Strategerist: “Or a whole bunch o’ cheap slow, unstealthy missiles that simply overwhelm the maximum engagements the target ship can manage at once.”
Yeah, there definitely is that. That was one of the big fears in the Cold War. Even though we thought our technology was better, the Soviets could theoretically overwhelm us with numbers.
I remember a science fiction short story that was about two planets. One was technically advanced but non-aggressive. The other was relatively primitive but very warlike. The primitive one kept attacking over and over in spite of losses. The technically advanced one kept designing better star ships that took them longer to design and were produced in diminishing numbers. Eventually the advanced race had one star ship that could do nearly everything versus millions upon millions of attacking ships. Yes, the end result was that the advanced race was beaten.
We need to make sure that some nation like the China can’t simply overwhelm us with thousands upon thousands of low tech missiles. They certainly have (or will have) that kind of production capability, and it would be nice not to have to resort to nukes in short order.
Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own."