The Economics of Defeat in Iran

“The war in Iran teaches an old lesson about military spending.

 

Six hundred years ago, on a muddy field near Agincourt in northern France, King Henry V's outnumbered, half-starved English army faced the flower of French chivalry. French knights were expensive, each man-at-arms the product of many years of training, his armor and warhorse a major investment.

 

Henry's archers carried longbows that cost little, drawn by men trained in every village across the kingdom. When the volleys came, the knights fell by the hundreds. Quantity overwhelmed quality -- and the mud helped. France lost the battle, but defeat in the war came not in the dying. It was in the impossibility of replacing what had died.

 

Patriot interceptors are exquisite, a wonder of engineering, the product of decades of accumulated technical mastery, each one the labor of hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Iranian drones they intercept are arrows -- cheap, plentiful, made in bulk.

 

Since February, the U.S. has fired more than 1,300 Patriot interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones. Each interceptor costs around $4 million to destroy weapons that cost between $20,000 and $50,000. Based on the most recent rate of production, it will take two years for Lockheed Martin to replace what has been fired in the past 2 1/2 months. That is the economics of defeat, and our adversaries understand it.

 

Each Patriot is also a creature of supply chains we don't fully control. The U.S.-made guidance chips depend on helium, supplies of which have been disrupted by the war in Iran. Even if Congress voted the funds tomorrow for 10,000 new interceptors, the metal and the gas would still have to be found, the workforce trained, and the production lines tooled. We are running short of the raw materials for our exquisite weapons while our adversaries flood the battlefield with cheap drones.

 

Next-generation fighters, multibillion-dollar carriers and so much more mean that although each is a marvel, we have too few, and they're too hard to replace, making them too valuable to risk.

 

The cure to what ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations's militaries isn't another exquisite platform. It's an industrial base that can take an idea and turn it into a million in a year. That means pivoting civilian production lines to defense and giving contracts to the manufacturer that can deliver 100,000 drones a month, not the one that delivers a dozen platforms in a decade.

 

The goal is no longer the perfect weapon. You build the best you can. Then build it again, 90% as good, at 80% of the cost, in 50% of the time. Then do it again and again, a thousand times more. That not only fills the armory; it creates a system to keep it full.

 

In the Iran war, we're equipping like the French at Agincourt when what we need is an army of archers.

 

---

 

Mr. Tugendhat, a Conservative, is a member of the British Parliament and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.” [1]

 

1. The Economics of Defeat in Iran. Tugendhat, Tom.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 May 2026: A17.