Geran-2 (which is Russian licenced Shahed drone) also carries air-to-air missile, so sending slow archaic manned airframe is just suicide mission (aka shaheed)

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-used-shahed-drone-arme...

a single AN/FPS-132 radar costs $1.1 bln, not $500m. And Iran stuck 17 of the CENCCOM sites hosting radars of all kinds across Qarar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, etc).

Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.

in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).

So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available

Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iran-str...

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-radars-airstrikes/