This is blogspam based on a tweet of the company's promo video[1] in November and some speculation by a guy on Chinese state TV[2]. As far as I can find there's no evidence since then that these have entered production, mass or otherwise. It was doubted at the time they could hit these costs in production, and there hasn't been any news since.
Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.
You underestimate both China's production capability and their desire to destabilize the south Asian region, so they can step in to take control. They have been arming Pakistan to the teeth against India. They even sold them the nuclear weapons tech. They don't care.
Both the US and China sold nuclear power technology to Pakistan, as I recall France also agreed to sell nuclear power tech to Pakistan .. in a deal that fell through because of something (haven't checked history) in France's domestic politics scene(?).
All three countries have denied providing nuclear weapons tech to Pakistan - there is credible history to account for both Pakistan and India to have independantly developed enrichment programs and weapons on their own*.
All things are possible, a plausible explanation for the flurry of accusations against China from 2000 onwards from both the US State Dept. and India was the bald fact that the US, the premier global atomic watchdog, was caught absolutely pants down and blindsided by the events of 1998** ... India detonated a series of nuclear weapons tests and Pakistan responded within 30 days with a slightly longer series ( 5 blasts Vs six in response .. IIRC )
It sounds like marketing hype. The term "hypersonic" is so vague as to be almost meaningless, for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile. Can it usefully maneuver at hypersonic speeds? Can it track a target at hypersonic speeds? Without further evidence I'm going to assume the answer is "no".
Also, as the Iranians have recently demonstrated, the way to get get past someone's defences is to deploy multiple warheads (and a pile of random debris) from a cheap missile, not to bet on exotic hypersonic weapons.
> for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile.
The V2 was not a hypersonic missile, it was a ballistic missile that had a predetermined flight path that was easy to predict. The distinguishing factor of hypersonic missiles is that they do not require a ballistic trajectory to achieve their speeds (and are hence, much harder to detect) and they maintain maneuverability throughout their entire flight path.
> The ancestor of ballistic missiles, Germany’s [...] V-2 was first launched in the 1940s. During ascent, it could reach a speed greater than Mach 5 and could do so again momentarily on its way back down. But, no one would claim that the V-2 was a hypersonic missile. In a similar vein, should one apply this label to modern intercontinental ballistic missiles that reach speeds beyond Mach 20 at ascent and re-entry?
> Certainly not, and there are other characteristics commonly cited when defining ‘hypersonic missiles’. However, while a combination of defining characteristics is increasingly adopted among experts, hypersonic missiles are often not well understood within public discussions in politics and the media [...]. The US-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance states that ‘hypersonic weapons refer to weapons that travel faster than Mach 5 (~3800mph) and have the capability to maneuver during the entire flight.’
How about don't call stuff that travels faster than sound a "fasterthansoundic missile" if you don't want people to confuse it with all other old stuff that also travels faster than sound!
Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not quite the scenario from my parent. They said "high cost weapons taking out air defenses". Whatever the US equivalent of an Iskander would be (I used a Tomahawk as an example), the S-400 (i.e. Patriot "equivalent") would be used to defend against it at first/in his scenario.
If you want to turn it around, sure. Let's see how you'd want to take out a Patriot: high cost weapons, like an Iskander might try it? Costs about as much as a Tomahawk? Would need multiple ones, because the Patriot would defend itself against even multiple ones? But the Patriots cost as much and you want multiple interceptors for each Iskander sent its way?
What if I could send, for less money/resources, a drone swarm that also takes out the Patriot or at least expends more money/resources in interceptors shot from it, than I had to spend on the drone swarm?
I totally agree, it's "just a race". If I build an offensive drone swarm for $x, which is less than your high cost interceptors, you better build an "anti drone whatever thingie" (which might be anti-drone drone swarms) that's even cheaper.
But, thanks, essentially you're agreeing with me: Don't use your high cost stuff to take out SAMs and then use cheap drones. Instead, use cheaper stuff to swarm it out of existence. Just gotta be faster at being cheaper. Doesn't matter if you're the attacker or defender.
"what if I just had a better system with no downsides or logistical costs that was also cheaper".
In reality: Ukraine reliably downs Shaheds using a mix of low cost technologies.
They mostly can't defend against ballistic missiles without high cost interceptors.
The Shaheds could do a lot of damage to the Patriot site if they could hit it...but they never get anywhere near it. That's the point: your low cost system does not have the capability to threaten the high cost one.
And in all this you've forgotten that attacking the SAM site is only being done to enable other operational objectives. The Patriot battery is defending targets many times it's value, including the logistics and launch sites of all those low cost defensive systems - or the logistics and launch sites of your own low cost offensive systems.
To the article: the Tomahawk missile costs about $2 million per shot. Assuming this article is true, the missile in question gives you maybe a 20:1 cost advantage...but can it do the same mission? Does it have the same range, or targeting, or precision? If you cannot fire these from the same range as a tomahawk, or they don't realiably hit targets, then they can be substantially worse for a much higher logistics cost to deploy (perhaps total: the truck blowing up because you had to drive it to the front line is rather a problem).
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"
I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.
The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
> If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?
In terms of russias strategic goals Russia lost in month one when they pulled out of kyiv and admitted regime change wasn't going to happen. Everything since then has just been a very expensive face saving exercise and a hope thay somehow Ukraine would collapse.
It's been getting worse and worse lately, they have huge losses, hard to even think about it. With oil output dropped by 40% in the latest Ukrainian attacks on oil infra, it looks like they will probably miss out on the sanctions relief Trump handed them. Yeah, Ukraine is also quite well bruised up but somehow they are more competent to fight. But by the time the war ends, even if they won it'd only be their symbolic liberation victory because economically it won't look to good, also bad for EU, possibly a global crisis.
There's no single source, it's basically all the war reporting. My claims are not contentious. Even Russia's war bloggers are repeating the same now.
Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!
Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.
Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.
You're talking about the hardware. That is critical.
But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.
They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.
Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.
Ukrainian society is also very bottom up, and individual units are empowered to procure what they want, based on price or quality, from online systems that operate like Amazon. No general issue, just customization all the way to soldiers getting to choose from a wide variety of drone models from many manufacturers, and the manufacturers are competing to supply to the needs of individual units:
US military leadership is all about empowering units to solve problems on their own, at least whenever I read their books that's the message I get. Ukraine seems to have taken it even further.
Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.
People are taking the absolute wrong lesson from Ukraine. The cheap drone munition isn't the innovation, it's the supply chain that can rapidly iterate.
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them?
If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities.
Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.
> ... isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots ...
Yeah they want Patriots but they want them for taking out relatively expensive Russian ballistic missiles. If those ballistics/hypersonics start costing $100k, Patriots will not be a viable defense against this.
Actually fighting for your life doesn't bestow any superhuman powers. Russians there are fighting for their lives too. There's enough videos of people in Ukraine being killed by $1000 drones, $100 landmines, and 50 cent bullets.
It's just the way war has always turned. Battleships were obsoleted by airplanes 1/1000th their cost. Machineguns and trenches ended cavalry. Arms companies still profit in war and people still die in them, doesn't matter what an individual gun or missile costs.
This is what people should keep in mind when the statistic about US defense spending being higher than the next N nations combined or whatever it is now. If I buy a 30k Prius, and you spend 300k on a different car,
1) that doesn’t mean you can drive 10x as fast and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
To the point that defense spending prevents us from publishing an accurate financial statement for soon to be 30 years running.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.
Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
I think while these kinds of projects are cool, but I think the point of my parent comment is that volume matters. If you can do something, its interesting and great for bragging rights, but making and operating thousands of airframes (especially considering the breakneck speed with which technology evolved, timeframes were very compressed!).
While the SR71 was more capable than the MIG, if the Air Force would've wanted to build a thousand of those in 5 years, it would've been impossible, not to mention the maintenance burden.
So while the planes you mentioned might've been more capable, in a real conflict they wouldn't have mattered much, as they could not have sustained a volume of strikes to be relevant.
Interesting how quality and quantity have changed over the years: in WW2, giant factories pumped out airplanes on endless production lines by the tens of thousands, yet those planes couldn't drop bombs accurately.
In contrast, 4th gen fighters were made in still significant volumes, and their smart bombs could hit a target accurately enough so that a hundred pound bomb can do the job you would need a WW2 B-29 to drop its entire payload for.
I think that was a peak in quality X quantity in aviation.
Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
> Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
> So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
Not sure why you think this.
The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
The 4th F-16 (also a great plane!) had 4600 built since 1976.
[1] Yes, despite all the negative press and the amount of time it took to get right, it's a great plane. See eg https://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned... where the editorializing is anti-F35 but the pilot who flew it only has positive things to say.
> The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
So while I don't dispute that the F35 is individually a great plane, I still don't think the quality X quantity metric of a pure F-35 fleet is higher than a 4th gen fleet.
Which is echoed by US procurement, because if it was, they'd have stopped building other planes, just like the stopped building F-4s not long after 4th gens entered service.
> Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
The F-111 is a 3rd generation fighter-bomber jet.
Putting that aside, the F-18 Super Hornet is a 4.5 generation plane that is pretty different to the F-18. It was created as a stop-gap because the F-35 was behind schedule.
The F-16 is in production to sell to air forces that can't afford the F-35.
The F-15 is in production to fill gaps because of slow production of the F-35.
The F-14 isn't in production.
> And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
This isn't true.
The F-35 can carry 22,000 lbs of payload. The F-15 can carry 29,000 lbs, the F-16 15,000 lbs, the F-18 18,000 and the F-14 could only carry 14,000 lbs.
So the F-15 is the only one that can carry slightly more than the F-35 and it is way less stealthy carrying external weapons. The others carry less and are less stealthy.
There is a reason the F-35 has won every fly-off against the Typhoon, Rafael and the Gripen.
Off topic but I can't help but snicker every time someone gets autocorrected into writing Rafael instead of Rafale (which I literally just had to correct, myself).
I am not the one making those. If you read an article about how a Lamborghini Aventador was faster than a Nissan GT-R, you would go 'well, duh, it costs 20x as much'.
The SR-71 wasn't trying to catch the MIG-25, it was trying to get away--and it worked. The U-2 proved vulnerable to filling the sky with cheap stuff--the missiles were ballistic by the time they got up there but when the sky was full of them the U-2 had no path to safety.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
I suggest you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, to get reliable account about the SR-71 and its relation to Soviet air defenses from the horse's mouth. Besides, it's genuinely well-written and enjoyable book
These don’t seem comparable to me. The sr 71 was never meant to be mass produced or to head to head against a mig. The sr71 didn’t even have any guns it’s a spy plane. The sr 71 accomplished its goal with flying colors and spotted nuclear test sites and information on the Cuban missle crisis.
The star fighter, or f15 or f22 would be more apt.
TLDR special purpose tool vs general fighter cannot be compared
There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.
That's my point. The SR71 makes for a much cooler topic of discussion, but in a war, it matters how many planes you have. Even a thousand jets isn't really that much when fighting a country of millions.
Yes this is a great point. The great irony of the tech sector is that although tech creates efficiencies, the process by which tech is created is itself comically inefficient.
Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.
Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.
A lot of what you see was removed was just test sensors. The same happens in every engineering program, but no one else pretends that it's somehow innovation.
It's like removing test code when you ship a binary.
I don't agree that it's not innovation. It always looks stupidly simple with hindsight to just remove unnecessary complexity, and yet it's extremely rare to see a team which actually does it right on the first go.
Getting the design right the first time requires vision, foresight as well as a deep understanding of all relevant parts and priorities. Very few people can do it without hindsight.
I'm an experienced software engineer and team lead who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was that they were often way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.
Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors, monitoring and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed and needs runtime monitoring and fallbacks, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.
The safety mechanisms only end up making themselves useful by increasingly the likelihood of failure to begin with.
My view on fallback mechanisms is that, in the event of failure of the main system, they shouldn't be so complex as to try to keep the system running as if nothing had happened; they should just provide graceful failure and sometimes they aren't needed at all. Just an error log is enough.
Pakistan invests in chinese air -defenses- gets steamrolled by india.
Iran buys chinese air-defenses- gets steamrolled by Israel and the Us.
Russia claimed the s400 was all the rage- and its going nowhere in ukraine.
If propaganda claims where a currency, could you buy anything with all this?
The S400 and the Patriot etc all suffer from the same problem: They only deny the enemy high elevation flight.
Russian doctrine has been based around big, fast things going high. NATO doctrine has been about smaller, slower things going very low. Going low leaves you very vulnerable if you get too close to a defender, but there's no way there are defenders everywhere.
An extreme example of the problem was the Moskova--big, fast missiles that couldn't see something coming in just above wavetop height. There were only two launchers that had any possibility of engaging and only time for one launch cycle--and that probably only if they already had a bird on the rails. (Exposed to the elements, rather than safe in the magazine.)
Pakistan and Iran's imported missiles from China have worked as-advertised. To say nothing of the PL-15's recent success, China's land attack missiles have been a serious threat ever since the Silkworm ASCM hit the export market.
In terms of credibility, this is the same group / private company that claimed the ramject rotating detonation engine last year. They're the only private PRC aerospace company that works on hypersonic technology, they've been around for 10+ years, have national little giant designation, IIRC the founder was chief designer at CALT/CASC, most of the R&D teams seems seasoned. That said I cannot tell if they're PRC's very budget Anduril, their PR is pretty flash (at least relative to PRC standards) but they have a lot of ambitious vapor ware tier projects / announcements in prior years. It doesn't seem like they ever really had the $$$ to do anything grandiose, but they got like 200m rmb in investment right before YKJ-1000 announcement... Considering PRC acquisition of 1m drones + 1m loitering munitions, maybe sign pivot to budget hypersonic viable business model than commercial space.
Other related relevant info, there was interview according (allegedly) to source within company the the 100k USD / 700k rmb unit price is apparently calculated by outsiders, so it is not reliable. But the more interesting tidbit is the goal of "manufacturing rockets like manufacturing cars" is to drive down costs of missiles to 1/10th price of "traditional" costs, with cited costs of "often in 10s of millions" of rmb per unit. Often as in not always, hinting lower end, i.e. 10-40 million rmb, and I assume in same S/IRBM tier, suggesting those tier missiles are currently in 1m-5m usd range. Likely not higher, i.e. 50-100 rmb range, otherwise linguistically, language would round unit up to 100m (亿).
$99,000 sounds like an ad for a car. How much is the deluxe warhead option? Is it available under leasing? (insurance may be expensive)
I have a hard time believing that the price is anything but marketing. Statistically, $99,000 is just a number that is as likely as any other number, but still...
Whether these claims are real or not, they do illustrate one of the crazy things about technological progress. Capabilities that are difficult for states to develop eventually become something corporations can easily implement, and from there they become affordable for private citizens, first to buy, and then to DIY.
Two obvious and concerning corollaries are that state capabilities eventually become easy to obtain for non-state terrorist groups and, later on, unbalanced individuals. Consider what ISIS would have done with these, and then think about what the unabomber would have done.
I'd fully expect this particular company to face multiple hurdles in actually exporting any of these missiles. They might not be able to actually deliver at the quoted price-point. China might not permit it, due to the political blow-back. Israel and the U.S. obviously have an interest in making sure none of these missiles wind up in Iranian hands. The execs of this company are probably feeling a bit like a target has been painted on their heads right now.
However, controlling technology like this is ultimately a game of whack-a-mole. If this company fails, gets regulated, decapitated, sucked up by the Chinese military, etc., ten other companies will pop up all over the place that can produce the same thing or better, cheaper. There's also a supply chain of components behind this company that can now export critical parts to those building their own. We've simply reached (or are about to reach) the point where missiles of this sort can be made very cheaply.
Here's hoping missile defence gets better and cheaper fast.
Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].
In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
Cheap hypersonics don't threaten global stability, they threaten global hegemony. Which is really what I suspect irks most people afraid of them.
We've seen a shift towards cheap offensive capacity that gives middle powers or even smaller actors the capacity to hit hegemons where it hurts, very visible in Ukraine and the Middle East now. This leads to instability only temporarily until you end up in a new equilibrium where smaller players will have significantly more say and capacity to retaliate, effectively a MAD strategy on a budget for everyone.
GP's point was broader than that, it was about technological progress and the possibility of terrorist groups or mentally ill individuals getting their hands on weapons that can easily kill millions of people. That's also what the paper I linked is about.
Consider a future where individuals can relatively easily engineer a pathogen or manufacture a nuclear weapon. It's not hard to imagine how that would threaten global stability.
The US won the cold war because the expensive defense programs were subsidized by the consumer market. The USSR lost because it wasn't. They cloned a lot of western ICs but never cost effectively because they only ended up in military products.
Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
Lasers have very limited applications, they have an inherent line of sight limits, and even the most powerful ship mounted lasers that can do like 50kW, take a minute to boil a kettle of water away, more if you wrap it in tinfoil.
And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.
Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.
At this point no one is talking about using lasers to defend against hyper-sonic missiles (at least not anywhere near the target). All of the current laser systems require being focused on the targets for some amount of time to "burn though", which means they are only suitable for lower-speed targets (drones, cruise missiles, and some low-level ballistics).
You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.
Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.
It reminds me of a funny piece of news. A noodle manufacturer in China, for some reason—maybe to make more money—secretly produced quite a number of small aircraft and even managed to sell many of them.
According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.
So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.
the concept of 'The average hypersonic..' makes me laugh.
in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.
It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .
Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..
> Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production.
I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.
Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.
> Nobody knows yet the true capabilities of the missile, but it doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter very much, the payload doesn’t matter very much. If it’s launched at a certain target in Tel Aviv, it still is going to hit something in Tel Aviv. The Israelis have no choice but to attempt an intercept, and will spend millions to do so
Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues
iron dome is about $100k to intercept according to wikipedia. Millions is off by an order of magnatude. I suspect they can make it cheaper with scale as well.
$100k is the cost of the low-speed ~mach 2.2 Tamir interceptor, which is effective against shells and rockets but not going to intercept a maneuvering mach 7 glide body.
There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.
The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.
It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.
S300 is very good AA, but in practice modern SEAD with a sizeable number of planes can outrange them and they're not great at protecting themselves. We saw this in India-Pakistan and seeing this again in Iran-USA. You can see more of a stale mate when they aren't getting outranged in Ukraine-Russia.
If they're that cheap they can probably afford to cry wolf with them. Get people used to seeing unarmed missles flown in to random places, where the possible damage doesn't justify trying to shoot them down, then suddenly start putting explosives onboard.
Will this be like the time that Saudi Arabia bought a Chinese laser defense system to stop drone attacks on its oil infra only for it to be incredible ineffective?
Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends.
The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
People thought the same on Iran, untouchable. China has the same air defense and tech as Iran, not effective in real world situations.
Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.
Well to this day China is getting Iranian energy. This naval blockade is a relic of a past long gone. When you have eyes in the sky and pin point accurate missiles. The US can't even block or free the straight of Hormuz.
Also China is friendly with Russia they have land border so they can build pipelines.
Well first, the US is not restricting oil through hormuz, even Iranian oil.
Second, the oil market would disagree that blockading a choke point is not effective. The threat of Iranian missiles has reduced the volume of oil on the market. It's a measurable reduction.
And no China does not have pin point accurate missiles. The missed hits on Diego base with Chinese missiles demonstrate that. The nice thing about Iran is they use Chinese tech, and Chinese contractors. It's a good trial run to asses Chinese offensive and defensive abilities. So far they have proven ineffective against western militaries.
Even Chinese deep bunker defense is proving ineffective. Iranian officials are now taking their chances sleeping in tents as the deep bunkers are death traps.
Iran doesn't use PRC super sonic missiles or Chinese bunkers.
PRC is so far only power to have demonstrated high end missiles, coordinated to hit moving targets at sea 5000km away. Not only pin point but pin point on moving targets, and synchronized arrival from different launch sites thousands of km apart.
Iran has ever managed to hit stationary barges across horizon.
BTW draw 5000km radius around PRC, that covers every SLOC from malacca to gulf, aka PRC has range to do what Iran does to gulf but with coverage of all her shipping lanes, and being least dependant on energy (only 20% of energy mix is import) and hence has asymmetric hemispheric escalation dominance.
