A munitions plant was built near my hometown in the 40s and used on and off until the 70s(though it stayed intact for decades longer). They took some of the best quality farmland in the state despite protests when they built it. Now the ground is quite contaminated, and so is the groundwater.
I would hope we someday learn to stop polluting our world in the pursuit of killing each other.
Sadly, these days the warmongers are having real boom times, which ironically means a tramsfer of power to people who benefit from wars becoming more frequent in the name of making us more safe.
> I would hope we someday learn to stop polluting our world in the pursuit of killing each other.
Your representatives in Congress and the Executive Branch still need to get paid, and blowing up brown people is their most reliable play to get re-election votes from their base.
Perun (Australian military procurement geek) presented the maths for missile defence vs. attack and it's heavily weighted in favour of the attacker.[1] He also previously analysed the Ukrainian truck-full-of-drones attack against a Russian airbase and it was in this video (sorry no link I can't find it quickly) I think he investigated whether the cost-benefit exists to bury military and critical infrastructure underground (or use heavily hardened buildings).
Both topics are very relevant to the current conflicts of eastern Europe and the middle east. Perhaps I took away the wrong message but I don't think Perun would propose to stockpile interceptor missiles any time soon.
Under post-WWII US military doctrine, the air defense systems and munition stockpiles that we have now were never intended as a permanent shield. Planners intended those to (mostly) defeat the initial attacks only during the opening days of a conflict. Then offensive forces including ground troops were supposed to advance into enemy territory and destroy or occupy the air bases and other sites used for launching air attacks. But if that second step never happens then the entire doctrine around air defense has to change. Israel did that with the Iron Dome system and now the US (and other countries) will have to learn from their experience.
I think Perun would agree that it's better not to be attacked but unfortunately you don't always get a choice. Since you don't get that choice, you have to stockpile interceptors anyway, even though they're not nearly as effective as a good attack.
Part of this is the sheer expense of hardening everything. If you're trying to protect a single airplane, putting it in a hardened hanger is a lot cheaper than trying to get enough interceptors in place that you're going to protect it for sure. However, if you protect that one airplane, they'll just attack the one next to it and they'll get reasonable effects onto that. Or if you protect the whole airport, fine, they will just go attack something else.
The defense equation is not about the cost of the interceptor versus the cost of the missile. The equation is the cost of whatever the missile is going to hit versus the cost of the interceptor. Thus, although interceptors are very expensive, they tend to be cost effective anyway when you consider that they can protect a lot of different unhardened things.
I agree. This is US strongest defensive "weapon". I always compare it to playing Age of Empires II while having isolated Island for yourself with all resources imaginable.
I believe that's for soldiers on the ground. One soldier can defend against ~10 attackers. For missiles, and drones, you can overwhelm air defence pretty cheaply, because the defence missiles cost more than the attack ones, as they need to be more precise.
But why is that? Soldiers move in 2D, missiles in 3D. Is the dimensionality what causes this flip in what's cheaper? Or the fact that soldiers are humans and need to be kept alive? What is the fundamental difference?
There are a lot of things and I don't pretend to know them all. The usual claim I've heard is 3x not 10x, but whatever. (edit - the claim I've heard is attackers take 3x the losses of defenders, re-reading a slightly different claim)
Defenders have a big advantage because they can choose a good position and hide. Often this means they can catch attackers by surprise, and so eliminate the entire attack.
Defenders have time to fortify their position - even if the attacker knows where they are, the attacker needs to run up to a fortified position to take it.
Defenders often know where others are and plan overlapping lanes of fire. If someone is attacking you, the next position will be firing at your attackers (and do the same for you).
Attackers are moving and so have a harder time identifying who is friend vs foe. Defenders know what is supposed to be there - if they see something unexpected they know it is the enemy.
That said the difference is a rule of thumb - but not a law of any sort. Well trained attackers with a good plan can greatly reduce the ratio. Defenders who don't take advantage of all their advantages also lower the ratio.
