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No, the opposite has happened with this war. Adversaries globally have seen the ability of the US and Israel to operate with near-impunity over Iran, and it has destroyed confidence in non-Western defence systems.

The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.


You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper.

The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.


JDAM's are a lot cheaper. They are a guidance kit bolted on to a MK-82 gravity bomb. There are a lot of MK-82's in stock, as they have been made since the 1940's.

Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.

We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)


Also, you can jam JDAM (GPS) guidance. The Russians are masters at jamming and I'm fairly confident they've shared some systems with Iran.


The issue is restraint, an all out bombing campaign with no regard for civilians or international condemnation would do the job in a month


I think it takes a wilful ignorance of the history of industrialised warfare to believe this.


The headline is inaccurate, as the article actually says that the US Army has used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles, referring to ATACMS and PCM.

First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.

Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.


> A new, fully equipped ambulance is about $150k.

This is definitely not true. A base model unequipped ambulance may be in that ballpark. A fully equipped ambulance will vary wildly in cost based on clinical level but will be about $250-500k in the US.

> Then you have liability, both for the vehicle and for the medical treatment; that's about $12k per year.

Maybe for BLS or non-emergency ambulances in a low-utilisation role? For ALS/Critical Care or higher in a busy jurisdiction it's going to be significantly higher.


I tried to find the asterisk there to see the details, but could not.

FWIW I think that HEMS cost is significantly under costed, as the London HEMS H135s run about £2,500 per flight hour on direct flight costs alone, so I suspect the £4,748 figure is referring to that alone.

I think a closer estimate is probably total annual operational costs divided by total shouts, (£18 MM / 2,000) or about £9,000 per shout.

Even that's an under costing, as the clinical personnel, equipment, and liability is shouldered by the NHS. A pure costing is probably closer to 2-3X that per clinical flight.

Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.


> I think a closer estimate is probably total annual operational costs divided by total shouts, (£18 MM / 2,000) or about £9,000 per shout.

That's a more useful estimate than merely the flight costs, agree - though the fixed operation costs don't change much in an 1800 vs a 2100 callout scenario.

> Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.

It's wild!


> Only a complete moron would think the answer to this is no. If there's no personal cost to using an extremely expensive service, every one is going to use it regardless of whether it's actually necessary. It will quickly turn into a free taxi service for anyone who wants to go anywhere near a hospital.

Okay, so why don't we see this behaviour more in other countries?

In my jurisdiction, the incentives are actually weighted towards pushing people to ambulances, as there is a €100 fee for self-referral to ED which is waived if you're transported, but while there are time wasters and frequent flyers, the service is actually less abused than US ambulances under EMTALA.


That's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.


It exists, but the vast majority of government services dont use it (i.e. taxes are just done through belastingdienst.nl).


Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk).

Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.


Ah. Just a blatant inaccuracy on wikipedia I take it. That does make a bit more sense.


Yep. gov.nl is in the PSL[1] and there are plenty of used subdomains (e.g. https://business.gov.nl/)

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat


As far as I can tell .gov.nl is only used for pages aimed at i.e. expats and businesses. Most services dutch people use simply have a .nl page like the digital id or filing taxes.


This makes sense because gov is anglocentric and would make the URLs sound weird in non-English countries.


There’s no reason they couldn’t have picked a different second-level suffix. Spanish-speaking countries use e.g. .gob.mx, France uses .gouv.fr.


And overheid.nl is their government site for that reason.


I wonder where you suggest researchers go that is both granting funding and not attaching similar or more stringent strings to the money?


Any country that doesn't openly say that it will bar funding to grant applications that include any word from a given list of words. Which, of the countries on this planet, is quite a few.


Can you name one?


No country in Europe does this, for example.


Our developers work office hours, but would frequently have 10 plus sessions open. Massive parallelism is one of the benefits of agentic coding.


Yes, subjectively there do seem to be moments where the quality of the output drops significantly - usually during US peak hours.


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