4 ms·

> A Patriot missile, usually priced at about $3 million was recently used to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone, according to a US general. I thought they were

by sakopov 10y ago

> A Patriot missile, usually priced at about $3 million was recently used to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone, according to a US general. I thought they were at most $50k a piece. This is unbelievable.

blackguardx 10y ago
One of the simplest missiles of all, the TOW [1] costs almost $20k. A friend who is a former Marine says it was common to fire half a dozen in practice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  I've heard from people who work for military contractors that development is very expensive because everything is very inflexible and clamped down and there is so much paperwork.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  I wonder if that price is due to low production and that the price would come down with mass production in war. Maybe not the case here but I always assume this is the case with expensive new weapons that are likely mostly r&d costs being spread across relatively few orders in peacetime.
  - cstross 10y ago
    Partly, but mass production in time of war simply isn't a thing in this day and age — hot wars between roughly-comparable adversaries (as opposed to the asymmetric conflicts such as counter-insurgency campaigns) are generally over in double-to-triple-digit hours, a couple of weeks at most. So the policy of most developed nations' militaries is "come with whatever you've got" and don't plan on building more kit until it's over.
    - PJDK 10y ago
      Add to that statement a "probably...". For example WWII started with months of "phoney war" where both sides moved onto a war footing, followed by a short violent blitzkrieg. WWII is also shows powers capable of exercising restraint, even Hitler, conducting a war he was obviously losing, opted to not use chemical weapons. WWIII could be fought in a couple of hours or it could go on for years with neither side willing to press the biggest button.
smacktoward 10y ago
> The unit cost of the PAC-3 MSE missile is $3.94 million in FY 2016. (Source: http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/Defense/Patriot-PAC-3-MSE.html http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/Defense/Patriot-PAC-3-MSE.html)
ufmace 10y ago
An active radar set in the missile, guidance computer, actuators, with power source and antennas, all hardened enough to tolerate being on a rocket accelerating hard to Mach 2, plus the missile itself with an engine big enough to get it to ~80k ft, plus a warhead and proximity fuse. I have no problem believing that it costs $3 Million.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  Plus Raytheon overheads and profit. Either of which might be a larger portion of the price than any one of those hardware items. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, just that it's a cost component. I bet the DoD is not super cost-sensitive for amazing weapons systems that can protect large assets, but they drive a hard bargain on butter and toilet paper. Is anyone at liberty to talk about overhead and profit margins for these kind of systems? I previously worked for a related business which precludes me from giving numbers. The laser weapon might not have a per-shot profit margin. Though they can build that into the service contract...
  - ufmace 10y ago
    Some of that, for sure. I'm not saying that Raytheon et al are angels or anything, but in their defense, most of the "overhead" is likely due to the hoops they have to jump through to do things the way that their customer wants them to be done. I haven't worked with Government or their suppliers, but I have worked for a large company that did a lot of manufacturing of semi-exotic stuff, and their procurements demands were completely irrational. They didn't want to maintain an inventory of parts that were complex to manufacture, but required that they be available to purchase on short notice without any kind of contract or schedule, and were willing to pay any price to get that. So suppliers sprang up to hold these parts in inventory for them and supply them on-demand at vastly marked up prices, to cover their costs of maintaining the inventory. I'm not sure if any explicit corruption was involved in setting that up, but that's the kind of thing that tends to happen at large organizations. Then again, even if there wasn't any explicit corruption when setting these things up, it tends to happen later on as suppliers get established and try to bend the customer into having even more bizzare procurement rules, so that no other company could possibly comply with them and take their business.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nannal 10y ago
Yeah drones got really cheap.
underbluewaters 10y ago
That sounds like bullshit. Can a patriot missile even hit a 25cm wide target? Why would such a quadcopter even represent a serious threat? Sounds like this "General" was making an embellished hypothetical example of why this laser system is useful.
- dtparr 10y ago
  Given that you put "General" in quotes, I'm not sure which part you think is bullshit. If it's the part about him saying it, here's the youtube video[0] of a 4-star general in the US Army (Gen. David Perkins) making that claim. And he's not advocating for lasers (it's unrelated to this article), he's advocating for alternative options, and mentions cyber and something like "sema?". As far as could the patriot hit it, I would think the hard part would be tracking it. No idea what the RCS looks like on a quadcopter vs., say, a stealthy cruise missile. As far as threats for use in asymmetric warfare, we've seen cheap drones that are used for recon, and we've seen them used to drop ordnance. 0 - https://youtu.be/6v7nfB5bV3E?t=14m54s https://youtu.be/6v7nfB5bV3E?t=14m54s Edit: here's a link to a picture of an ISIS-modified drone used to drop grenades: https://twitter.com/AlexMello02/status/819259288950624256/photo/1 https://twitter.com/AlexMello02/status/819259288950624256/ph...
  - underbluewaters 10y ago
    Huh, thanks for the link to the talk. That wasn't in the original article so I could hardly believe they got that correct. Still, I don't see how that's justifiable even if they can drop grenades. They won't be able to do it very effectively, and in fact if it's close enough to drop a grenade on troops you probably don't want to be detonating a Patriot missile in the same area.
    - dtparr 10y ago
      Actually, I think his whole point was that it wasn't really justifiable, but it wasn't the US Army that did it (I am curious who it was). Totally agree about the proximity thing.
woodandsteel 10y ago
The Patriot is not a shoulder-fired missile. It is a heavy-duty anti-aircraft missile that weighs 1,500 lb. In fact, some versions can shoot down medium-range ballistic missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot

by sakopov 10y ago

blackguardx 10y ago

One of the simplest missiles of all, the TOW [1] costs almost $20k. A friend who is a former Marine says it was common to fire half a dozen in practice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW

Gravityloss 10y ago
I've heard from people who work for military contractors that development is very expensive because everything is very inflexible and clamped down and there is so much paperwork.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
I wonder if that price is due to low production and that the price would come down with mass production in war. Maybe not the case here but I always assume this is the case with expensive new weapons that are likely mostly r&d costs being spread across relatively few orders in peacetime.
- cstross 10y ago
  Partly, but mass production in time of war simply isn't a thing in this day and age — hot wars between roughly-comparable adversaries (as opposed to the asymmetric conflicts such as counter-insurgency campaigns) are generally over in double-to-triple-digit hours, a couple of weeks at most. So the policy of most developed nations' militaries is "come with whatever you've got" and don't plan on building more kit until it's over.
  - PJDK 10y ago
    Add to that statement a "probably...". For example WWII started with months of "phoney war" where both sides moved onto a war footing, followed by a short violent blitzkrieg. WWII is also shows powers capable of exercising restraint, even Hitler, conducting a war he was obviously losing, opted to not use chemical weapons. WWIII could be fought in a couple of hours or it could go on for years with neither side willing to press the biggest button.

smacktoward 10y ago

> The unit cost of the PAC-3 MSE missile is $3.94 million in FY 2016. (Source: http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/Defense/Patriot-PAC-3-MSE.html http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/Defense/Patriot-PAC-3-MSE.html)

ufmace 10y ago

An active radar set in the missile, guidance computer, actuators, with power source and antennas, all hardened enough to tolerate being on a rocket accelerating hard to Mach 2, plus the missile itself with an engine big enough to get it to ~80k ft, plus a warhead and proximity fuse. I have no problem believing that it costs $3 Million.

robotresearcher 10y ago
Plus Raytheon overheads and profit. Either of which might be a larger portion of the price than any one of those hardware items. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, just that it's a cost component. I bet the DoD is not super cost-sensitive for amazing weapons systems that can protect large assets, but they drive a hard bargain on butter and toilet paper. Is anyone at liberty to talk about overhead and profit margins for these kind of systems? I previously worked for a related business which precludes me from giving numbers. The laser weapon might not have a per-shot profit margin. Though they can build that into the service contract...
- ufmace 10y ago
  Some of that, for sure. I'm not saying that Raytheon et al are angels or anything, but in their defense, most of the "overhead" is likely due to the hoops they have to jump through to do things the way that their customer wants them to be done. I haven't worked with Government or their suppliers, but I have worked for a large company that did a lot of manufacturing of semi-exotic stuff, and their procurements demands were completely irrational. They didn't want to maintain an inventory of parts that were complex to manufacture, but required that they be available to purchase on short notice without any kind of contract or schedule, and were willing to pay any price to get that. So suppliers sprang up to hold these parts in inventory for them and supply them on-demand at vastly marked up prices, to cover their costs of maintaining the inventory. I'm not sure if any explicit corruption was involved in setting that up, but that's the kind of thing that tends to happen at large organizations. Then again, even if there wasn't any explicit corruption when setting these things up, it tends to happen later on as suppliers get established and try to bend the customer into having even more bizzare procurement rules, so that no other company could possibly comply with them and take their business.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nannal 10y ago

Yeah drones got really cheap.

underbluewaters 10y ago

That sounds like bullshit. Can a patriot missile even hit a 25cm wide target? Why would such a quadcopter even represent a serious threat? Sounds like this "General" was making an embellished hypothetical example of why this laser system is useful.

dtparr 10y ago
Given that you put "General" in quotes, I'm not sure which part you think is bullshit. If it's the part about him saying it, here's the youtube video[0] of a 4-star general in the US Army (Gen. David Perkins) making that claim. And he's not advocating for lasers (it's unrelated to this article), he's advocating for alternative options, and mentions cyber and something like "sema?". As far as could the patriot hit it, I would think the hard part would be tracking it. No idea what the RCS looks like on a quadcopter vs., say, a stealthy cruise missile. As far as threats for use in asymmetric warfare, we've seen cheap drones that are used for recon, and we've seen them used to drop ordnance. 0 - https://youtu.be/6v7nfB5bV3E?t=14m54s https://youtu.be/6v7nfB5bV3E?t=14m54s Edit: here's a link to a picture of an ISIS-modified drone used to drop grenades: https://twitter.com/AlexMello02/status/819259288950624256/photo/1 https://twitter.com/AlexMello02/status/819259288950624256/ph...
- underbluewaters 10y ago
  Huh, thanks for the link to the talk. That wasn't in the original article so I could hardly believe they got that correct. Still, I don't see how that's justifiable even if they can drop grenades. They won't be able to do it very effectively, and in fact if it's close enough to drop a grenade on troops you probably don't want to be detonating a Patriot missile in the same area.
  - dtparr 10y ago
    Actually, I think his whole point was that it wasn't really justifiable, but it wasn't the US Army that did it (I am curious who it was). Totally agree about the proximity thing.

woodandsteel 10y ago

The Patriot is not a shoulder-fired missile. It is a heavy-duty anti-aircraft missile that weighs 1,500 lb. In fact, some versions can shoot down medium-range ballistic missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot