Posted by anjel 5 hours ago
But also look at Ukraine. They are punching well above their weight with asymmetrical tactics, but Russia is not defeated.
Drones and other autonomous, cheap weaponry changes a lot. Smaller states and non-state actors can inflict much more serious and expensive damage now more than ever.
Large weapons still matter though. If we ever were to enter an existential battle you would quickly see how big, expensive systems can still be advantageous. I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine or the US in Iran vs, say, WWII. Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not. Then suddenly what matters are big weapons and the huge supply chains powering a war machine.
Both the US and Russia are also pivoting heavily towards drones, and they've been developing them for decades. Yes we have big, expensive weapons programs but we also have a lot of stuff ready or soon to be ready which is much, much cheaper.
They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
Restraint, my unbleached asshole.
That was mainly the Americans, British, and the Germans, not the USSR.
Also, what makes you think they could in this war? Do you think they can send bombers over Ukranian cities and drop a shitton of ordnance?
The Russians aren't deploying nukes; that is the only actual 'restraint' to date.
It was really coming to the point of urgent existential threat to the Putin regime this spring, before Trump and Netanyahu bailed him out, first by doubling the global oil price and then by relaxing sanctions.
And Ukraine's drone / cruise missile portfolio includes things like the Flamingo, more than twice the payload and range of a Tomahawk.
Flamingo is still mostly vaporware. For precise strikes against Russian factories Ukraine uses either Storm Shadow or domestic Neptun.
But that just shows again that drones are not particularly effective against most industrial targets and even against oil installations the damage is not lasting.
Or consider how US was able to destroy the bridge in Iran yet Crimea bridge and bridges in Rostov that are absolutely vital to Russian war logistics still stands.
In the sense that the tide of geopolitics means that if someone tried that they'd mark themselves as a defector in the current scheme of morality and would stand to lose a lot when the rest of Europe inevitably treats that as an example of how they are about to be treated.
Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. This says nothing about the cost and value of the lives that might be lost in an enemy strike.
We would not be safer if the enemy had cheap drones and we had no weapons capable of fighting back.
The main problem is that air defense interception is incredibly challenging and expensive primarily because a mid-course defensive interceptor needs considerably greater capabilities than the weapon it is intercepting, because it needs to catch up to the incoming missile or drone mid-flight.
Sure, this can lead to massive overkill problems. Yes, the US should invest more in the low end of the high/low mix. But no, this does not mean there's no place for the high end, or that they should never be used to destroy lower end targets if that's all that is available.
A more interesting challenge, if you ask me, is in the naval domain. Imagine a capital ship has two options for defending against incoming threats - either fire an expensive and limited stock interceptor missile with a 99% kill chance, or wait until the threat is inside the range of a cheap cannon or laser system with a 95% kill chance. There's a real command level tradeoff to be made here. If you shoot every drone with interceptors, you lose shot exchange badly, and you just run out of interceptors. But if you let every target through into the engagement range of your close range systems, you run the risk that one makes it through to your ship, potentially causing damage and casualties.
The future of war is going to be wild one way or the other.
If that $5000 drone was alone then sure. However if they launch 200 drones (money equivalent of one missile) you'd be looking at totally different picture. Also they usually launch combo. Few missiles and whole bunch of drones. even worse
Old school was guns. Price per round was cheap. But the expensive missile kills the platform holding the cheap gun, you have to go with missiles. But the drone war is a different beast entirely. Drones can't shoot back. Thus the answer is guns. How well will their light drones fare against a Cessna armed with an automatic shotgun? How would the jet drones fare against a WWII warbird?
Lots of cheap, mobile guns. No meaningful self defense but doctrine is to always depart after shooting.
The naval one is much harder because you're not free to disperse your ship into many pieces. But, still, consider your cannon. Let's step down a bit, cheaper cannon with a 90% kill rate--but you put several of them.
So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?
Hell, Iran didn't actually work into building them before Trump decided to attack them.
As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear. We're not even certain which faction is really in control of nuclear weapons policy. (This isn't an endorsement of the recent attacks.)
> As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear.
The had elections at the time, and voted in the candidate promising nuclear weapons at the next year. So no, that's lying propaganda again.
I assure you that is a much better problem than the alternative.
