while they fail to inflict the same damage on you.
That's true, but feels very much like "draw the rest of the owl." And even if you can do it, you'd have to do it against any country that starts to build this capacity that you think might somebody potentially use it against you, even if they aren't currently, unless you're confident that you can destroy their launchers and stockpiles so quickly that they can't be used in any significant number. (And if the USA couldn't manage to do that to Iran....)
Yes, it's complicated. There's almost 1,000 generals and officers spread across the US military. They (and the tens of thousands of people directly supporting them) spend a lot of time on these things.
Sometimes "draw the rest of the owl" makes sense when you've got 20,000 people actively drawing owls all day every day.
I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that there are a lot of experts doing expert things who know better about these things than some idiot sitting at his computer i.e. me.
But in this particular case, we're in the middle of a war where the owl didn't get drawn and the enemy has successfully launched thousands of drones and missiles at our forces and our allies, causing enough damage to severely disrupt the world economy.
They had a religious ruling on the range, and they also had a religious ruling on "not creating an atomic bomb."
The question of whether the world can assume its security on some religious rulings of some Ayatollas is still standing, as these rulings can apparently be changed or bypassed.
This "religious ruling" stuff is less interesting than it sounds. To begin with, while the Islamic Republic of Iran is a totalitarian state, the Twelver Shia hierarchy isn't unified. The supposed ban on nuclear weapons was Khamenei's, and binding only on his followers. But there are several other marja (marjas? marji?), with significant followings even in the security state & IRGC (al-Sistani being a good example).
More importantly, it's pretty clear that the geopolitical rulings are, well, geopolitical in nature. Iran is a nuclear threshold state; its strategy is to come as close to the breakout line as it can and extract concessions for not crossing it. The supposed nuclear fatwa is just public relations strategy. At the point Iran decided the cost/benefit/risk/reward of crossing the threshold made sense, it would be updated.
I agree with you, mostly. My read is that Twelver Shi’ism is not a unified hierarchy, and a marja’s fatwa normally binds that marja’s own followers rather than all Shi’a, so your institutional point is broadly right.[1][2] It is too strong, though, to say the anti-nuclear position was simply “invented for PR”: Khamenei did publicly describe it as a real fatwa.[3] At the same time, Iran’s enrichment posture _does_ fit the description of a threshold state, with large stocks of uranium enriched to 60%, so it is fair to say the ruling also had strategic and diplomatic value.[4]
The parts I would soften are the specific claim about Sistani having a significant following inside the IRGC, which MIGHT be true but is much harder to substantiate publicly (although, maybe you have some behind-the-scenes knowledge?), and the certainty of motive. Still, your last sentence is basically right: these rulings are not _immutable_. After Ali Khamenei’s death, Iran’s foreign minister said (quoting the Reuters article), “fatwas depend on the Islamic jurist issuing them,” and added he was “not yet in a position to judge the jurisprudential or political views of Mojtaba Khamenei…” This reinforces the point that doctrine can shift if the leadership chooses.[5]
[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Twelver Shi’ah.”
[2] Al-Islam.org, “Question 49: Difference between hukm and fatwa.”
[3] Leader.ir, “Ayatollah Khamenei in the Eid al-Fitr congregational prayers” and “Leader’s remarks on anti-Iran sanctions and Yemen aggressions by Saudi Arabia.”
[4] Arms Control Association, “The Status of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” and ACA analysis citing the IAEA’s 440.9 kg figure.
[5] Reuters, “Iran says nuclear doctrine unlikely to change, Hormuz Strait needs new protocol” (March 18, 2026).
There are lots of countries doing just the same but the West does not give a flying fuck about it. Most of the human rights violations they care about somehow related to countries that happened to have oil.
And if you tell me that US /Israel are bombing Iran to protect rights of oppressed then I have that wonderful bridge.
But that has nothing to do with this war. Like, nothing at all. Israel doing genocode in gaza and what seems like ethnical cleansing of lebanon does not have anyyhing with that either. USA threatening Greenland is also not a factor in this war.
Donald Trump does not care about protesters in Iran. His idea of regime change is "keep the regime and change head for someone who will pay me personally".
And Hegseth does not care either. He is proving his manhood.
And Israel have completely different goals, so.
It is not like Saudi were democrats. They have cut that journalist into pieces. They are violent dictatorship on their own right.
Everyone does, the problem is that every time the US came to deliver democracy to the Middle East they left the place in a much worse shape than it was... Also I don't believe for a second Trump or Israel give a single fuck about Iranian citizens
That’s the thing that annoys me the most about that post-hoc rationale - we’re supposed to pretend that Donald Trump cares at all about Muslim protesters on the other side of the world?
These were chemical weapons found in Iraq, the reason the new york times was interested in the story was the fact that ISIS has somehow developed chemical weapons using Iraq's existing infrastructure.
This means there were active facilities, materials and know how even after the war
We have Joe Kent on mic saying Iran was not building nukes and posed no threat to the US.
The only people saying Iran was just about to get nukes are the Israelis, who've been saying that every 5 years for the last 40 years, and the only people who fell for it are magatards
I don't understand how people fall for this shit after the Iraq war scam, which was essentially the exact same propaganda
Well, maybe you have a plausible explanation for why Iran needed 60%-grade enriched uranium -- now that we've firmly established that it clearly was not for building nukes.
Are you talking about the stuff he used to gas 100,000 Iranians in about 1984, or the stuff he used to gas 100,000 of his own citizens in 1988? Oh wait he didn't, it's all propaganda and war scam I guess.
I don't think anyone cares. I remember the switch from a MacBook with a (no-adjective) trackpad to a MacBook with a haptic trackpad. There was absolutely nothing earth-shattering about that switch, it was a great trackpad before and a great trackpad after.
True, I don’t think people care since Apple’s non-haptic trackpad is still far (and I mean FAR) better than anything else in the market. People who eventually move on to a higher priced Mac with a haptic trackpad will probably feel a difference and think of it as a nice bonus that came with their upgrade (and probably would not like to downgrade, if possible), but I dont think any newcomers would frown at its absence first-hand.
Cluster munitions that have between 1 and 10 kg of explosives are great against the infantry in the open field, not so much against population with proper level of shelters and an advanced warning to get there.
> I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
It's a good point, though I should point out that GPS denial is assumed in those sort of contexts as a first countermeasure so D_A likely has alternative targeting, and that smaller drones can move faster with less energy storage, which itself requires less weight, compounding the benefits of being smaller.
D_A only needs to get to coordinates (X, Y) with a minimal requirements for Z as "some meters above ground." It doesn't matter if it gets there in 15 minutes or in 20 minutes, or in 2 hours.
D_B needs to absolutely nail X, Y, Z -- but also t!
To be at the time t0 at the point (X0, Y0, Z0), the defence drone needs to be at some other point (X1, Y1, Z1) at the time t1 -- given the speed and the direction of the attack drone. But what the defence drone has is just an estimation of these. The amount of back-propagation calculations for the defence drone is simply immense.
And also the attacker can send 100 drones without any real targeting at all and 10 proper expensive drones and you need to send up 110 defenders which need to be able to track flying drones. Being the attacker will always be easier.
He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.
that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and sold later
> plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild
That is the real cost, which I would assume is nowhere near billions
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