I suppose to be rigorous you must include time as a dimension. Stationary surface targets are easiest to find, moving surface targets are harder, and moving air targets are hardest. Especially fast-moving ones like missiles.
Attack missiles generally need to travel much farther which increases the cost. How it balances out it an open question and different for each system of missile/interceptor.
If your interceptors are good eventually the enemy is going to give up on that attack mode. - you have more incentive to defend than they do to conduct useless attacks.
If attackers are cheaper than defenders, the attacker might be able to bankrupt the defender, or at least temporarily deplete their supply of defenders. So not useless at all.
It doesn’t matter how valuable the thing is that’s being protected. If the interceptor costs more than the missile it shoots down, then a peer adversary can afford to overwhelm your defenses.
We did this during the Cold War where the things being defended were entire cities. Obviously an interceptor that costs a few million dollars is worth orders of magnitude less than an entire city. But if they cost more than an ICBM then the enemy can just out-build you and they don’t work.
I think the political fight around SDI/Star Wars gave people the impression that shooting down ICBMs was just not technologically possible, or it was but evil politicians decided that having guns to each other’s heads was preferable to defense. Fact is, there were technologically viable interceptors in the 1970s. The US deployed a system for about six months to defend missile fields in the northwest. The Soviets deployed one defending Moscow that still exists to this day. The British made it their mission to ensure one of their submarines could overwhelm those defenses and ensure the destruction of Moscow and they succeeded. The British! The US didn’t even have to do anything special.
SDI/Star Wars wasn’t about figuring out how to shoot down ICBMs. That was already figured out. It was (ironically, given the costs) about figuring out how to do it cheaply so that it could actually stop a peer enemy willing to outbuild your defenses.
The US has defenses today that can take down Chinese or Russian nuclear missiles. There are only a few dozen interceptors, while those nations have hundreds of missiles. The interceptors cost a lot less than a city, so isn’t it worth building more? No, because they cost more than the enemy’s missiles, so if we add more, they can add more too, and always be able to overwhelm them. Hence the system exists to defend against rogue launches or rogue states, not an all-out attack.
This assessment works because in the Cold War, the goal isn't to intercept enemy missiles, it's to prevent your cities and civilization from being destroyed or being overly coerced - which is something that you could achieve much cheaper via mutual deterrence.
Once you can no longer achieve mutual deterrence (perhaps because you are a nation who has a streak/role of engaging in interventionist wars of choice, or maybe you are planning for the case when deterrence fails, and you are now under attack), you have to decide how to protect your assets, if even in a limited way.
An airbase which gets overwhelmed and lost after 5 days of bombardment is an airbase that hopefully was able to contribute 5 days of value to your effort. It's true that the costs will not always work out in your favor.
> It doesn’t matter how valuable the thing is that’s being protected. If the interceptor costs more than the missile it shoots down, then a peer adversary can afford to overwhelm your defenses.
That is way oversimplified. There are many more factors. Few countries are peer adversaries in the fist place. When your economy is larger you can sustain losses. Interceptors can be scaled up (if they work)...
Also even if interceptors don't work perfectly, they can be good enough. Russia is spending a lot more on drones now that the original Shaheds - Ukraine's interceptors for the first generation is working near perfect and they have the economic advantage over Russia's attempt to overwhelm air defenses. (resulting in higher costs missiles, which Ukraine cannot intercept - but even there Ukraine is working on interceptors because they have no other option - the missiles are coming either way and will do even more economic damage than the cost of an interceptor.
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)
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.
> 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.
You are wrong to assume that everyone in that 5% want war.
And what about the soldiers or operations folks that actually carry out the war?
Holding soldiers responsible for the wars they fight would require giving them the option to refuse to deploy, or to refuse to fight while deployed. Currently that's punishable quite severely
We could do a better job punishing soldiers for war crimes. But responsibility for the war itself rests with the President, congress, and the ones with power over them (which is supposed to be the entire population, but the top 1% do have an incredibly outsized influence in US politics. Not that I think it's healthy to codify that)
The amount spent on this folly in Iran (~95B) is roughly the estimated annual total Medicare fraud in the us. And that's just one federal services outlay
I always wanted a law where, in case Congress declares war, each senator and congressman/woman that voted for war has to send their kids and grandkids (if they are between 18 and 35 years of age) to the front line.
