Ukraine technological flexibility reflects their organizational incentives. Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
The US military procurement is the opposite of this.
One reason procurement is slow is to avoid fraud.* Ukrainse hasn’t managed to eliminate that. Perhaps there is a balance, when you’re under fire at least.
* in the US, procurement fraud looks quite different (e.g. having anpart for your weapon made in every congressional district, a tactic developed for the B-1)
> Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
Do you have any pointers to a good write-up of this?
Yes, that’s the actual, primary reason for America’s wars, using them to plunder wealth in all kinds of ways.
The problem humanity has long had is that war is profitable for the parasites in society.
We should simply make all costs of war, including compensatory damages for innocent victims payable by the richest ~5% through taxation of their income and seizure of their wealth. They want war… make them at least pay for what they ordered.
More relevantly, in a modern war you want experts. Even grunts need to know a lot to be effective, they have drilled and drilled until they react correctly without thinking about it - and somebody in charge of a handful of them needs to know how to use their skills to achieve larger strategic goals which then trickle up.
Needing to use a draft is a bad sign - the more of your soldiers are volunteers the better quality you'll get out of that.
I agree it's a luxury position, I'm just suggesting that "We should draft trust fund kids" isn't actually some clever fix to ensure alignment from the ultra-wealthy and your military forces will hate it.
That's the magic of it. When someone says "why should I have to pay X?" all the useful idiots can come out of the woodwork to spew things that aren't technically lies in abstract about how X is insulating against some failure mode that hasn't happened in 50yr and is probably cheaper to mop up every now and then to pay every time.
Matters of life and death, when there is (as you describe) direct contact between those whose lives are on the line and the industry, tend to prevent some of the usual corruption, I would think.
History has shown that countries at war become about an order of magnitude better at producing weapons than countries in peacetime.
not really, the corruption is quite rampant in both warring armies and especially in drone manufacturers (look up national anti-corruption invesrigation into FirePoint as an example)
war and all matters adjacent are just the perfect ground for breeding corruption as there is too much entropy and handwaving opportunity at the same time
NYT breathlessly reported[1] that Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to corrupt or mismanaged defense procurement in 2024. But the article never once stated the total defense budget. As best I can tell, Ukraine's defense budget in 2024 was ~$65 billion. So this supposedly pervasive corruption cost about 2% of it's budget. That's a rounding error in pervasively corrupt countries.
I think the chatter about corruption in Ukraine is partly a function of the fact that it's democratizing. People don't really talk much about corruption in corrupt countries, not as much as they do in less corrupt countries. Everybody knows it's there; it's a given. But without transparency and a steady flow of concrete data and admitted examples, there's not much to talk about. You just assume such-and-such was a corrupt deal. Only when a country is capable of combating corruption do you see robust, public debates about it.
"Handwaving opportunity". I think you hit the nail there. I will steal that. The opportunity to label critique as treason also make corruption and bad policy in general go rampant. I think that is the strongest factor.
I don't know how people can have such a romantic view. Like read some fictional books on the matter. All quiet on the Western front or Catch 22.
Back cutting and corruption goes rampant and the worst kind of people profiteer while losers are slaughtered.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production, so that you don't need to maintain as much military spending 24/7
> I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production.
I think the issue is that you need different types of weapons for defence during peacetime and wartime (or when attacking).
For example, Stinger missiles are great for defending against the first wave of a drone attack or occasional rocket - they're effective and quick to use, but its immensely costly to maintain an arsenal of them that would last a year of sustained attack or even the production capability to replace used missiles. When you're under sustained attack it might be better to deploy more troops with lots of (previously warehoused) anti-aircraft cannon that can fill the sky with bullets for a few dollars to bring down drones and rockets and use your Stingers for those that get through.
So, Sidewinders and Stingers and its Soviet and European counterparts, of generations predating the AIM-9X models... they use IR sensors, but not cameras.
They have a miniature Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and a rotary coded aperture, and a singular or just handful of gas-cooled IR detector devices. Either the aperture, or more commonly the entire telescope, is on a spindle and rotates at high RPM. So imagine one of those palm sized super long focal length camera lens is put onto a disassembled hard drive and the entire thing spinning at the disk drive speed. On models after AIM-9B, either the front group, or again the entire thing, is on a quick responding 2-axis gimbal.
A dot of heat source within view of the seeker, interfering with spinning coded aperture, will create a characteristic pulses and/or beats. The pattern can be half-open half-close disc, an asterisk/sunburst pattern, or a half covered asterisk. And the spindle can be strategically angled, or it can be perfectly straight. Anyhow, the way IR source is interrupted gives the seeker theta and alpha angles by the intervals of the blocker part of aperture passing over it, or the delay between the start of new rotation to the IR spike getting through and whatnot.
(I think this mechanism is where the hallmark Sidewinder grrrrr -> wheeeEeEeEEEEE growl comes from but I don't know...)
A separate flare sensor with filters to mask engine exhaust and focusing on flare spectrum is added, and it is wired to activate a mechanical aperture to limit the view as well as tracking disable signal to the seeker so that the missile flies towards last known direction as long as a flare is in the field of view of the seeker; the field of view is limited to a very narrow cone in the first place, and that is why seekers are built on the Schmidt-Cassegrain system, and extremely rapid tracking allows the seeker to work despite tiny FOV.