I guess it is a good thing then that this isn't something they actually do.
They use cheap weapons to shoot down cheap drones. Their primary anti-drone missile was developed in the 2010s and costs less than a Shahed.
The US took the old Vietnam-era unguided rocket pods (Hydra 70), of which they produce hundreds of thousands every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept.
A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.
Which is the same reason no level of military power is going to keep the Strait of Hormuz open (or at least, no level beyond a truly absurd one and even then - see the Kerch bridge in Crimea).
But Orange Dementia didn't even think about that.
Except this is more propaganda than truth. In general america does not use patriots to shoot down drones except in exceptional circumstances.
Not that the ecconomics of missile defense isnt a problem. It can be. But some of it has been highly exagerated.
I'm sure they burned through quite a few AMRAAM and Sidewinders doing intercepts as well. Patriot is much more expensive than $1M (try $4M), Stinger is around 250K depending on who the customer is ($750K if you're non-US). AMRAAM is over $1M, Sidewinders $500K.
Even APKWS is $40k, and Shaheed prices are around $30k? So even that low cost option is losing.
It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.
The industry obviously wants more and more profits.
They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.
That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.
They are interested in profits, not national security.
And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.
You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.
They're only interested in making more money.
Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.
Also, saying that instrument X is higher caliber to instrument Y is completely wrong. They all needs immense workmanship to produce, and immense effort to play. This effort can't be compared. A double bassist's finger spread for the first three positions is almost equal to whole keyboard/fretboard of a violin, but a violin can play 8x more notes with a bow when compared to the double bass. Momentum is a strong adversary when you try to change direction with a full size German bow.
You might think woodwinds are easy. A French horn player needs to play adjacent notes with small lip movements. That's an unforgiving blade's edge. A tuba player needs lungs of a whale to keep that long notes, etc. etc.
Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.
Like how the article outlines. An expensive violin is good for a solo performance, but loses its importance in an orchestra. Like how F-35 becomes the wrong thing when the theater of war calls for different conventions and operates with completely different dynamics.
P.S.: Yes, I have played double bass in a symphony orchestra.
I don't think that last bit translated well.
Beyond that, what on earth are you talking about. Frankly what is the grandparent talking about? $2m violins cost that much because they're rare and famous and have a story, not because they somehow have a higher quality than a modern equivalent. Sort of like the mona lisa.
I don't think so. It's a good analogy how F-35 needs a good ground crew and logistics chain to keep it flying. Like how an orchestra needs these instruments to create subtle but extremely important pillars of sound, even if they're rarely or barely heard.
Also, not al $2MM violins cost that much because they have a story, but they're built by distinguished builders and built to order, for the person playing it, with old-stock woods and whatnot.
Yes, they don't cost that much, but you pay for the craftsmanship and the privilege. Price is an artificial construct after some point.
That only has to do with physics of sound intensity: to create a sound that is perceived as "twice as loud" as "one violin" you'd need ... ten violins.
If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.
China very successfully built a rich economic system that is the factory of the world while eroding our own domestic capacity. In a war they can cut us off. We are not even as strong as we were during the Vietnam war, though we have fancier toys. Good luck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8
(Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)
USA is shifting focus to china in lots of their policy documents
China is massively building up arms
Lots of talk about a potential invasion of taiwan at some point.
Its clearly something war planners are worried about.
Winning sub-peer conflicts is fine for projecting hard power (when it works...) and protecting allies (when you have them...) but it doesn’t really budge the needle on national security.
That aside, people are simply not able to model how the next peer conflict will be fought ahead of time. All sides will be learning as they go. Building complex systems like the F-35 seems like a good way to maintain engingeering/technology culture that can be adapted when the time comes.
Also, I'm fairly skeptical of China's military. They keep purging people, and the human element in war seems underrated.
Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.
We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.
More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.
Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.
Anyone making claims about cost has a lot of work to do because the F-35 program is actually extremely cheap per unit now for what it is.
https://ekonomickydenik.cz/app/uploads/2023/09/20230905-awn-...
The F35 is very, very impressive, just maybe not very suitable for a long war of attrition.
The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but:
The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either.
We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders.
The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this.
And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home.
First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth.
Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles.
Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing.
We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.
The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.
The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."