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.
There is the real thing you do. You ensure your kids are drafted. However, even in war, there are places that are peaceful that have to be protected. Your kids do have to go through basic training, which is grueling, but once they do that, you just make sure that they're the ones selected to man the supply chain back home. Or maybe they stand in front of an embassy of a third party not involved with the war because you still have to have guards in front of that embassy even though it's probably a ceremonial position.
Note that it often isn't the powerful doing anything. Anyone with sense in military chain of command is going to ensure the kids of the powerful people get moved to important but non dangerous positions without being asked. Even if asked to put the kids in a dangerous position it won't happen.
The richest 5% alone is simplistic but in the right alley. Anyone benefits a war, shall pay a chunk in a healthy society. Big one, considering the harm and risk on the society, regardless of the side in the armed conflict.
The trouble usually is, that the 95% has a huge portion willing to sacrifice anyone else in the same society they live on for peanuts dropped to them by the 5%! : / (see the Trump effect as a light example) Parasites are everywhere, being rich or poor, they suck out the blood of fellow people.
The share of ignorants (does not move a muscle in any direction) are even bigger than the peanut lovers so a healthy society is a fairytale. The economically stronger eat up the weak still.
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.
On one hand you've got "what we procure needs to work for earthly climates with some error bars so that we don't wind up with a million dollars of stuff that doesn't work in Alaska"
And on the other end of the spectrum you've got "my company makes .001% of widgets that do X but we make 50% of widgets that do X at -200deg F so we'll have our lobbyists wine and dine the brass until that number starts showing up in the technical standards forcing anyone who's submitting an RFP to use our product".
And of course the latter always tries to pretend like it's the former. It's not an easy problem. Sometimes concerns are valid. Sometimes they're bullshit. Usually the peddlers of bullshit believe their own bullshit.
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, and I'd be surprised if corruption in Russia was less than 5x or maybe even 10x than in Ukraine.
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, as you see in Ukraine.
given that both warring parties are in top-10 military spending in the world with more or less peer budgets dedicated to the war, peer stats on basically every war aspect like casualties, recruiting rates etc I fail to see the exact mechanism of why the corruption rates should be different
Whenever people talk about Ukrainian corruption, I point to three simple facts:
1. If Zelensky was corrupt, he could've easily sold out the country to either Putin or Trump, both were ready to make him a billionaire and let him keep power if he gave in to their demands. If high level generals were corrupt, Ukraine would have already lost.
2. The proof is in the pudding (battlefield results). The fact that the Ukrainian army has held back the Russian army for almost 5 years now (longer than the Soviet war with Nazi Germany in WW2) against incredible odds means that whatever they are doing is WORKING. And in 2026 the UA army is doing better than ever: has gained territory instead of losing it, and is now striking deep into the heart of Russia with impunity. A corrupt army could NEVER achieve what Ukraine has achieved.
3. The Ukrainian army has never had a high-level whistleblower defection like Prygozhin/Wagner who exposed the corruption in the Russian army.
Covid was the same. In the UK the government created a corrupt scheme where politicians and their mates were first in the queue for personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts. Fortunes were made.
Any kind of emergency is an opportunity for graft.
P.S. Two separate enquiries found that this was fine because the corrupt scheme was fairly operated according to its corrupt terms of reference. They didn't consider whether the scheme was corrupt per se.
That always seemed so strange to me; the concept of a VIP lane _sort_ of makes sense if the criteria for entry is that you're an expert in the field, i.e. a logistics company or existing supplier of the NHS. Not just that you're friends with someone in a position of authority.
"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.
Whenever people talk about Ukrainian corruption, I point to three simple facts:
1. If Zelensky was corrupt, he could've easily sold out the country to either Putin or Trump, both were ready to make him a billionaire and let him keep power if he gave in to their demands. If high level generals were corrupt, Ukraine would have already lost.
2. The proof is in the pudding (battlefield results). The fact that the Ukrainian army has held back the Russian army for almost 5 years now (longer than the Soviet war with Nazi Germany in WW2) against incredible odds means that whatever they are doing is WORKING. And in 2026 the UA army is doing better than ever: has gained territory instead of losing it, and is now striking deep into the heart of Russia with impunity. A corrupt army could NEVER achieve what Ukraine has achieved.
3. The Ukrainian army has never had a high-level whistleblower defection like Prygozhin/Wagner who exposed the corruption in the Russian army.
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
The problem is how do you quickly spin up? You can't take an assembly line manufacturing a truck and turn it into manufacturing a tank. Well, you can, but it's basically you take the building it's in, throw away three fourths of the custom jigs and replace it with brand new custom jigs for a tank. I'm sure there's a small overlap of things you can use for both, but it wouldn't be very large.
Tanks are relatively easy to spin on production of. No nation ever started building a battleship in the time of war that then saw service in that war. Battleships commissioned during war had been started during peacetime or they were scrapped during the war because they didn't fit into the time or they were started under high holds, but they couldn't be finished in time. aircraft carriers are likely to be the same place going forward - you have to make them beforehand.
Things like artillery shells, which need to have the ability to quickly spin up production, but that's relatively easy to do. Which is why we're so low on production. The one thing that's lacking is the willpower to actually spin up production because as we quickly discover you could do it but that means all the things that your people are doing instead can't be done.
> 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.
Many of Sidewinder style systems use a "tone" to indicate their lock-on state. The tone is low when the system is turned on but not "locked on". It quickly rises into a high pitched tone when it's pointed at something hot. The user is expected to first "cage" the missile, straightening out the sensor, then point it at the target, then "uncage" it and swing around to ensure the change in pitch matches your expectation. Then finally it is to be fired.
We in the public don't have a complete list of missiles from various nations and their tones, but it's well known that American Sidewinder systems use an iconic growling dog[1] tone. Stinger is more sine like[2], and many others appear to be sine like too, and newer systems like 9X and later are clearly just digital and software based even by public descriptions of it.
What I'm suspecting is that, the early gen Sidewinder growl might have been just the raw sensor output piped into the headset, because the operating principle of those seeker units somewhat corresponds to the sounds, down to the high boresight angle warning tone which isn't hard to imagine a kid playing with a benchtop example and accidentally implementing it by damaging some cable.
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
> 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?
> procurement fraud looks quite different (e.g. having anpart for your weapon made in every congressional district, a tactic developed for the B-1)
Why is that fraud? That seems more like congresspeople having something to offer each other, to build up relationships and interdependence. What we have now is that our 2 parties don’t care about each other and don’t need each other, so there’s no reason for them to work together.
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)
$13 million to save a few city blocks is good. But it won’t be $13 million. You station an interceptor, and attack is so much cheaper, so they’ll add a second attacker. Now it’s $26 million to save those blocks. Still a good deal. Except now they’ll send three missiles. Extrapolate until one of you is unwilling or unable to spend more. (And this isn’t even getting into interception success rates or the fact that an attacker can attack anywhere but a defender needs to defend everywhere, both of which make it worse than one interceptor to shoot down one missile.) Hence this equation only works out for the defender if the attacker is much less willing or able to spend. It works pretty well for Israel versus militants, or for US versus North Korea. It starts to break down a bit when the adversary is even as capable as Iran, let alone anything like a peer.
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.
This is subjective, but I think this image wasn't uncommon in US-aligned countries either, but at least this seems to have changed in the last decade or so.
The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo, proper order. Hegemony, the maritime order, global currency (US dollar), and forever war are inseparable. The cliché "if you want peace, prepare for war." Some low-level, mostly contained, amount of violence is the price for a larger "peace".
Post WWII, the USA did not engage in total war or seek unconditional surrender. Because breaking the equilibrium wrecks hegemony. As demonstrated by GWB's ill-advised conquest of Iraq, which (IMHO) was the deflection point for Pax Americana.
The notion of just war and world cop is mythmaking, rationalization. So the citizens will keep subsidizing the hegemony. (h/t Niall Ferguson) Any notions of justice, human rights, and whatnot were savvy marketing, born of (PR) competition with other hegemons.
As bad as Pax American hegemony has been for all participants, I'm certain we'll look back with nostalgia. In that "What has Rome ever done for us?!" sort of way. The ~70 years of (relative) peace was kind of incredible.
The emerging multi-polar world (and poly-crisis) is more chaotic, violent, and terrible. And will prove ever more so over time.
Technically, RTX is currently the parent company for Raytheon. The two other major business units are Pratt & Whitney (jet engines) and Collins Aerospace.
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.
You hit on something that's been making me nervous for awhile, and I hope I'm wrong. The US's relationship with Ukraine reminds me of stories I've read about how people train fighting dogs. It has just that level of abuse, negligence and reward for violence that creates a creature that is good at just one thing. I really hope I'm wrong about all of my assumptions.
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.
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.
US military procurement regulations keep companies like GlobalFoundries alive. No alternative for critical chips from some of their legacy nodes (at least none that can be certified within years, obviously the chips themselves are very far from cutting edge).
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.
Electromagnetic radiation is a lot cheaper to generate and transmit across space than a 450kg warhead. The only obvious exception being if that warhead is the W80 variant.
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
You could still jam this but you need to overcome 20+dB of additional gain in the transmission. If the party you are jamming has anti-radiation missiles, you are forced to make yourself an extremely hot and unambiguous target to participate in jamming at these power levels.
Cruise missiles still costing multiple millions each is a rip off of American taxpayers. Weapon systems is a market ripe for “creative destruction” and you’re, ever so slowly, starting to see it with companies like Anduril.
Anduril sells missiles like the Barracuda-M (1/10 the warhead of a Tomahawk missile, and reduced range) for north of $200k. Very similar payload delivery price, that isn't actually a cheaper alternative. Arguably many targets don't require a 500kg warhead and in those cases a much smaller and cheaper missile would do the trick just fine, and if it can be produced much faster and benefit from economy of scale, even better, but at the end of the day they're just as much looking to make as much profit as possible as everyone else (everything for the shareholders).
I'm rooting for Anduril and more competition but it also sounds like typical techie naivete thinking nobody else knows what they're doing and missiles are multi millions for no reason.
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.
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.
Much of WWII was based on overwhelming cheap (and field reparable) machinery backed by industrial capacity while the Germans had the finely crafted equipment.
Somewhere in the next decades, the US has switched to being the finely crafted military equipment.
The Barracuda (which I assume is what you're referencing to) is not nearly as performant as the Tomahawk. The largest Barracuda has a range of ~500nm, and carries a 100lb warhead, and is air launched (there claims to be a ground launched version, but it might result in reduced range). The Tomahawk has a range of like ~900nm carries like a 700lb warhead and can be ship/land launched (so it needs extra booster).
The Barracuda would be really really useful a lot (probably most) of targets and missions, but we can't pretend like there's no tradeoff in performance and additional limitations. Very roughly a Tomahawk has twice the range, and 7 times the payload.
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.
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!
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 would hope we someday learn to stop polluting our world in the pursuit of killing each other.
Your representatives in Congress and the Executive Branch still need to get paid, and blowing up brown people is their most reliable play to get re-election votes from their base.
Both topics are very relevant to the current conflicts of eastern Europe and the middle east. Perhaps I took away the wrong message but I don't think Perun would propose to stockpile interceptor missiles any time soon.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFhNXecrb4&t=2382s
Part of this is the sheer expense of hardening everything. If you're trying to protect a single airplane, putting it in a hardened hanger is a lot cheaper than trying to get enough interceptors in place that you're going to protect it for sure. However, if you protect that one airplane, they'll just attack the one next to it and they'll get reasonable effects onto that. Or if you protect the whole airport, fine, they will just go attack something else.
The defense equation is not about the cost of the interceptor versus the cost of the missile. The equation is the cost of whatever the missile is going to hit versus the cost of the interceptor. Thus, although interceptors are very expensive, they tend to be cost effective anyway when you consider that they can protect a lot of different unhardened things.
Arguably USA does have this choice, by virtue of sitting across the ocean.
Strange, I keep hearing from experts that attacking is 10x as costly as defending.
Defenders have a big advantage because they can choose a good position and hide. Often this means they can catch attackers by surprise, and so eliminate the entire attack.
Defenders have time to fortify their position - even if the attacker knows where they are, the attacker needs to run up to a fortified position to take it.
Defenders often know where others are and plan overlapping lanes of fire. If someone is attacking you, the next position will be firing at your attackers (and do the same for you).
Attackers are moving and so have a harder time identifying who is friend vs foe. Defenders know what is supposed to be there - if they see something unexpected they know it is the enemy.
That said the difference is a rule of thumb - but not a law of any sort. Well trained attackers with a good plan can greatly reduce the ratio. Defenders who don't take advantage of all their advantages also lower the ratio.
b) A human defender can hunker down in a safe space and shoot at attackers. The attackers need to move and are more vulnerable
If your interceptors are good eventually the enemy is going to give up on that attack mode. - you have more incentive to defend than they do to conduct useless attacks.
Ukraine's interceptors for cheap drones are drones that are even cheaper and so advantage defender.
We did this during the Cold War where the things being defended were entire cities. Obviously an interceptor that costs a few million dollars is worth orders of magnitude less than an entire city. But if they cost more than an ICBM then the enemy can just out-build you and they don’t work.
I think the political fight around SDI/Star Wars gave people the impression that shooting down ICBMs was just not technologically possible, or it was but evil politicians decided that having guns to each other’s heads was preferable to defense. Fact is, there were technologically viable interceptors in the 1970s. The US deployed a system for about six months to defend missile fields in the northwest. The Soviets deployed one defending Moscow that still exists to this day. The British made it their mission to ensure one of their submarines could overwhelm those defenses and ensure the destruction of Moscow and they succeeded. The British! The US didn’t even have to do anything special.
SDI/Star Wars wasn’t about figuring out how to shoot down ICBMs. That was already figured out. It was (ironically, given the costs) about figuring out how to do it cheaply so that it could actually stop a peer enemy willing to outbuild your defenses.
The US has defenses today that can take down Chinese or Russian nuclear missiles. There are only a few dozen interceptors, while those nations have hundreds of missiles. The interceptors cost a lot less than a city, so isn’t it worth building more? No, because they cost more than the enemy’s missiles, so if we add more, they can add more too, and always be able to overwhelm them. Hence the system exists to defend against rogue launches or rogue states, not an all-out attack.
Once you can no longer achieve mutual deterrence (perhaps because you are a nation who has a streak/role of engaging in interventionist wars of choice, or maybe you are planning for the case when deterrence fails, and you are now under attack), you have to decide how to protect your assets, if even in a limited way.
An airbase which gets overwhelmed and lost after 5 days of bombardment is an airbase that hopefully was able to contribute 5 days of value to your effort. It's true that the costs will not always work out in your favor.
That is way oversimplified. There are many more factors. Few countries are peer adversaries in the fist place. When your economy is larger you can sustain losses. Interceptors can be scaled up (if they work)...
Also even if interceptors don't work perfectly, they can be good enough. Russia is spending a lot more on drones now that the original Shaheds - Ukraine's interceptors for the first generation is working near perfect and they have the economic advantage over Russia's attempt to overwhelm air defenses. (resulting in higher costs missiles, which Ukraine cannot intercept - but even there Ukraine is working on interceptors because they have no other option - the missiles are coming either way and will do even more economic damage than the cost of an interceptor.
