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0 pointswahern13h ago0 comments

Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M

Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit.

I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?

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XorNot11h ago

The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.

The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.

tharkun__9h ago

    namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.

That makes no sense to me. Why would I spend millions times, dunno how many do you need for a guaranteed kill for an S-400, if you could spend hundreds of thousands on cheaper ways to kill the same S-400, while the S-400 still defends itself with millions worth of its own missiles?

That's precisely what Ukraine was/is doing and has developed. The West provided lots of military support, including the US of course, but way not enough as we can see now play out in even the US itself vs. Iran. They developed cheap drones that can shoot down cheaper Shaheds. Shaheds that are way too cheap to use regular interceptors for. But even cheaper drones tip the scales back.

Why would I want to waste Tomahawks 1:1 vs. S-400 interceptors, if I can kill it with a much cheaper drone swarm?

Not saying those precise conditions/weapons exist today. I have no idea. But if they did, why would I still waste my high cost weapons.

3eb7988a16638h ago

Agreed. Start with the low cost munitions in a zergling rush. Maybe it gets through, maybe it does not, but the defenders will still have to expend their interceptors. Only if the low cost stuff proves ineffective, follow-on with the better equipment.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

XorNot7h ago

Because your low cost weapons will be intercepted by their low cost weapons.

The enemy gets a say in your plans, and is much more likely to have low cost weapons available then high cost ones.

The interceptor for a SHAHED is a quadcopter which doesn't need to fly as far or carry as much payload. Anyone can build this.

The interceptor for an Iskander ballistic missile is a Patriot interceptor: literally nothing else can successfully stop it reliably. Only the US can build this.

If your attacking systems are cheap, then the enemy can field just as many: Russia has a lot of drones in Ukraine now too, they were just playing catch up.

"The next war" won't have surprise drones as a problem, it'll have highly developed and optimized drone and counter drone systems.

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runtype9h ago

I think in recent conflicts we are also seeing the opposite - low-cost munitions and drones can be deployed in such large numbers that they exhaust existing supplies of interceptors, and since those interceptors are more expensive than the munitions they're intercepting and cannot be replenished as quickly, they can force resource exhaustion and compete disproportionally in the economic and supply line domain of warfare.

This is a classic "you show up prepared for the last war"

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