The Bomber Will Always Get Through…

It is said that history doesn’t actually repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The 1930s were in some ways similar to the recent decade; the settlement following the First World War was unravelling, and political extremism was on the rise. The future was uncertain and worrying, and there was disagreement on how to protect the United Kingdom from future threats. The development of aviation raised the very real prospect of cities being destroyed from the sky. It was against this background that the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin gave a speech on the eve of Armistice Day 1932 in which he said:

‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through…’^[1]

And indeed it did, at Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hanoi and thousands of other places. As Baldwin rightly predicted, absolute defence was nigh impossible; deterrence through retaliation was the only effective response.

Fast forward nearly one hundred years, and we can see the result of Baldwin’s gloomy forecast in the skies of the Middle East, where Israeli and American bombers range at will, bombing with something close to absolute immunity. The Iranians have found as Baldwin predicted that the bombers always get through and they have adopted Baldwin’s philosophy of striking back, not like for like, for they do not have access to the high tech wizardry in American aircraft such as the F-35 which cost around $100 million a pop, but through cheap drones such as the Shahed, which cost according to some commentators $30,000 dollars each. And Iran has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them.

The Shahed is a modern, more accurate version of the V1 flying bombs Hitler threw at London in 1944. They are slow-moving and relatively easy to shoot down, but here’s the rub: a Patriot SAM (Surface to Air Missile), which has been used to take them out, costs over $3 million each.^[2] One does not need to be a mathematician to see the problem.

Arthur Erickson, chief executive and co-founder of Texas-based drone maker Hylio, was quoted by the New York Times as saying: ‘It is definitely more expensive to shoot down a drone than to put a drone in the sky.’ ‘It’s a money game. The cost ratio per shot, per interception, is at best 10 to 1. But it could be more like 60 or 70 to 1 in terms of cost, in favour of Iran.’^[3]

This is bad enough, but if we take into consideration the relative production scales, the Pentagon has a problem. The US produces around 500 Patriots a year,^[4] whereas Iran produces around 1,000 Shahed drones a month.^[5] Of course, both sides have other similar weapons, but the Shahed v Patriot scenario is indicative of the core problem now facing the US – it is more likely to run out of anti-drone munitions before Iran runs out of drones. The US can hit factories and supply chains, but these weapons can be made in small workshops, as they are in Ukraine. Used in swarms, they can overwhelm the best defences, and Iran is using them primarily not against well-defended military targets but the economic infrastructure of America’s Gulf allies. Dubai’s tourist industry has been destroyed by a few strikes on luxury hotels, while oil storage tanks and refineries in Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have been set ablaze. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, despite being lavishly equipped with modern American military aircraft, have resisted the urge to strike back, but I imagine President Trump is getting regular calls to wrap the war up. The US and Israel can strike Iran at will, but Iran has shown the ability to strike back and also, by virtue of closing the Straits of Hormuz through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, put the world’s economy into a tailspin.

Vietnam showed that a smaller, weaker nation can be the back that wears out the lash. The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than fell in all of the Second World War, but in the end, it conceded it could not pummel Vietnam into surrender and walked away. In that respect, history may be rhyming again. As Stanley Baldwin predicted, the bomber, and nowadays the drone, will always get through.