And, you know, in this day and age, it could be just a camera. And they in fact use cameras since AIM-9X and on(9X3? 9X4?).
And my point is, the US already uses the GP's suggested strategy of maintaining bare minimum military spending at uneconomical price to be spent on maintaining emergency ramp-up capability, combined with regularly repeated and easily won wars in Central Asia, as well as strict controls of advanced military technologies such as what I described above to slow catch-ups by other players than the US, except it is all out of control, now crippling the US and the Western world itself.
Slap an ESP32CAM on the head of a rocket with a pair of SG90 servos and it'll serve perfectly as a $49 superior substitute to a Stinger guidance block(exaggerating but shouldn't be more than 1.5 digits off). Military technologies and controls on technological proliferation completely missed that, and Stingers are still dumping current on Peltier coolers and spinning those mirror drive systems, genuinely costing thousands to make before bonuses and capped to peacetime rates.
I'm not from the US and I don't identify as an American so maybe I really shouldn't be saying this and I might recall this later in the way some retired American military officials pointing out basic corrective actions to be taken in after the Putin's massive blunder in the Ukrainian invasion - but I think that is the problem that the US military industrial complex is facing, what tech billionaire right wingers were making clumpy half-baked A for effort attempts to fix, and partly why they support what is effectively the destruction of the USA. I think.
Arguably, this has been the US’s strategy by constantly transitioning from one war to another for fifty years. Say what you will, but they’ve kept their war factories more busy than most.
We laugh at Russia's "fields of rusting armour" but one interpretation I saw somewhere said these scrap heaps were (plausibly) set up to be a source of components for whatever military requirements appeared next. It also kept the armaments industry ticking along for the last 80 years. The Japanese build two submarines every two years, by two companies. Unless they stuff up, each company can plan developments with forward looking. The contract system in the US has its drawbacks.
Ukraine has manufacturing capacity for (ten?) millions of drones per year and manufactures millions of drones per year because they are using millions of drone per year.
The problem is continuously maintaining, and upgrading that sort of capacity when you don't have an active war that requires it.
It's a very different model to traditional exquisite weapons. It makes no sense to actually buy and store the drones as they quickly become obsolete. But someone needs to pay for the capacity to be maintained/upgraded. Dual-use can help, but only partially
The gamified precurment system is just neoliberalism taken to the extreme. I mean Goodhart's Law is a warning not a guide.
When the dust settles I think the precurment system will be seen as detrimental. Military power structures need to be boring such that it doesn't eat it self.
I don't think that is really true any more. All electronics includes a substantial amount of Chinese sourced inputs but I believed actual manufacturing is taking place on Ukranian soil of metal and plastic parts. Of small jet engines as well.
Reading up on some of these systems is wild. For example THAAD munitions are wildly expensive, but also a ballistic projectile that physically knocks hypersonic missiles out of the air in flight 200km away. Ultimately $13 million seems reasonable to save a few city blocks in a major city. It just doesn't make sense to use against small arms like disposable drones.
Theoretically, assuming you get the supply chain optimized - this would be the biggest challenge, as US manufacturing has taken a nosedive after decades of being out-competed by lower-wage countries (and free capitalism being more than happy to save costs by moving production to said countries)
It seems like the better strategy is to not be worth bombing to begin with. It can be extremely expensive to act like israel on the global stage and I strongly recommend we don't do that any more than we already are. Americans are pretty notorious at encouraging and being unwilling to avoid blowback and avoiding all sense, and this seems trivially avoidable by not using our military to perpetrate evil. For the eighth fucking decade in a row.
You'll get downvoted for this because the US believes it is in the right.
The US sees itself as a "policeman" not a "gangster", they are out to save the world, not conquer it.
And yet, the line between the two is very blurry. Kuwait was justified, Iraq contrived. Afghanistan meaningless. Iran is a solution looking for a problem (nooo they can't have nuclear weapons, but who trashed JPOA?)
The 20th century was no better. The righteous of WW2 allows any excess, Vietnam being a poster child.
For the US to change they first need to accept they are the bad guy. And that's a very difficult thing to accept. The shiny uniform for example is what the good guy wears.
But in the end the gangster and police can be hard to tell apart.
Even in the past, US was more of a gangster supporting its gang rather than a fair hearted policeman. Its support to Pakistan during Bangladesh (East Pakistan) genocide is well known.
Or the Indonesian genocide. Or giving Pol Pot diplomatic cover as soon as they saw him as an enemy to Vietnam. Or couping essentially every country in Latin America.
The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
The key point is not what they have done (too many examples of bad behavior to list.)
The key point is how they see themselves. The average American sees the US as "the good guys". This is not a self-image lightly over-turned. Regardless of how the rest of the world views them.
Ukraine, for whatever reason, was denied access to the DARPA innovation pipeline early on. Thus, they had to make their own to survive. Now, not only is there something moving much faster, than that flow of innovation but also there’s a hunch of adversaries, who have picked up on it. That’s what you get for the lack of strategic thinking. Your decisions are not terminal, your moves are not the finishing ones. Others get to make theirs as well. And you might not at all like where these moves will take you.