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)
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.
You are wrong to assume that everyone in that 5% want war.
And what about the soldiers or operations folks that actually carry out the war?
We could do a better job punishing soldiers for war crimes. But responsibility for the war itself rests with the President, congress, and the ones with power over them (which is supposed to be the entire population, but the top 1% do have an incredibly outsized influence in US politics. Not that I think it's healthy to codify that)
There would be no war pretty soon.
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.
The trouble usually is, that the 95% has a huge portion willing to sacrifice anyone else in the same society they live on for peanuts dropped to them by the 5%! : / (see the Trump effect as a light example) Parasites are everywhere, being rich or poor, they suck out the blood of fellow people.
The share of ignorants (does not move a muscle in any direction) are even bigger than the peanut lovers so a healthy society is a fairytale. The economically stronger eat up the weak still.
I wish I were such a useful idiot that I could just imagine-away incentives in a system so I could more easily create imaginary solutions :(
And on the other end of the spectrum you've got "my company makes .001% of widgets that do X but we make 50% of widgets that do X at -200deg F so we'll have our lobbyists wine and dine the brass until that number starts showing up in the technical standards forcing anyone who's submitting an RFP to use our product".
And of course the latter always tries to pretend like it's the former. It's not an easy problem. Sometimes concerns are valid. Sometimes they're bullshit. Usually the peddlers of bullshit believe their own bullshit.
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
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, as you see in Ukraine.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/ukraine-war-...
given that both warring parties are in top-10 military spending in the world with more or less peer budgets dedicated to the war, peer stats on basically every war aspect like casualties, recruiting rates etc I fail to see the exact mechanism of why the corruption rates should be different
1. If Zelensky was corrupt, he could've easily sold out the country to either Putin or Trump, both were ready to make him a billionaire and let him keep power if he gave in to their demands. If high level generals were corrupt, Ukraine would have already lost.
2. The proof is in the pudding (battlefield results). The fact that the Ukrainian army has held back the Russian army for almost 5 years now (longer than the Soviet war with Nazi Germany in WW2) against incredible odds means that whatever they are doing is WORKING. And in 2026 the UA army is doing better than ever: has gained territory instead of losing it, and is now striking deep into the heart of Russia with impunity. A corrupt army could NEVER achieve what Ukraine has achieved.
3. The Ukrainian army has never had a high-level whistleblower defection like Prygozhin/Wagner who exposed the corruption in the Russian army.
Any kind of emergency is an opportunity for graft.
P.S. Two separate enquiries found that this was fine because the corrupt scheme was fairly operated according to its corrupt terms of reference. They didn't consider whether the scheme was corrupt per se.
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.
1. If Zelensky was corrupt, he could've easily sold out the country to either Putin or Trump, both were ready to make him a billionaire and let him keep power if he gave in to their demands. If high level generals were corrupt, Ukraine would have already lost.
2. The proof is in the pudding (battlefield results). The fact that the Ukrainian army has held back the Russian army for almost 5 years now (longer than the Soviet war with Nazi Germany in WW2) against incredible odds means that whatever they are doing is WORKING. And in 2026 the UA army is doing better than ever: has gained territory instead of losing it, and is now striking deep into the heart of Russia with impunity. A corrupt army could NEVER achieve what Ukraine has achieved.
3. The Ukrainian army has never had a high-level whistleblower defection like Prygozhin/Wagner who exposed the corruption in the Russian army.
Tanks are relatively easy to spin on production of. No nation ever started building a battleship in the time of war that then saw service in that war. Battleships commissioned during war had been started during peacetime or they were scrapped during the war because they didn't fit into the time or they were started under high holds, but they couldn't be finished in time. aircraft carriers are likely to be the same place going forward - you have to make them beforehand.
Things like artillery shells, which need to have the ability to quickly spin up production, but that's relatively easy to do. Which is why we're so low on production. The one thing that's lacking is the willpower to actually spin up production because as we quickly discover you could do it but that means all the things that your people are doing instead can't be done.
