US-Israel war with Iran: Do the gulf states have enough interceptor missiles?

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. With a program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life, I'm Charlotte McDonald. On Saturday the 28th of February, the US and Israel launched a military attack on Iran, targeting the country's missile infrastructure, military sites and leadership. In response, Iran launched a wave of strikes across the region, including on Israel and the Gulf states. Iran has a stockpile of ballistic missiles, which it's firing at neighboring countries. These countries in turn are using interceptor missiles to try and shoot them down. The brutal equation we're looking at today, is it clear who will run out of missiles first? I am Kelly Grieco and I am a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, a nonpartisan think tank on national security and foreign policy. We're seeing a lot of missiles and drones crisscrossing the skies over the entire Gulf. The United States and Israel have conducted intense operations using a lot of missiles against Iranian targets. Something on the order of about 2,000 targets have been struck. Iran though is not sitting back and just taking it. It's also sending a lot of missiles and drones into the region, and particularly targeting the Gulf states. Over 500 ballistic missiles have been fired at Gulf states. We're going to focus on the part of the battle involving ballistic missiles today. In cases as obvious, a ballistic missile is not something it's easy to protect yourself from. These are missiles that go really high up and then come back down towards earth on a predictable path. And you're basically trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. So it requires sophisticated interceptors to be able to do that, particularly given the speeds that are involved. So this is when you'll start to hear about things like patriot missiles, particularly the very high-end interceptors for that called the PAC-3 MSC. They're very expensive kit because this is not easy to do. So for a patriot, you can be spending about $4 million per interceptor. Kelly says that the US and Israel haven't shared much usable data on their missile interceptor operation, but other countries coming under attack have. Reuters report that Q8 say they detected 178 ballistic missiles and intercepted 178. Qatar detected 101 and intercepted 98. The UAE detected 196 and intercepted 181. Bahrain says they destroyed 74 missiles. This data from the government suggests that some of these countries are intercepting 100% of the Iranian ballistic missiles. These are very high rates. These systems, particularly the patriot systems that most are relying on have become really good. At the same time, Kelly cautions that you should take these numbers as preliminary and not definitive. It can be hard during a war to be clear what has actually happened. Historically, as we go back and look at it, it's often been the case that these kinds of interception rates, in reality, we go back over the data, we'll realize that, oh, in fact, someone thought they had hit another incoming missile, and in fact, it was a piece of debris. At least from what we're seeing, it looks like it's a high interception rate. These figures from the Gulf states give you a ballpark idea of how many missiles are being intercepted. But to work out how many missiles the Gulf states are using from their stockpile, you need to know something else. In order to get these high interception rates, you don't use one interceptor for one missile, because you really want to make sure you're able to destroy it, and you often only have one chance to do this. The standard practice is to use two interceptors per incoming missile threat in order to make sure that you have a high probability of kill. And at that point, if you did miss it, you might even use a third. This gets us to the key question. Do we know how many high-tech interceptor missiles the Gulf states had in the first place? So we can try to estimate using open source, but the numbers themselves are classified. One of the ways we try to estimate this is these countries are largely relying on U.S. purchase systems. And so you can go back over foreign military sales notices to Congress about authorizations to try to estimate how many they actually purchase. These numbers tell you how many of the missiles each country was authorized to buy from the U.S., but not how many they actually bought. Historically, what we see is countries may actually purchase like 60 to 80 percent of what they're authorized for. When you add up these sales estimates figures, and this research comes from Fabian Hoffman at the University of Oslo, you get a rough idea of the top end of the stockpile. The total across the Gulf states is about 1800 interceptors in total. You can then do the back of the envelope maths. You take the number of ballistic missiles that have been intercepted, assume two and sometimes three interceptor missiles might have been fired each time, and total it up to see how much of the stockpile might have been used. If we assume, you know, for example, that there may be or firing twice as many for the incoming threats, that would be about 59 percent of their inventory gone. And if we assume that it's more closer to 2.5 interceptors used for every one incoming threat, then it would be closer to about 73 percent. These, remember, are the figures that assume the Gulf states purchased 100 percent of the missiles they could have bought, which is unlikely. It's also unlikely that the Gulf states will be able to procure many more of these interceptor missiles. There's a lot of demand, and the war in Ukraine has depleted supplies across Europe, for example. To give you a sense of scale, Kelly says that about 620 of the interceptor missiles were produced in 2025. And while the company that makes them are trying to increase production, that process is going to take years, not weeks. The lines are really long of countries that are asking for them and who gets priority, of course, is tricky as well. This brings us to the most important question. Are the Gulf states supplies of interceptor missiles going to last longer than Iran's supplies of the ballistic missiles they're firing at them? Yeah, so this is exactly the question. There's a bit of a race here between the ability of the United States and Israel to basically find Iran's ballistic missile launchers and also its missile stockpiles. Because obviously, if you destroy the launchers, then Iran can't get the missiles into the air. And then this would take a lot of pressure off defenders and their stockpiles. Before the war, the Israeli Defense Force suggested that their best estimate was that Iran had about 2,500 ballistic missiles of all types and ranges and about 200 launchers. Over the last four days or so, in the updates that we've received, the IDF has suggested that they think they've destroyed a bit more than half of these ballistic missile launchers. After an initial wave, the rate of Iranian ballistic missile attacks has fallen in recent days. This might be a strategy, says Khali. But if it is the result of a collapse in Iran's military capacity, the Gulf states might be okay. I feel like we'll have a better sense in the coming days if we see the rates, you know, if it remains in the single digits in terms of what Iran is firing of ballistic missiles, then I think the possibility of Gulf states running out becomes less and less likely. Kelly is very clear that she doesn't have the same optimism about the waves of drone attacks from Iran. But we're not able, at the moment, to do the maths on that one to give a clear answer. What is clear is that Iran's drone operation will be far harder to attack than their ballistic missiles. The problem with the Shahad drones is that these are relatively easy to assemble. It means that you can disperse your production far more widely. I mean, someone could be, you know, assembling one of these drones in their garage. Thanks to Kelly Grico from the Stimson Center. That's it for this week. If you've seen a number you think we should take a look at, email more or less at bbc.co.uk. Until next week, goodbye.