Oh so western parasites can continue killing the planet? Have already killed 4 continents. Western greed knows no end. It’s core western value. Greed racism and Genocide are baked into European minds
Isn't the strategy to nearshore production, and recent moves in South America were potentially done to reduce Chinese/Iranian/Russian influence in those regions?
Indeed. Most of the local death squads have been phased out or even prosecuted, so the US has to keep up the rate of indiscriminate murder of civilians itself. The boat bombings are just the most conspicuous example.
South America US mil moves is about going to war with drug distribution networks. Ecuador, Columbia, in particular.
Jungle warfare school was recently... reopened in Panama to the point that a conventional unit (one of the 10th mtn units) is there training. If that is where conventional units are training right now... that's a signal.
Technically, RTX is currently the parent company for Raytheon. The two other major business units are Pratt & Whitney (jet engines) and Collins Aerospace.
Surely, knowing what the requirements are, we can build a cheaper Tomahawk missile these days, right?
SpaceX does the whole rocket launch thing for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle. GPS is not that complicated any more and all the processing power required fits in a chip the size of a cellphone.
It's not just the cost of a GPS chip, it's the custom turbofan engine, the other guidance system components, active radar (in some units) and a guarantee that you can keep the unit in a tube for years and ensure that it's gonna work when you need it.
Plus low volume production volums and long times needed to manufacture it.
Could it be cheaper? Yeah I'm sure. But the US Gov is willing to pay for em so why drop the price?
A tomahawk has a good INS, which is still expensive, and it has to be able to sit for years in a tube getting banged around with the waves, and launch on a moments notice.
That’s not to say that it should cost 2.5 million, but Ukraine doesn’t need storability and durability because I think they pretty much get driven from the factory to the launch site in a matter of days.
What seems to be happening is that Ukraine, which has a rocket industry from the Soviet era, is building such missiles, and, through a quiet deal with Taiwan, the electronics is provided.[1] This is not a secret but nobody talks about numbers.
As described in TFA, one of the cheapest weapons now made in USA, the "Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System" is presumed to cost around $55K.
The funny thing is that this was designed in USA based on what was learned by reverse-engineering one of the models of Iranian Shahed drones.
That was certainly the smart thing to do, but it contrasts with the very frequent opinions expressed on many US forums, which disparage some other countries, mainly China, because supposedly they copy other technologies, instead of being "independent innovators like USA".
Fortunately for USA, they still have engineers who understand that the most efficient strategy is to first copy whatever others do better than you, and then improve on it. There are no such things as "independent innovations", any successful innovation is applied over a countless number of previous innovations discovered by others.
You can lower costs by a lot dropping some requirements like component deratings, screening, temperature of operation, mean time between failures rate, etc.
You end up with a _just as good_ device that will fail way more times than before (1:100 or more instead of 1:100000) but is way cheaper and way easier to procure. When it fails just launch another.
I wouldn't specifically do this to the tomahawk as it's used in missions where accuracy is critical in order to avoid collateral damage. But otherwise I'm a strong proponent of applying "new space" logic to military gear.
Would building something reliant on GPS be the right way to go? We've seen how easy it is to make it not very reliable. Musk has also shown that StarLink/Shield reliability are at the mercy of how he feels that day. Internal navigation still seems the most reliable for Tomahawks
Russia has been building mid-range cruise missiles ("Banderol") that are estimated to be sub $150k. That's much cheaper than Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles.
However, you can't compare them to long-range cruise missiles that are north of $1 million. The payload is much bigger and you just can't leverage cheap commercial engines.
One of the difficulties that I've heard described is that the United States is the world's best producer of castle technology and has been for the last two centuries.
It has been the best, second to none for a long time. If you want the best castle, you buy it from the United States. Other countries may also sell castle technology... though as Norway noted it doesn't have to buy the best (and most expensive) from the United States, it just has to buy something better than Russia's. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/norway-se... )
... And then with the conflicts in Ukraine and to a lesser extent Iran the world has realized that while we've had the best castles for a long time, they're big, expensive, expensive to maintain (and its own hasn't been maintained well) and has the possibility of a switch on the drawbridge that will let it down when the US wants in...
While Ukraine and Russia have rolled up to the battlefield with a cheap cannon that is demonstrating that expensive castles aren't all they're cracked up to be.
---
Yes, you can probably build a cheaper Tomahawk missile today. However, can someone else build a cheaper drone that is even better for the battlefield theaters of the next several decades?
>Yes, you can probably build a cheaper Tomahawk missile today. However, can someone else build a cheaper drone that is even better for the battlefield theaters of the next several decades?