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.
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.
That's probably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolleron
Sound: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MFt_-IrUHlE
We in the public don't have a complete list of missiles from various nations and their tones, but it's well known that American Sidewinder systems use an iconic growling dog[1] tone. Stinger is more sine like[2], and many others appear to be sine like too, and newer systems like 9X and later are clearly just digital and software based even by public descriptions of it.
What I'm suspecting is that, the early gen Sidewinder growl might have been just the raw sensor output piped into the headset, because the operating principle of those seeker units somewhat corresponds to the sounds, down to the high boresight angle warning tone which isn't hard to imagine a kid playing with a benchtop example and accidentally implementing it by damaging some cable.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OttbRzLr3VI
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_dQMlwAAYM
Sure. How?
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
Do you have any pointers to a good write-up of this?
Why is that fraud? That seems more like congresspeople having something to offer each other, to build up relationships and interdependence. What we have now is that our 2 parties don’t care about each other and don’t need each other, so there’s no reason for them to work together.
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.
Also, consider VSL (value of a statistical life) which is around 5-10 million in most of developed world.
Although thinking about how many humans a kill machine is worth is one hell of an idea to ponder
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Blood#The_Blood_Telegra...
The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
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.
Or just reflects American views of what cops are for; thumping minorities.
The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo, proper order. Hegemony, the maritime order, global currency (US dollar), and forever war are inseparable. The cliché "if you want peace, prepare for war." Some low-level, mostly contained, amount of violence is the price for a larger "peace".
Post WWII, the USA did not engage in total war or seek unconditional surrender. Because breaking the equilibrium wrecks hegemony. As demonstrated by GWB's ill-advised conquest of Iraq, which (IMHO) was the deflection point for Pax Americana.
The notion of just war and world cop is mythmaking, rationalization. So the citizens will keep subsidizing the hegemony. (h/t Niall Ferguson) Any notions of justice, human rights, and whatnot were savvy marketing, born of (PR) competition with other hegemons.
As bad as Pax American hegemony has been for all participants, I'm certain we'll look back with nostalgia. In that "What has Rome ever done for us?!" sort of way. The ~70 years of (relative) peace was kind of incredible.
The emerging multi-polar world (and poly-crisis) is more chaotic, violent, and terrible. And will prove ever more so over time.
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.
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?
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?
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.
[1] https://ipdefenseforum.com/2026/01/taiwan-looks-to-partner-w...
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.
What we ultimately want is effect on target.
Electromagnetic radiation is a lot cheaper to generate and transmit across space than a 450kg warhead. The only obvious exception being if that warhead is the W80 variant.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/regi...
You could still jam this but you need to overcome 20+dB of additional gain in the transmission. If the party you are jamming has anti-radiation missiles, you are forced to make yourself an extremely hot and unambiguous target to participate in jamming at these power levels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M247_Sergeant_York
Somewhere in the next decades, the US has switched to being the finely crafted military equipment.
My armchair historian says that the technology innovations are done during peacetime while treaties limit the size of the forces. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Conventional_Armed_F... ) while the inventions happen during the war itself. This in turn means that much of the technology innovation is focused on fighting the last war.
With the Pax Americana ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana ) and various policies (could the military industrial complex have survived the Last Supper? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper_(defense_industry) ... and how has that contributed to current budgets and projects?) the United States has produced cutting edge military equipment. We've certainly left that period.
The Barracuda would be really really useful a lot (probably most) of targets and missions, but we can't pretend like there's no tradeoff in performance and additional limitations. Very roughly a Tomahawk has twice the range, and 7 times the payload.
no?
cost-per-launch is about equal, it's just that falcon made it to the desired launch cadence to spread cost-per-month around, while shuttle did not
why do you think falcon program is closing as starlink launches are switching to starship?
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!'
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.
People with guns mostly kill themselves, no?
In the context of a potential civil war, isn't this basically just importing foreign combatants?
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.
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
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.