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Yeah, fair the carrier incident is a separate thing. I do think that what it's going to come down to is the ability to produce weapons and counter measures at scale. Even with the cost being brought down, the bottleneck might end up being actual industrial capacity in the US. Another problem is stuff like rare earths that China has a monopoly on, and US military is now cut off from. Developing independent supply will take at least half a decade. So, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts weapon production in the near future. With the existing stocks becoming depleted thanks to Ukraine and Gaza, I wonder what the remaining capacity looks like.
I imagine that if there was an all out war with Iran, then they would just use hypersonics to attack the airfields and carriers which is probably the surest approach to neutralizing F35s.
With the APKWS counter drone and cruise missile rockets though, that's just a laser guidance kit mounted to an unguided Hydra 70mm rocket, with a proximity fuse and cheap infrared seeker for the air to air variant. Much like how a UMPK kit turns an unguided Russian FAB bomb into a guided glide bomb, or a a JDAM kit turns a Mk 80 series unguided bomb into a guided bomb. The US has plenty of Hydra rockets already produced, the limitation on production would be on the guidance kits. Anti ballistic missile interceptors are the much bigger production bottleneck for stuff like THAAD and SM-3.
With Iran, during the last attack the US evacuated bases close by like Qatar, and attacked from areas where Iran would not attack, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, even Greece potentially. And their aircraft carriers remained outside of the range of even Iran's longest range anti ship ballistic missiles. This also explains all the recent "mutual defence pacts" in the Middle East, as a strategy to encircle Iran. Iran then attacked the evacuated base in Qatar as a form of symbolic retaliation. Also for a counterforce attack with conventional ballistic missiles, a high degree of accuracy over long range is required. Iran is working on that by fitting optical seekers to the maneuverable warheads of their ballistic missiles, first starting with the shorter range missiles, and expanding to the longer range ones. I think they're up to 1200km range now. But it's quite challenging. Some from of radar guidance/radar mapping like on the Pershing-II and potentially the Chinese DF-21 could be more feasible long term.
I mean, the US is currently having trouble ramping up stuff like artillery shell production. Even a relatively simple rocket is a far more complex thing to produce.
And that's why I specifically noted the scenario of total war. Right now, Iran just absorbs the hits because it doesn't want to escalate. However, if there was an open war then these bases would obviously be hit, and carriers alone aren't a solution because they can only carry so much gear. This is really the key problem the US has in general, the logistics are vastly in favor of the adversaries. The US has to ship everything across the ocean, while Iran or Russia can just transport things by rail.