I heard the US produced knockoffs of the Iranian ~$10-50k drone and produces it for ~$35K and its a modular and an upgradable platform (ie. not just a dumb copy). If you ask me, that ability to not only produce castles but also 'cheap cannons' as per your analogy when needed for cheaper and then improve on top of it is a pretty darn good skill.
this has nothing to do with manufacturing capacity, and everything to do with the wildest,most out of control, corrupt, total conversion to a rabid , industrial cleptocracy.
a case to study is the comisoning of the latest british aircraft carrier, they did get it built, launched, and as stated commisoned, but as no one greased the huge ,wildly expensive, propellor shaft, it siezed , the d o t s dont connect, and every single last person in the whole fucking mess,instictivly knows that to actualy touch or be associated with grease, is a career ending move, and now a year later they still cant figure out what happened, but whewwee, it turned out good, as they can all pass the shilling,' nope cant show up, sorry, but realy we cant make it to your war,we have contracts to fill, ta!'
it's an interesting question. we kind of already are.
guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
anduril's arsenal of weapons are more likely to be used against americans than anyone else. and for that matter, our imagined adversaries - the chinese and russian governments have killed way more chinese and russian people than any of their foreign adversaries. germans have killed lots of germans.
there are powerful VCs in my community, members of Y Combinator, who sincerely believe we should deploy advanced surveillance technologies - they're true believers of the article's broader, very soviet material product system, very IG Farben way of looking at things - despite talking on podcasts about their own families being slaughtered not by petty criminals or foreign adversaries but by their own countrymen, en masse.
americans have killed a lot of americans. not in some facetious sense either.
the best defense is strong representative politics and democratic institutions. the DoD's most powerful weapons are journalists, low interest rates, global shipping and a merciful immigration policy.
> guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
From 2005 to 2025, 730,000-760,000 Americans died from firearms related injuries, including police shootings, gang violence, and accidents, however suicide alone is between 55-60% of those total deaths.
From 2005 to 2025, in Europe, around 1,400,000 Europeans died from heat related deaths. Between 70-80% of that number could have been prevent by having air condition based on data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Idk why this is relevant, is the air condition going to kill people in a civil war?
But I still get baited into a conversation! Note that if you instead of nr of deaths measured 'nr of life-years lost'(relative to average age of death) the magnitude would be flipped, as most of the heath-deaths were old people who died earlier than expected because of heath. These are still preventable deaths, and should not have their importance scoffed at. But at the same time, these stats does get a bit complicated at end-of-life. Its clear (to me at least) that if e.g. (philosophical thought-experiment incoming!) a single doctor is on duty, and has to choose between saving the life of an infant or prolonging the life of someone on palliative care with a day, the choice is clear. And if the doctor did the obvious choice, did she kill the old person? Should this death today be counted as a 'preventable death' which could be prevented if we just had more doctors?
There are many activities we as a society can do to lengthen life expectancy of old people, like creating social gathering spots, exercise groups, or installing more AC in their homes. In most cases you can't attribute any single death or extra day-of-life to any single cause, but you can see statistical differences in death-rate and attribute causes on a population level.
I have noticed that ACs has become part of some culturewar thingy. In reality it is one of many factors influencing life-expectancy, and in some cases it's the most effective solution to increase life-expectancy, but in many cases other things are far more efficient.
I still don't understand why you compare guns with air conditioning, but this might be a relevant point, depending on where you were going with it :P
Air Condiitioning seems to have come into the picture because Floridians can't imagine why people who live in say Northern France don't have Air conditioning when it was (for a time) very hot in Europe. Unsurprising yes quite a few people who live in stereotypically hot Southern Europe do have Air conditioning.
Which is in the same ballpark as Minnesotans wondering why Cairo doesn't have snowplows. Yes it can snow in Egypt. No it doesn't do so often enough for them have bought fucking snowplows and if as a result of changing climate they do need to buy snowplows that would not be because they're backwards morons who didn't know about this idea until the Americans taught them.
i don't really know where this air conditioning meme comes from, but if your point is that man made global warming is a greater adversary than any foreign government, and completely impervious to the size of your munitions arsenal, i agree!
Ukraine technological flexibility reflects their organizational incentives. Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
The US military procurement is the opposite of this.
One reason procurement is slow is to avoid fraud.* Ukrainse hasn’t managed to eliminate that. Perhaps there is a balance, when you’re under fire at least.
* in the US, procurement fraud looks quite different (e.g. having anpart for your weapon made in every congressional district, a tactic developed for the B-1)
> Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
Do you have any pointers to a good write-up of this?
Like all corruption in the USA the fraud is just baked into the system.
Yes, that’s the actual, primary reason for America’s wars, using them to plunder wealth in all kinds of ways.
The problem humanity has long had is that war is profitable for the parasites in society.
We should simply make all costs of war, including compensatory damages for innocent victims payable by the richest ~5% through taxation of their income and seizure of their wealth. They want war… make them at least pay for what they ordered.
Add a frontline draft (no exceptions) to that and let's see how it goes. You can manage away cost but not that.
With enough wealth drafts can be doged
Or the privileged kids are placed in safe deployments.
More relevantly, in a modern war you want experts. Even grunts need to know a lot to be effective, they have drilled and drilled until they react correctly without thinking about it - and somebody in charge of a handful of them needs to know how to use their skills to achieve larger strategic goals which then trickle up.
Needing to use a draft is a bad sign - the more of your soldiers are volunteers the better quality you'll get out of that.
> Needing to use a draft is a bad sign - the more of your soldiers are volunteers the better quality you'll get out of that.
That's a luxury position, which unfortunately not every country is in.
I agree it's a luxury position, I'm just suggesting that "We should draft trust fund kids" isn't actually some clever fix to ensure alignment from the ultra-wealthy and your military forces will hate it.
cue Creedence - Fortunate Son
War is also an expression of the power of that 5%, so good luck with your taxation idea actually getting off the ground.