Hypersonic has a big weakness--good luck building a seeker that can function hypersonic. And most of that flight will be effectively outside the atmosphere--no midcourse adjustments. If you're standing still that's irrelevant, but if you can move that's a big issue. And how many Chinesium rocket motors will explode on ignition, blowing up whatever is doing the shooting.
Chat, is this real? I've seen this guy pop up on youtube. I assume he's a Chinese state mouthpiece as he's a westerner in the mainland with a very pro-China spin (substack recommended the other posts below), but I'm curious how strong the factual basis for this reporting is.
China's factories are in another world - Mar 23, 2025
Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025
Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026
Good question. I think China is undoubtedly far better than the US at advanced, cheap mass-production. So wouldn’t be surprising they could do that for the military too. Not to say the US couldn’t get better.
Better than the US at producing almost anything at this point. There are a few tiny islands of advantage left for the US in advanced engineering but they won’t last.
Prediction: China will win the new race to the moon for this very reason.
There's a few of these guys that make posts about technology that doesn't materialize after a few years, they can be ignored. There are plenty of pro-China observers that offer grounded analysis of Chinese military-industrial base out there that don't make claims that China has unobtainium technology. /r/LessCredibleDefence has a shortlist of these propagandists.
Yeah it's certainly unimaginable that the civilization that invented gunpowder, cannons, guns, rockets a thousand years ago can make it for cheap now :)
'Hypersonic' missile makes it sound like it's alien technology, no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory with a computer from 1970.
The raw materials cost less than half of a standard car.
That's pretty much the entire point of what people are calling hypersonic missiles. All ballistic missiles fly at hypersonic speeds. The advance is being able to do so at low altitude with maneuverability.
You are correct, but I should point out that Russia has described its Kinzhal missiles as hypersonic, when they are really more of a traditional ballistic missile fired horizontally. So very fast (Mach 10), but not as maneuverable as what the U.S. has been calling hypersonic.
Since the original story here does not provide many details, we can't know which side of that fence this falls on (assuming it is real).
Was there any evidence that the Kinzhals fired, for example, toward Kyiv during the current conflict were fired on a depressed trajectory? I remember reading one account that looked like a plain old interception of a ballistic missile. (which is impressive enough to someone who remembers when "Patriot missile" was not exactly synonymous with excellence)
> That's pretty much the entire point of what people are calling hypersonic missiles.
Most missiles endowed with the "hypersonic" moniker are simply theater ballistic missiles used for standard ballistic missile things, which is part of why I asked the question.
> The advance is being able to do so at low altitude with maneuverability.
Hate to burst your bubble but arms dealers and governments are as capable as anyone else of marketing spin.
> Mach 5, high maneuverability, inside the atmosphere.
Out of these, Mach 5 and inside the atmosphere have been doable for several decades. Pretty much all countries that make missiles can make missiles with these two characteristics.
My point, which you seem to either misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent, is the other one - "maneuverability" - being the distinguishing factor for what we call hypersonic missiles. That makes these difficult to defend against.
Think of it like calling humans hyper-limbed animals, but limbs being not what really distinguishes humans from, say, chimpanzees.
> He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video
Does he? The only sources seem to be a CNSpaceflight tweet from last november of a promo animation from the missile company, and a South China Morning Post article that is just quoting commentators on Chinese state TV talking about the the possible capabilities of the missiles.
The other sources (someone else's substack that's sourced from a December article[1] from The Independent, and two articles on "interestingengineering") all just quote the same animation and commentators.
China does keep close tabs on foreign bloggers in their country (especially over the past decade or so), and anything remotely nonpositive does get people visits from police or worse. There is a huge chilling effect, even for people who mostly do have positive things to say.
This is blogspam based on a tweet of the company's promo video[1] in November and some speculation by a guy on Chinese state TV[2]. As far as I can find there's no evidence since then that these have entered production, mass or otherwise. It was doubted at the time they could hit these costs in production, and there hasn't been any news since.
[1] https://xcancel.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1993158707056984359
[2] https://archive.is/VLO7U
Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.
You underestimate both China's production capability and their desire to destabilize the south Asian region, so they can step in to take control. They have been arming Pakistan to the teeth against India. They even sold them the nuclear weapons tech. They don't care.
Both the US and China sold nuclear power technology to Pakistan, as I recall France also agreed to sell nuclear power tech to Pakistan .. in a deal that fell through because of something (haven't checked history) in France's domestic politics scene(?).
All three countries have denied providing nuclear weapons tech to Pakistan - there is credible history to account for both Pakistan and India to have independantly developed enrichment programs and weapons on their own*.
All things are possible, a plausible explanation for the flurry of accusations against China from 2000 onwards from both the US State Dept. and India was the bald fact that the US, the premier global atomic watchdog, was caught absolutely pants down and blindsided by the events of 1998** ... India detonated a series of nuclear weapons tests and Pakistan responded within 30 days with a slightly longer series ( 5 blasts Vs six in response .. IIRC )
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagai-I
U.S. Intelligence and India’s Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned - https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
It sounds like marketing hype. The term "hypersonic" is so vague as to be almost meaningless, for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile. Can it usefully maneuver at hypersonic speeds? Can it track a target at hypersonic speeds? Without further evidence I'm going to assume the answer is "no".
Also, as the Iranians have recently demonstrated, the way to get get past someone's defences is to deploy multiple warheads (and a pile of random debris) from a cheap missile, not to bet on exotic hypersonic weapons.
> for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile.
The V2 was not a hypersonic missile, it was a ballistic missile that had a predetermined flight path that was easy to predict. The distinguishing factor of hypersonic missiles is that they do not require a ballistic trajectory to achieve their speeds (and are hence, much harder to detect) and they maintain maneuverability throughout their entire flight path.
https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2022/m...
> The ancestor of ballistic missiles, Germany’s [...] V-2 was first launched in the 1940s. During ascent, it could reach a speed greater than Mach 5 and could do so again momentarily on its way back down. But, no one would claim that the V-2 was a hypersonic missile. In a similar vein, should one apply this label to modern intercontinental ballistic missiles that reach speeds beyond Mach 20 at ascent and re-entry?
> Certainly not, and there are other characteristics commonly cited when defining ‘hypersonic missiles’. However, while a combination of defining characteristics is increasingly adopted among experts, hypersonic missiles are often not well understood within public discussions in politics and the media [...]. The US-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance states that ‘hypersonic weapons refer to weapons that travel faster than Mach 5 (~3800mph) and have the capability to maneuver during the entire flight.’
How about don't call stuff that travels faster than sound a "fasterthansoundic missile" if you don't want people to confuse it with all other old stuff that also travels faster than sound!
Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not quite the scenario from my parent. They said "high cost weapons taking out air defenses". Whatever the US equivalent of an Iskander would be (I used a Tomahawk as an example), the S-400 (i.e. Patriot "equivalent") would be used to defend against it at first/in his scenario.
