The Lanchester square law explains why it’s collapsing so fast, even if Iran planned to “save the good stuff.”
Quick version: In modern ranged combat (missiles, drones, precision strikes), a force’s real power isn’t just its numbers — it’s roughly proportional to the square of its numbers. Why? Because every launcher can potentially target any enemy asset. So when the coalition knocks out even a modest percentage of Iran’s mobile launchers (TELs), command nodes, and air defenses, the remaining launch capacity drops exponentially — not linearly.
That’s why the chart shows 350 → 175 → 120 → ~50 in days, not a slow grind. Destroying one TEL doesn’t just remove one missile; it kills every future missile that truck could have fired, plus the coordination around it. The Economist article was written before the coalition went straight for the “launcher hunt” strategy. Iran never got the chance to cycle through cheap stuff and then unleash the hypersonics — the infrastructure to do it is being dismantled faster than they can adapt.
The exponential decay we’re seeing (half-life ~1 day) is textbook square-law attrition. Classic case of quality + precision beating quantity in real time.