That's the magic of it. When someone says "why should I have to pay X?" all the useful idiots can come out of the woodwork to spew things that aren't technically lies in abstract about how X is insulating against some failure mode that hasn't happened in 50yr and is probably cheaper to mop up every now and then to pay every time.
Matters of life and death, when there is (as you describe) direct contact between those whose lives are on the line and the industry, tend to prevent some of the usual corruption, I would think.
History has shown that countries at war become about an order of magnitude better at producing weapons than countries in peacetime.
>tend to prevent some of the usual corruption
not really, the corruption is quite rampant in both warring armies and especially in drone manufacturers (look up national anti-corruption invesrigation into FirePoint as an example)
war and all matters adjacent are just the perfect ground for breeding corruption as there is too much entropy and handwaving opportunity at the same time
NYT breathlessly reported[1] that Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to corrupt or mismanaged defense procurement in 2024. But the article never once stated the total defense budget. As best I can tell, Ukraine's defense budget in 2024 was ~$65 billion. So this supposedly pervasive corruption cost about 2% of it's budget. That's a rounding error in pervasively corrupt countries.
I think the chatter about corruption in Ukraine is partly a function of the fact that it's democratizing. People don't really talk much about corruption in corrupt countries, not as much as they do in less corrupt countries. Everybody knows it's there; it's a given. But without transparency and a steady flow of concrete data and admitted examples, there's not much to talk about. You just assume such-and-such was a corrupt deal. Only when a country is capable of combating corruption do you see robust, public debates about it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/ukraine-war-...
"Handwaving opportunity". I think you hit the nail there. I will steal that. The opportunity to label critique as treason also make corruption and bad policy in general go rampant. I think that is the strongest factor.
I don't know how people can have such a romantic view. Like read some fictional books on the matter. All quiet on the Western front or Catch 22.
Back cutting and corruption goes rampant and the worst kind of people profiteer while losers are slaughtered.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production, so that you don't need to maintain as much military spending 24/7
> I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production.
I think the issue is that you need different types of weapons for defence during peacetime and wartime (or when attacking).
For example, Stinger missiles are great for defending against the first wave of a drone attack or occasional rocket - they're effective and quick to use, but its immensely costly to maintain an arsenal of them that would last a year of sustained attack or even the production capability to replace used missiles. When you're under sustained attack it might be better to deploy more troops with lots of (previously warehoused) anti-aircraft cannon that can fill the sky with bullets for a few dollars to bring down drones and rockets and use your Stingers for those that get through.
So, Sidewinders and Stingers and its Soviet and European counterparts, of generations predating the AIM-9X models... they use IR sensors, but not cameras.
They have a miniature Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and a rotary coded aperture, and a singular or just handful of gas-cooled IR detector devices. Either the aperture, or more commonly the entire telescope, is on a spindle and rotates at high RPM. So imagine one of those palm sized super long focal length camera lens is put onto a disassembled hard drive and the entire thing spinning at the disk drive speed. On models after AIM-9B, either the front group, or again the entire thing, is on a quick responding 2-axis gimbal.
A dot of heat source within view of the seeker, interfering with spinning coded aperture, will create a characteristic pulses and/or beats. The pattern can be half-open half-close disc, an asterisk/sunburst pattern, or a half covered asterisk. And the spindle can be strategically angled, or it can be perfectly straight. Anyhow, the way IR source is interrupted gives the seeker theta and alpha angles by the intervals of the blocker part of aperture passing over it, or the delay between the start of new rotation to the IR spike getting through and whatnot.
(I think this mechanism is where the hallmark Sidewinder grrrrr -> wheeeEeEeEEEEE growl comes from but I don't know...)
A separate flare sensor with filters to mask engine exhaust and focusing on flare spectrum is added, and it is wired to activate a mechanical aperture to limit the view as well as tracking disable signal to the seeker so that the missile flies towards last known direction as long as a flare is in the field of view of the seeker; the field of view is limited to a very narrow cone in the first place, and that is why seekers are built on the Schmidt-Cassegrain system, and extremely rapid tracking allows the seeker to work despite tiny FOV.
And, you know, in this day and age, it could be just a camera. And they in fact use cameras since AIM-9X and on(9X3? 9X4?).
And my point is, the US already uses the GP's suggested strategy of maintaining bare minimum military spending at uneconomical price to be spent on maintaining emergency ramp-up capability, combined with regularly repeated and easily won wars in Central Asia, as well as strict controls of advanced military technologies such as what I described above to slow catch-ups by other players than the US, except it is all out of control, now crippling the US and the Western world itself.
Slap an ESP32CAM on the head of a rocket with a pair of SG90 servos and it'll serve perfectly as a $49 superior substitute to a Stinger guidance block(exaggerating but shouldn't be more than 1.5 digits off). Military technologies and controls on technological proliferation completely missed that, and Stingers are still dumping current on Peltier coolers and spinning those mirror drive systems, genuinely costing thousands to make before bonuses and capped to peacetime rates.
I'm not from the US and I don't identify as an American so maybe I really shouldn't be saying this and I might recall this later in the way some retired American military officials pointing out basic corrective actions to be taken in after the Putin's massive blunder in the Ukrainian invasion - but I think that is the problem that the US military industrial complex is facing, what tech billionaire right wingers were making clumpy half-baked A for effort attempts to fix, and partly why they support what is effectively the destruction of the USA. I think.