If you want to turn it around, sure. Let's see how you'd want to take out a Patriot: high cost weapons, like an Iskander might try it? Costs about as much as a Tomahawk? Would need multiple ones, because the Patriot would defend itself against even multiple ones? But the Patriots cost as much and you want multiple interceptors for each Iskander sent its way?
What if I could send, for less money/resources, a drone swarm that also takes out the Patriot or at least expends more money/resources in interceptors shot from it, than I had to spend on the drone swarm?
I totally agree, it's "just a race". If I build an offensive drone swarm for $x, which is less than your high cost interceptors, you better build an "anti drone whatever thingie" (which might be anti-drone drone swarms) that's even cheaper.
But, thanks, essentially you're agreeing with me: Don't use your high cost stuff to take out SAMs and then use cheap drones. Instead, use cheaper stuff to swarm it out of existence. Just gotta be faster at being cheaper. Doesn't matter if you're the attacker or defender.
Zerg vs. Protoss.
"what if I just had a better system with no downsides or logistical costs that was also cheaper".
In reality: Ukraine reliably downs Shaheds using a mix of low cost technologies.
They mostly can't defend against ballistic missiles without high cost interceptors.
The Shaheds could do a lot of damage to the Patriot site if they could hit it...but they never get anywhere near it. That's the point: your low cost system does not have the capability to threaten the high cost one.
And in all this you've forgotten that attacking the SAM site is only being done to enable other operational objectives. The Patriot battery is defending targets many times it's value, including the logistics and launch sites of all those low cost defensive systems - or the logistics and launch sites of your own low cost offensive systems.
To the article: the Tomahawk missile costs about $2 million per shot. Assuming this article is true, the missile in question gives you maybe a 20:1 cost advantage...but can it do the same mission? Does it have the same range, or targeting, or precision? If you cannot fire these from the same range as a tomahawk, or they don't realiably hit targets, then they can be substantially worse for a much higher logistics cost to deploy (perhaps total: the truck blowing up because you had to drive it to the front line is rather a problem).
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"
> wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.
I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.
The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.
> I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here.
I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
Ah, I hadn't thought of that sort of slingshot! I was thinking more "primitive rock throwing."
There is also a cost aspect of it as well.
The long range drones that are being shot down are the "expensive products" of a military industrial complex.
The US solution to this problem is even more expensive.
For the cost the Ukraine's solution might as well be a rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone)
> If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?
I think whatever advantage Russia has (size and resources) is being squandered by corruption and incompetence.
In terms of russias strategic goals Russia lost in month one when they pulled out of kyiv and admitted regime change wasn't going to happen. Everything since then has just been a very expensive face saving exercise and a hope thay somehow Ukraine would collapse.
It's been getting worse and worse lately, they have huge losses, hard to even think about it. With oil output dropped by 40% in the latest Ukrainian attacks on oil infra, it looks like they will probably miss out on the sanctions relief Trump handed them. Yeah, Ukraine is also quite well bruised up but somehow they are more competent to fight. But by the time the war ends, even if they won it'd only be their symbolic liberation victory because economically it won't look to good, also bad for EU, possibly a global crisis.
There's no single source, it's basically all the war reporting. My claims are not contentious. Even Russia's war bloggers are repeating the same now.
Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!
Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.
Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.
You're talking about the hardware. That is critical.
But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.
They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.
Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.
Precisely, they both go hand in hand.
Ukrainian society is also very bottom up, and individual units are empowered to procure what they want, based on price or quality, from online systems that operate like Amazon. No general issue, just customization all the way to soldiers getting to choose from a wide variety of drone models from many manufacturers, and the manufacturers are competing to supply to the needs of individual units:
https://youtu.be/zlSMz_vtSwg
US military leadership is all about empowering units to solve problems on their own, at least whenever I read their books that's the message I get. Ukraine seems to have taken it even further.
absolute drivel, zero-substantiated, zero-value.
Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.
A turbo fan may be simpler but the tolerances are much tighter.
People are taking the absolute wrong lesson from Ukraine. The cheap drone munition isn't the innovation, it's the supply chain that can rapidly iterate.
I'd argue WW2 was when that innovation happened. The spitfire plane had something like 20+ design iterations over the course of the war.
So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
Hypersonics would not appear to be definitively offensive or defensive.
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them?
If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities.
Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.
> ... isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots ...
Yeah they want Patriots but they want them for taking out relatively expensive Russian ballistic missiles. If those ballistics/hypersonics start costing $100k, Patriots will not be a viable defense against this.
Actually fighting for your life doesn't bestow any superhuman powers. Russians there are fighting for their lives too. There's enough videos of people in Ukraine being killed by $1000 drones, $100 landmines, and 50 cent bullets.
It's just the way war has always turned. Battleships were obsoleted by airplanes 1/1000th their cost. Machineguns and trenches ended cavalry. Arms companies still profit in war and people still die in them, doesn't matter what an individual gun or missile costs.
This is what people should keep in mind when the statistic about US defense spending being higher than the next N nations combined or whatever it is now. If I buy a 30k Prius, and you spend 300k on a different car,
1) that doesn’t mean you can drive 10x as fast and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
To the point that defense spending prevents us from publishing an accurate financial statement for soon to be 30 years running.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.
Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Backgr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_T-4
I think while these kinds of projects are cool, but I think the point of my parent comment is that volume matters. If you can do something, its interesting and great for bragging rights, but making and operating thousands of airframes (especially considering the breakneck speed with which technology evolved, timeframes were very compressed!).
While the SR71 was more capable than the MIG, if the Air Force would've wanted to build a thousand of those in 5 years, it would've been impossible, not to mention the maintenance burden.
So while the planes you mentioned might've been more capable, in a real conflict they wouldn't have mattered much, as they could not have sustained a volume of strikes to be relevant.
Interesting how quality and quantity have changed over the years: in WW2, giant factories pumped out airplanes on endless production lines by the tens of thousands, yet those planes couldn't drop bombs accurately.
In contrast, 4th gen fighters were made in still significant volumes, and their smart bombs could hit a target accurately enough so that a hundred pound bomb can do the job you would need a WW2 B-29 to drop its entire payload for.
I think that was a peak in quality X quantity in aviation.
Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
> Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
> So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
Not sure why you think this.
The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
The 4th F-16 (also a great plane!) had 4600 built since 1976.
[1] Yes, despite all the negative press and the amount of time it took to get right, it's a great plane. See eg https://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned... where the editorializing is anti-F35 but the pilot who flew it only has positive things to say.
> The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
So while I don't dispute that the F35 is individually a great plane, I still don't think the quality X quantity metric of a pure F-35 fleet is higher than a 4th gen fleet.
Which is echoed by US procurement, because if it was, they'd have stopped building other planes, just like the stopped building F-4s not long after 4th gens entered service.
> Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
The F-111 is a 3rd generation fighter-bomber jet.
Putting that aside, the F-18 Super Hornet is a 4.5 generation plane that is pretty different to the F-18. It was created as a stop-gap because the F-35 was behind schedule.
The F-16 is in production to sell to air forces that can't afford the F-35.
The F-15 is in production to fill gaps because of slow production of the F-35.
The F-14 isn't in production.
> And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
This isn't true.
The F-35 can carry 22,000 lbs of payload. The F-15 can carry 29,000 lbs, the F-16 15,000 lbs, the F-18 18,000 and the F-14 could only carry 14,000 lbs.
So the F-15 is the only one that can carry slightly more than the F-35 and it is way less stealthy carrying external weapons. The others carry less and are less stealthy.
There is a reason the F-35 has won every fly-off against the Typhoon, Rafael and the Gripen.
Off topic but I can't help but snicker every time someone gets autocorrected into writing Rafael instead of Rafale (which I literally just had to correct, myself).
Argh!
It's a false comparison.
How many MIG-25s flew over the borders of the United States mainland during the cold war?
Yes the MIG-25 was a cheaper and more practical plane, but that wasn't the MO of the sr71.
I am not the one making those. If you read an article about how a Lamborghini Aventador was faster than a Nissan GT-R, you would go 'well, duh, it costs 20x as much'.
A school bus costs 4-5x more than. GT-R, and I wouldn’t expect it to be faster.
The SR-71 wasn't trying to catch the MIG-25, it was trying to get away--and it worked. The U-2 proved vulnerable to filling the sky with cheap stuff--the missiles were ballistic by the time they got up there but when the sky was full of them the U-2 had no path to safety.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
(And the MIG-25 was a maintenance nightmare.)
I suggest you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, to get reliable account about the SR-71 and its relation to Soviet air defenses from the horse's mouth. Besides, it's genuinely well-written and enjoyable book
These don’t seem comparable to me. The sr 71 was never meant to be mass produced or to head to head against a mig. The sr71 didn’t even have any guns it’s a spy plane. The sr 71 accomplished its goal with flying colors and spotted nuclear test sites and information on the Cuban missle crisis.
The star fighter, or f15 or f22 would be more apt.
TLDR special purpose tool vs general fighter cannot be compared
During the Cuban Missle Crisis it was the U2, not the sr-71
There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.
Your figure of 300% is off by orders of magnitude for how much cooler the SR-71 is at 60 years of age than practically anything else that exists.
That's my point. The SR71 makes for a much cooler topic of discussion, but in a war, it matters how many planes you have. Even a thousand jets isn't really that much when fighting a country of millions.
Or they bought a lambo, which is amazing, and goes really fast... but when you are out of gas, the Prius will keep going. :)
Yes this is a great point. The great irony of the tech sector is that although tech creates efficiencies, the process by which tech is created is itself comically inefficient.
Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.
Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.
A lot of what you see was removed was just test sensors. The same happens in every engineering program, but no one else pretends that it's somehow innovation.
It's like removing test code when you ship a binary.
I don't agree that it's not innovation. It always looks stupidly simple with hindsight to just remove unnecessary complexity, and yet it's extremely rare to see a team which actually does it right on the first go.
Getting the design right the first time requires vision, foresight as well as a deep understanding of all relevant parts and priorities. Very few people can do it without hindsight.
I'm an experienced software engineer and team lead who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was that they were often way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.
Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors, monitoring and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed and needs runtime monitoring and fallbacks, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.
The safety mechanisms only end up making themselves useful by increasingly the likelihood of failure to begin with.
My view on fallback mechanisms is that, in the event of failure of the main system, they shouldn't be so complex as to try to keep the system running as if nothing had happened; they should just provide graceful failure and sometimes they aren't needed at all. Just an error log is enough.
Pakistan invests in chinese air -defenses- gets steamrolled by india. Iran buys chinese air-defenses- gets steamrolled by Israel and the Us. Russia claimed the s400 was all the rage- and its going nowhere in ukraine. If propaganda claims where a currency, could you buy anything with all this?
The S400 and the Patriot etc all suffer from the same problem: They only deny the enemy high elevation flight.
Russian doctrine has been based around big, fast things going high. NATO doctrine has been about smaller, slower things going very low. Going low leaves you very vulnerable if you get too close to a defender, but there's no way there are defenders everywhere.
An extreme example of the problem was the Moskova--big, fast missiles that couldn't see something coming in just above wavetop height. There were only two launchers that had any possibility of engaging and only time for one launch cycle--and that probably only if they already had a bird on the rails. (Exposed to the elements, rather than safe in the magazine.)
air defense is much more complicated and difficult to build.
Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.
Pakistan and Iran's imported missiles from China have worked as-advertised. To say nothing of the PL-15's recent success, China's land attack missiles have been a serious threat ever since the Silkworm ASCM hit the export market.
In terms of credibility, this is the same group / private company that claimed the ramject rotating detonation engine last year. They're the only private PRC aerospace company that works on hypersonic technology, they've been around for 10+ years, have national little giant designation, IIRC the founder was chief designer at CALT/CASC, most of the R&D teams seems seasoned. That said I cannot tell if they're PRC's very budget Anduril, their PR is pretty flash (at least relative to PRC standards) but they have a lot of ambitious vapor ware tier projects / announcements in prior years. It doesn't seem like they ever really had the $$$ to do anything grandiose, but they got like 200m rmb in investment right before YKJ-1000 announcement... Considering PRC acquisition of 1m drones + 1m loitering munitions, maybe sign pivot to budget hypersonic viable business model than commercial space.
Other related relevant info, there was interview according (allegedly) to source within company the the 100k USD / 700k rmb unit price is apparently calculated by outsiders, so it is not reliable. But the more interesting tidbit is the goal of "manufacturing rockets like manufacturing cars" is to drive down costs of missiles to 1/10th price of "traditional" costs, with cited costs of "often in 10s of millions" of rmb per unit. Often as in not always, hinting lower end, i.e. 10-40 million rmb, and I assume in same S/IRBM tier, suggesting those tier missiles are currently in 1m-5m usd range. Likely not higher, i.e. 50-100 rmb range, otherwise linguistically, language would round unit up to 100m (亿).
$99,000 sounds like an ad for a car. How much is the deluxe warhead option? Is it available under leasing? (insurance may be expensive)
I have a hard time believing that the price is anything but marketing. Statistically, $99,000 is just a number that is as likely as any other number, but still...
Whether these claims are real or not, they do illustrate one of the crazy things about technological progress. Capabilities that are difficult for states to develop eventually become something corporations can easily implement, and from there they become affordable for private citizens, first to buy, and then to DIY.
Two obvious and concerning corollaries are that state capabilities eventually become easy to obtain for non-state terrorist groups and, later on, unbalanced individuals. Consider what ISIS would have done with these, and then think about what the unabomber would have done.
