The other thing to understand is that most of these weapons are costly and war is a game of outlasting the enemy and running down their resources. Having expensive missiles is more effective as a threat than as a means of wearing down an enemy.
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.