> hallmark Sidewinder grrrrr -> wheeeEeEeEEEEE growl comes from
That's probably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolleron
Sound: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MFt_-IrUHlE
Arguably, this has been the US’s strategy by constantly transitioning from one war to another for fifty years. Say what you will, but they’ve kept their war factories more busy than most.
We laugh at Russia's "fields of rusting armour" but one interpretation I saw somewhere said these scrap heaps were (plausibly) set up to be a source of components for whatever military requirements appeared next. It also kept the armaments industry ticking along for the last 80 years. The Japanese build two submarines every two years, by two companies. Unless they stuff up, each company can plan developments with forward looking. The contract system in the US has its drawbacks.
> have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production
Sure. How?
I guess my suggestion is my being more Ukraine like
Ukraine has manufacturing capacity for (ten?) millions of drones per year and manufactures millions of drones per year because they are using millions of drone per year.
The problem is continuously maintaining, and upgrading that sort of capacity when you don't have an active war that requires it.
It's a very different model to traditional exquisite weapons. It makes no sense to actually buy and store the drones as they quickly become obsolete. But someone needs to pay for the capacity to be maintained/upgraded. Dual-use can help, but only partially
Or all small arms serviceweapons made by SIG.
The gamified precurment system is just neoliberalism taken to the extreme. I mean Goodhart's Law is a warning not a guide.
When the dust settles I think the precurment system will be seen as detrimental. Military power structures need to be boring such that it doesn't eat it self.
Everything made in Ukraine is just assembled Chinese parts though (nothing wrong with that, entirely different difficulty however).
I don't think that is really true any more. All electronics includes a substantial amount of Chinese sourced inputs but I believed actual manufacturing is taking place on Ukranian soil of metal and plastic parts. Of small jet engines as well.
Correct. And since there are thousands of decentralized manufacturers, they're heavy users of 3D printing, too.
Reading up on some of these systems is wild. For example THAAD munitions are wildly expensive, but also a ballistic projectile that physically knocks hypersonic missiles out of the air in flight 200km away. Ultimately $13 million seems reasonable to save a few city blocks in a major city. It just doesn't make sense to use against small arms like disposable drones.
That 13mil also covers r&d costs as well as the actual manufacturing costs. If we needed 10000+ the cost would go down
Theoretically, assuming you get the supply chain optimized - this would be the biggest challenge, as US manufacturing has taken a nosedive after decades of being out-competed by lower-wage countries (and free capitalism being more than happy to save costs by moving production to said countries)
A city block demolished or abandoned is pretty close next to each other on the Operational and Out of Service scale when it comes to economic input.
Also, consider VSL (value of a statistical life) which is around 5-10 million in most of developed world.
So each missile costs ~2 human lifetimes to produce? But has the potential to save hundreds if used precisely
It seems like the better strategy is to not be worth bombing to begin with. It can be extremely expensive to act like israel on the global stage and I strongly recommend we don't do that any more than we already are. Americans are pretty notorious at encouraging and being unwilling to avoid blowback and avoiding all sense, and this seems trivially avoidable by not using our military to perpetrate evil. For the eighth fucking decade in a row.
You'll get downvoted for this because the US believes it is in the right.
The US sees itself as a "policeman" not a "gangster", they are out to save the world, not conquer it.
And yet, the line between the two is very blurry. Kuwait was justified, Iraq contrived. Afghanistan meaningless. Iran is a solution looking for a problem (nooo they can't have nuclear weapons, but who trashed JPOA?)
The 20th century was no better. The righteous of WW2 allows any excess, Vietnam being a poster child.
For the US to change they first need to accept they are the bad guy. And that's a very difficult thing to accept. The shiny uniform for example is what the good guy wears.
But in the end the gangster and police can be hard to tell apart.
The US used to see itself as a policeman. It is now kinda going gangster.
You can't police a multipolar world - you can when you're the sole superpower in a unipolar word where "policing" can be a euphemism.
I think there is now a general or at least generational attitude shift about world policeman type stuff vs smash, grab and bully in America.
Even in the past, US was more of a gangster supporting its gang rather than a fair hearted policeman. Its support to Pakistan during Bangladesh (East Pakistan) genocide is well known.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Blood#The_Blood_Telegra...
Or the Indonesian genocide. Or giving Pol Pot diplomatic cover as soon as they saw him as an enemy to Vietnam. Or couping essentially every country in Latin America.
The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
The key point is not what they have done (too many examples of bad behavior to list.)
The key point is how they see themselves. The average American sees the US as "the good guys". This is not a self-image lightly over-turned. Regardless of how the rest of the world views them.
> The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
Or just reflects American views of what cops are for; thumping minorities.
Given what the Department of War does with the munitions, hopefully not quickly at all.
Ukraine, for whatever reason, was denied access to the DARPA innovation pipeline early on. Thus, they had to make their own to survive. Now, not only is there something moving much faster, than that flow of innovation but also there’s a hunch of adversaries, who have picked up on it. That’s what you get for the lack of strategic thinking. Your decisions are not terminal, your moves are not the finishing ones. Others get to make theirs as well. And you might not at all like where these moves will take you.