I'd fully expect this particular company to face multiple hurdles in actually exporting any of these missiles. They might not be able to actually deliver at the quoted price-point. China might not permit it, due to the political blow-back. Israel and the U.S. obviously have an interest in making sure none of these missiles wind up in Iranian hands. The execs of this company are probably feeling a bit like a target has been painted on their heads right now.
However, controlling technology like this is ultimately a game of whack-a-mole. If this company fails, gets regulated, decapitated, sucked up by the Chinese military, etc., ten other companies will pop up all over the place that can produce the same thing or better, cheaper. There's also a supply chain of components behind this company that can now export critical parts to those building their own. We've simply reached (or are about to reach) the point where missiles of this sort can be made very cheaply.
Here's hoping missile defence gets better and cheaper fast.
Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].
In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
[0] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
Cheap hypersonics don't threaten global stability, they threaten global hegemony. Which is really what I suspect irks most people afraid of them.
We've seen a shift towards cheap offensive capacity that gives middle powers or even smaller actors the capacity to hit hegemons where it hurts, very visible in Ukraine and the Middle East now. This leads to instability only temporarily until you end up in a new equilibrium where smaller players will have significantly more say and capacity to retaliate, effectively a MAD strategy on a budget for everyone.
GP's point was broader than that, it was about technological progress and the possibility of terrorist groups or mentally ill individuals getting their hands on weapons that can easily kill millions of people. That's also what the paper I linked is about.
Consider a future where individuals can relatively easily engineer a pathogen or manufacture a nuclear weapon. It's not hard to imagine how that would threaten global stability.
History would seem to show that hegemony is stability? Pax Romana etc
Nothing about that time period was stable for Rome's neighbours and targets.
Nothing about it was stable for the Romans either, with 10 major civil wars, and ~100 'minor' ones.
The US won the cold war because the expensive defense programs were subsidized by the consumer market. The USSR lost because it wasn't. They cloned a lot of western ICs but never cost effectively because they only ended up in military products.
Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
I see your $99,000 missile and I raise you a $10 intercept.
Time for those laser-defenses to come up to speed.
Lasers have very limited applications, they have an inherent line of sight limits, and even the most powerful ship mounted lasers that can do like 50kW, take a minute to boil a kettle of water away, more if you wrap it in tinfoil.
And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.
Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.
At this point no one is talking about using lasers to defend against hyper-sonic missiles (at least not anywhere near the target). All of the current laser systems require being focused on the targets for some amount of time to "burn though", which means they are only suitable for lower-speed targets (drones, cruise missiles, and some low-level ballistics).
You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.
> You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser
Still being researched. And yes, was part Regan's "star wars" Strategic Defense Initiative.
Reagan, not Bush.
Or you could just shoot the missiles while it's raining, or in a dense fog.
Laser defense system is a very expensive paperweight in those conditions.
You think of laser as in star wars cutting light saber.
Actual lasers don’t do shit at those distances: it is used not to cut something in half but to blind, damage sensors, and what have you
Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.
I also played Generals
What's that?
Only one of the best strategy games of all time.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2732960/Command__Conquer_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1p64kki/reporter_...
It reminds me of a funny piece of news. A noodle manufacturer in China, for some reason—maybe to make more money—secretly produced quite a number of small aircraft and even managed to sell many of them.
The future of almost all industries is smart software (costing billions to make, but infinitely copyable) and cheap hardware.
Perhaps this will be a larger peace between hypersonic powers than the one we've had between nuclear powers.
Nuclear weapons gave us global stability (i.e. no WW3). Hypersonics, hopefully, will also give us regional stability.
Do they hit their targets? Eventually with enough of them it’s not super important but… it does matter a bit.
According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.
So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.
the concept of 'The average hypersonic..' makes me laugh.
in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.
It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .
Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..
> Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production.
I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.
Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.
> Nobody knows yet the true capabilities of the missile, but it doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter very much, the payload doesn’t matter very much. If it’s launched at a certain target in Tel Aviv, it still is going to hit something in Tel Aviv. The Israelis have no choice but to attempt an intercept, and will spend millions to do so
Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues
iron dome is about $100k to intercept according to wikipedia. Millions is off by an order of magnatude. I suspect they can make it cheaper with scale as well.
$100k is the cost of the low-speed ~mach 2.2 Tamir interceptor, which is effective against shells and rockets but not going to intercept a maneuvering mach 7 glide body.
There is absolutely no way anyone is producing a manoeuvring mach 7 missile for $100,000 though.
The term "hypersonic" is incredibly overloaded.
Sure, I agree with that. I've not seen a booster stack at that price hit mach 4-5 reliably, mach 7 would be unprecedented.
Still important to clarify that HGVs are intended to defeat these cheaper intercept layers.
Clearly accuracy does matter. I just tried to throw a rock from my back yard to Tel Aviv, I missed terribly.
>"Do they hit their targets?"
Are you sure you want to find out?
What seems to be the problem with their S300 clones? Anyone knows ? Easy to jam I suppose.
There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.
The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.
It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.
Air defense works in layers where each layer often covers for another. S300 is good, but it's just one piece of a useful anti air defense strategy.
S300 is very good AA, but in practice modern SEAD with a sizeable number of planes can outrange them and they're not great at protecting themselves. We saw this in India-Pakistan and seeing this again in Iran-USA. You can see more of a stale mate when they aren't getting outranged in Ukraine-Russia.
I am talking about the Chinese clones, not the original (is there a difference ?).
As you mention they did not fare very well in the India-Pakistan conflict.
If it’s not five nines then I’m not interested.
Damn, can you imagine how quickly Aliexpress orders are gonna arrive now?
They will just get stuck at the customs :(
If they're that cheap they can probably afford to cry wolf with them. Get people used to seeing unarmed missles flown in to random places, where the possible damage doesn't justify trying to shoot them down, then suddenly start putting explosives onboard.
Will this be like the time that Saudi Arabia bought a Chinese laser defense system to stop drone attacks on its oil infra only for it to be incredible ineffective?
What is its weight, what is its payload and what is the cost of the fuel needed to propel it to hypersonic speeds?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41305736
No idea why a story about a YC company was flagged.
>"A Chinese company is in production of a hypersonic missile, with a sticker price comparable to that of a luxury sedan"
Well they've perfected manufacturing at scale. I see no surprise here.
Amazing! Yet another life destroying invention. What could go wrong?
when China take Taiwan there's not a single thing the world is going to be able to do about it
they use thousands of fishing boats to practice blockades
they are building massive oil reserves and getting most of population into electric vehicles
let's just hope they wait to next decade and not like 2028
Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends. The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
People thought the same on Iran, untouchable. China has the same air defense and tech as Iran, not effective in real world situations.
Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.
Well to this day China is getting Iranian energy. This naval blockade is a relic of a past long gone. When you have eyes in the sky and pin point accurate missiles. The US can't even block or free the straight of Hormuz.