Oh so western parasites can continue killing the planet? Have already killed 4 continents. Western greed knows no end. It’s core western value. Greed racism and Genocide are baked into European minds
Isn't the strategy to nearshore production, and recent moves in South America were potentially done to reduce Chinese/Iranian/Russian influence in those regions?
Recent moves in South America are because Marco Rubio has been given free reign to indulge all his narco-state fantasies.
Indeed. Most of the local death squads have been phased out or even prosecuted, so the US has to keep up the rate of indiscriminate murder of civilians itself. The boat bombings are just the most conspicuous example.
South America US mil moves is about going to war with drug distribution networks. Ecuador, Columbia, in particular.
Jungle warfare school was recently... reopened in Panama to the point that a conventional unit (one of the 10th mtn units) is there training. If that is where conventional units are training right now... that's a signal.
Never heard about RTX, turns out it's Raytheon.
It’s their stock ticker.
Technically, RTX is currently the parent company for Raytheon. The two other major business units are Pratt & Whitney (jet engines) and Collins Aerospace.
While true, they renamed themselves.
Surely, knowing what the requirements are, we can build a cheaper Tomahawk missile these days, right?
SpaceX does the whole rocket launch thing for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle. GPS is not that complicated any more and all the processing power required fits in a chip the size of a cellphone.
But those things cost 2.5M a piece?
It's not just the cost of a GPS chip, it's the custom turbofan engine, the other guidance system components, active radar (in some units) and a guarantee that you can keep the unit in a tube for years and ensure that it's gonna work when you need it.
Plus low volume production volums and long times needed to manufacture it.
Could it be cheaper? Yeah I'm sure. But the US Gov is willing to pay for em so why drop the price?
A tomahawk has a good INS, which is still expensive, and it has to be able to sit for years in a tube getting banged around with the waves, and launch on a moments notice.
That’s not to say that it should cost 2.5 million, but Ukraine doesn’t need storability and durability because I think they pretty much get driven from the factory to the launch site in a matter of days.
There's not some expensive magic to do that. They buy military grade chips and that's it. Any vendor can make the same with the same promise.
What seems to be happening is that Ukraine, which has a rocket industry from the Soviet era, is building such missiles, and, through a quiet deal with Taiwan, the electronics is provided.[1] This is not a secret but nobody talks about numbers.
[1] https://ipdefenseforum.com/2026/01/taiwan-looks-to-partner-w...
Lucky they didn’t buy from the US. Some tech billionaire would have found a way to shut it down.
As described in TFA, one of the cheapest weapons now made in USA, the "Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System" is presumed to cost around $55K.
The funny thing is that this was designed in USA based on what was learned by reverse-engineering one of the models of Iranian Shahed drones.
That was certainly the smart thing to do, but it contrasts with the very frequent opinions expressed on many US forums, which disparage some other countries, mainly China, because supposedly they copy other technologies, instead of being "independent innovators like USA".
Fortunately for USA, they still have engineers who understand that the most efficient strategy is to first copy whatever others do better than you, and then improve on it. There are no such things as "independent innovations", any successful innovation is applied over a countless number of previous innovations discovered by others.
You can lower costs by a lot dropping some requirements like component deratings, screening, temperature of operation, mean time between failures rate, etc.
You end up with a _just as good_ device that will fail way more times than before (1:100 or more instead of 1:100000) but is way cheaper and way easier to procure. When it fails just launch another.
I wouldn't specifically do this to the tomahawk as it's used in missions where accuracy is critical in order to avoid collateral damage. But otherwise I'm a strong proponent of applying "new space" logic to military gear.
Would building something reliant on GPS be the right way to go? We've seen how easy it is to make it not very reliable. Musk has also shown that StarLink/Shield reliability are at the mercy of how he feels that day. Internal navigation still seems the most reliable for Tomahawks
They work in GPS contested environments.
There is no evidence Musk has tampered with either as it relates to Ukraine.
What? Perhaps you're behind on the news:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/order-limit-starshield-...
That Starshield was remotely limited is not in dispute, only whether it was just Elon's doing, or at Trump's behest.
> Musk has also shown that StarLink/Shield reliability are at the mercy of how he feels that day.
There is a strong feeling on HN that because Trump is President, Musk holds zero responsibility.
This way the illuminati remain pure, when Trump eventually dies.
Russia has been building mid-range cruise missiles ("Banderol") that are estimated to be sub $150k. That's much cheaper than Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles.
However, you can't compare them to long-range cruise missiles that are north of $1 million. The payload is much bigger and you just can't leverage cheap commercial engines.
One of the difficulties that I've heard described is that the United States is the world's best producer of castle technology and has been for the last two centuries.
It has been the best, second to none for a long time. If you want the best castle, you buy it from the United States. Other countries may also sell castle technology... though as Norway noted it doesn't have to buy the best (and most expensive) from the United States, it just has to buy something better than Russia's. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/norway-se... )
... And then with the conflicts in Ukraine and to a lesser extent Iran the world has realized that while we've had the best castles for a long time, they're big, expensive, expensive to maintain (and its own hasn't been maintained well) and has the possibility of a switch on the drawbridge that will let it down when the US wants in...
While Ukraine and Russia have rolled up to the battlefield with a cheap cannon that is demonstrating that expensive castles aren't all they're cracked up to be.
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Yes, you can probably build a cheaper Tomahawk missile today. However, can someone else build a cheaper drone that is even better for the battlefield theaters of the next several decades?
>Yes, you can probably build a cheaper Tomahawk missile today. However, can someone else build a cheaper drone that is even better for the battlefield theaters of the next several decades?
I heard the US produced knockoffs of the Iranian ~$10-50k drone and produces it for ~$35K and its a modular and an upgradable platform (ie. not just a dumb copy). If you ask me, that ability to not only produce castles but also 'cheap cannons' as per your analogy when needed for cheaper and then improve on top of it is a pretty darn good skill.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac...
The US did try going the 'cheap cannons' route [1] at one point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M247_Sergeant_York
Anduril has several cheaper competitors to the tomahawk in the pipeline
Will they work reliably if they're being fired at someone Thiel likes?
That is happening, just slowly.
i am not a medical professional, but i urge you to get checked out for Engineer’s Disease
probably a lot more quickly with a future administration that isn't skimming off the top everywhere
bullshit.
this has nothing to do with manufacturing capacity, and everything to do with the wildest,most out of control, corrupt, total conversion to a rabid , industrial cleptocracy.
a case to study is the comisoning of the latest british aircraft carrier, they did get it built, launched, and as stated commisoned, but as no one greased the huge ,wildly expensive, propellor shaft, it siezed , the d o t s dont connect, and every single last person in the whole fucking mess,instictivly knows that to actualy touch or be associated with grease, is a career ending move, and now a year later they still cant figure out what happened, but whewwee, it turned out good, as they can all pass the shilling,' nope cant show up, sorry, but realy we cant make it to your war,we have contracts to fill, ta!'
i don't know. the DoD is planning for the wrong wars. the bloodiest war in the US was the civil war.
Should we be planning for another civil war?
it's an interesting question. we kind of already are.
guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
anduril's arsenal of weapons are more likely to be used against americans than anyone else. and for that matter, our imagined adversaries - the chinese and russian governments have killed way more chinese and russian people than any of their foreign adversaries. germans have killed lots of germans.
there are powerful VCs in my community, members of Y Combinator, who sincerely believe we should deploy advanced surveillance technologies - they're true believers of the article's broader, very soviet material product system, very IG Farben way of looking at things - despite talking on podcasts about their own families being slaughtered not by petty criminals or foreign adversaries but by their own countrymen, en masse.
americans have killed a lot of americans. not in some facetious sense either.
the best defense is strong representative politics and democratic institutions. the DoD's most powerful weapons are journalists, low interest rates, global shipping and a merciful immigration policy.
> a merciful immigration policy.
In the context of a potential civil war, isn't this basically just importing foreign combatants?
> guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
From 2005 to 2025, 730,000-760,000 Americans died from firearms related injuries, including police shootings, gang violence, and accidents, however suicide alone is between 55-60% of those total deaths.
From 2005 to 2025, in Europe, around 1,400,000 Europeans died from heat related deaths. Between 70-80% of that number could have been prevent by having air condition based on data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Idk why this is relevant, is the air condition going to kill people in a civil war?
But I still get baited into a conversation! Note that if you instead of nr of deaths measured 'nr of life-years lost'(relative to average age of death) the magnitude would be flipped, as most of the heath-deaths were old people who died earlier than expected because of heath. These are still preventable deaths, and should not have their importance scoffed at. But at the same time, these stats does get a bit complicated at end-of-life. Its clear (to me at least) that if e.g. (philosophical thought-experiment incoming!) a single doctor is on duty, and has to choose between saving the life of an infant or prolonging the life of someone on palliative care with a day, the choice is clear. And if the doctor did the obvious choice, did she kill the old person? Should this death today be counted as a 'preventable death' which could be prevented if we just had more doctors?
There are many activities we as a society can do to lengthen life expectancy of old people, like creating social gathering spots, exercise groups, or installing more AC in their homes. In most cases you can't attribute any single death or extra day-of-life to any single cause, but you can see statistical differences in death-rate and attribute causes on a population level.
I have noticed that ACs has become part of some culturewar thingy. In reality it is one of many factors influencing life-expectancy, and in some cases it's the most effective solution to increase life-expectancy, but in many cases other things are far more efficient.
I still don't understand why you compare guns with air conditioning, but this might be a relevant point, depending on where you were going with it :P
Air Condiitioning seems to have come into the picture because Floridians can't imagine why people who live in say Northern France don't have Air conditioning when it was (for a time) very hot in Europe. Unsurprising yes quite a few people who live in stereotypically hot Southern Europe do have Air conditioning.
Which is in the same ballpark as Minnesotans wondering why Cairo doesn't have snowplows. Yes it can snow in Egypt. No it doesn't do so often enough for them have bought fucking snowplows and if as a result of changing climate they do need to buy snowplows that would not be because they're backwards morons who didn't know about this idea until the Americans taught them.
i don't really know where this air conditioning meme comes from, but if your point is that man made global warming is a greater adversary than any foreign government, and completely impervious to the size of your munitions arsenal, i agree!