Also China is friendly with Russia they have land border so they can build pipelines.
Well first, the US is not restricting oil through hormuz, even Iranian oil.
Second, the oil market would disagree that blockading a choke point is not effective. The threat of Iranian missiles has reduced the volume of oil on the market. It's a measurable reduction.
And no China does not have pin point accurate missiles. The missed hits on Diego base with Chinese missiles demonstrate that. The nice thing about Iran is they use Chinese tech, and Chinese contractors. It's a good trial run to asses Chinese offensive and defensive abilities. So far they have proven ineffective against western militaries.
Even Chinese deep bunker defense is proving ineffective. Iranian officials are now taking their chances sleeping in tents as the deep bunkers are death traps.
Iran doesn't use PRC super sonic missiles or Chinese bunkers.
PRC is so far only power to have demonstrated high end missiles, coordinated to hit moving targets at sea 5000km away. Not only pin point but pin point on moving targets, and synchronized arrival from different launch sites thousands of km apart.
Iran has ever managed to hit stationary barges across horizon.
BTW draw 5000km radius around PRC, that covers every SLOC from malacca to gulf, aka PRC has range to do what Iran does to gulf but with coverage of all her shipping lanes, and being least dependant on energy (only 20% of energy mix is import) and hence has asymmetric hemispheric escalation dominance.
> China has the same air defense and tech as Iran
Lmao, quantitatively and qualitatively China is more than an order of magnitude bigger
Hypersonic has a big weakness--good luck building a seeker that can function hypersonic. And most of that flight will be effectively outside the atmosphere--no midcourse adjustments. If you're standing still that's irrelevant, but if you can move that's a big issue. And how many Chinesium rocket motors will explode on ignition, blowing up whatever is doing the shooting.
If they’re half as good as the robot I saw today in china slapping that kid id get a few
Chat, is this real? I've seen this guy pop up on youtube. I assume he's a Chinese state mouthpiece as he's a westerner in the mainland with a very pro-China spin (substack recommended the other posts below), but I'm curious how strong the factual basis for this reporting is.
China's factories are in another world - Mar 23, 2025
Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025
Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026
Good question. I think China is undoubtedly far better than the US at advanced, cheap mass-production. So wouldn’t be surprising they could do that for the military too. Not to say the US couldn’t get better.
Better than the US at producing almost anything at this point. There are a few tiny islands of advantage left for the US in advanced engineering but they won’t last.
Prediction: China will win the new race to the moon for this very reason.
This is basically what made the USA a military super power in the first place? At least it's what made them so powerful during WW2 and I guess beyond.
There's a few of these guys that make posts about technology that doesn't materialize after a few years, they can be ignored. There are plenty of pro-China observers that offer grounded analysis of Chinese military-industrial base out there that don't make claims that China has unobtainium technology. /r/LessCredibleDefence has a shortlist of these propagandists.
Yeah it's certainly unimaginable that the civilization that invented gunpowder, cannons, guns, rockets a thousand years ago can make it for cheap now :)
'Hypersonic' missile makes it sound like it's alien technology, no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory with a computer from 1970.
The raw materials cost less than half of a standard car.
I've only read a few short blurbs about this. What makes you think the booster doesn't follow a normal ballistic trajectory?
That's pretty much the entire point of what people are calling hypersonic missiles. All ballistic missiles fly at hypersonic speeds. The advance is being able to do so at low altitude with maneuverability.
You are correct, but I should point out that Russia has described its Kinzhal missiles as hypersonic, when they are really more of a traditional ballistic missile fired horizontally. So very fast (Mach 10), but not as maneuverable as what the U.S. has been calling hypersonic.
Since the original story here does not provide many details, we can't know which side of that fence this falls on (assuming it is real).
Was there any evidence that the Kinzhals fired, for example, toward Kyiv during the current conflict were fired on a depressed trajectory? I remember reading one account that looked like a plain old interception of a ballistic missile. (which is impressive enough to someone who remembers when "Patriot missile" was not exactly synonymous with excellence)
Kinzhals being intercepted all the time could also be propaganda or missile defense having progressed more than publicly known.
It's not a great idea in war to assume your enemy is incompetent (even when they are).
> That's pretty much the entire point of what people are calling hypersonic missiles.
Most missiles endowed with the "hypersonic" moniker are simply theater ballistic missiles used for standard ballistic missile things, which is part of why I asked the question.
> The advance is being able to do so at low altitude with maneuverability.
Hate to burst your bubble but arms dealers and governments are as capable as anyone else of marketing spin.
"no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory"
Hypersonics do not. They are extremely fast and extremely low flying.
No, hypersonic is a marketing term here that indicates 'difficult to intercept'.
It does not imply anything about speed, just automatic or controlled maneuvering later in the stage than normal missiles do.
The very definition of hypersonic requires at least Mach 5 in terms of speed.
sigh
We have had mach 5 missiles for about 60-80 years now, that's not what the novelty is.
Mach 5, high maneuverability, inside the atmosphere. Normally a non-ballistic trajectory. That's been the goal for a very long time.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archive...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_weapon
Do you have something to add to this discussion?
We just redoing definitions, or what?
> Mach 5, high maneuverability, inside the atmosphere.
Out of these, Mach 5 and inside the atmosphere have been doable for several decades. Pretty much all countries that make missiles can make missiles with these two characteristics.
My point, which you seem to either misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent, is the other one - "maneuverability" - being the distinguishing factor for what we call hypersonic missiles. That makes these difficult to defend against.
Think of it like calling humans hyper-limbed animals, but limbs being not what really distinguishes humans from, say, chimpanzees.
Maneuverability isn't new either, aim-9x's can pull 60Gs.
MUTANT missiles will take that a step further as the tech works through the Program Office trials.
I'm not sure what point it is you're trying to make here, this whole thread seems like a silly waste of time.
There are people on this site that work directly in the offices of these programs.
> I'm not sure what point it is you're trying to make here, this whole thread seems like a silly waste of time.
Yeah, step one before replying to something should be trying to understand the point.
> There are people on this site that work directly in the offices of these programs.
Maybe even in this thread!
You don't have to assume: He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video.
Perhaps it'd be more difficult for him to broadcast if he had an anti-china perspective, but the content itself seems legitimate.
> He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video
Does he? The only sources seem to be a CNSpaceflight tweet from last november of a promo animation from the missile company, and a South China Morning Post article that is just quoting commentators on Chinese state TV talking about the the possible capabilities of the missiles.
The other sources (someone else's substack that's sourced from a December article[1] from The Independent, and two articles on "interestingengineering") all just quote the same animation and commentators.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-hypersonic-...
China does keep close tabs on foreign bloggers in their country (especially over the past decade or so), and anything remotely nonpositive does get people visits from police or worse. There is a huge chilling effect, even for people who mostly do have positive things to say.