4 ms·

100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: prop

100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. Take a look at Raytheon's manufacturing line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc That's what it takes to have missiles that are nearly guaranteed to perform to specification every time. You can stockpile the packaged missiles in a non-climate-controlled shed for years, replenish them at sea while being showered with salt water, subject them to shock of a nearby blast while in a VLS, and they will still launch, go up to Mach 13, and catch an incoming ballistic missile nearly every time. Sure, Iran's ballistic missiles are simpler than SM-3, but they are still subject to most of the constraints. They still need perfectly cast large size solid rocket motors that don't crack after being stored for a year, they need warheads that only go off when they are supposed to, they still need to trace every part for QA, etc. There's a vast gap, largely invisible to amateurs, between garage prototypes and stockpiled AURs.

vidarh 7mo ago
TFA is literally about a $96 rocket. > propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. You're entirely missing the point. These do not need to be reliable for the scenario I hinted at. They also do not need to be armed. They need to be large enough that if one of them is a higher quality rocket (not part of the $10k) that contains actual explosives, you have serious destruction on your hand. Maybe something that looks large enough for that will drive the cost up and we're talking $20k or even $100k instead of $10k. The precise cost is largely irrelevant, as long as the total cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of a missile interception. The point is you'd be multiplying the cost assymmetry by forcing a massively outsized response. Because if you don't try to intercept them, every future barrage will include a real rocket. If you do try to intercept them all, you'll be burning through massively expensive interceptors to take out a bunch of cheap toys. If I was ever considering an insurgency, or a war, I'd be stocking up on vast quantities of toys, with the intent of making every radar constantly lit up by a number of possible threats.
- dgroshev 7mo ago
  > TFA is literally about a $96 rocket It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably. To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. Maybe your solid rocket motor would be a touch smaller because you're not delivering hundreds of kilograms of explosives, but it still has to be large because of the rocket equation. With a large motor you're looking at a lot of damage if it explodes at the launch point, so you need quality casting. You can't really save much money on the motor. Then, you need a TEL. Because the motor is large, the launcher has to be comparable to the real thing. You probably don't want to have two different vehicles, so you keep the same vehicle; it needs to be armed, driven around, and set for launch. Not that different from the real thing. So you've done all of that, and then you realise that your empty warheads are too light and the missiles (or warheads, if you split) don't interact with the atmosphere in the same way as non-decoy missiles do. What's worse, modern radars are perfectly capable of noticing that and discriminating the decoys. All of that effort, and you didn't win anything. Might as well add the payload. The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. In the end, relying on decoys doesn't really work, they are too expensive. Fancier CPUs change very little of this calculation, because compute is a very little part of the cost to begin with.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mosura 7mo ago
    > The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. OTOH if you built a successful decoy system that is exactly what you would want people to believe.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    > It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably. Doesn't matter at that cost. > To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. That is relevant in a conflict like Iran at the moment, where the distance that needs to be covered is large. It's not relevant in e.g. an insurgency or the moment you put boots on the ground, where it only needs to look like something potentially explosive coming towards your truck or your helicopter or your people and you have 20 seconds to decide whether to waste munitions on it or not.
pjc50 7mo ago
> price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. I wonder how much of that Ukraine is bothering with. Or Iran. Certainly Hezbollah are building down to a budget.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago
  I wonder how many Hezbollah rocket operators get blown up by their own rockets? A not insignificant number, I suspect.
  - coredog64 7mo ago
    And then as a follow-up question, how many civilians next door to a Hezbollah launch site get blown up by poorly manufactured rockets?
    - WaxProlix 7mo ago
      Probably some fraction of the civilians blown up by Israeli terrorist phone strikes and bombing raids; there's a reason Hezbollah maintains some level of support in the region.
  - halflife 7mo ago
    Last week they launched 200 rockets in the span of one day, about 40 of those fell inside Lebanon border, that’s not counting the number of rockets that did not fire at all.
- dgroshev 7mo ago
  Ukraine does bother with all of that when they can afford it. I'd even say that FPV drones are the main exception, and only because Ukraine was so pressed for immediate results and had stockpiles to repurpose. There are only so many old RPG warheads you can reuse with a detonator made of live wires, and maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day under artillery fire gets old fast. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, they don't need their contraptions to work reliably. GMLRS serves an entirely different purpose to rockets made of repurposed telephone poles, and is much more useful for a military force. Also, don't forget the distances. Ukraine is fighting a war in their own country, with direct ground lines of communication to the frontline. On the other hand, you can fit three Ukraines just between Guam and Taiwan.
regularfry 7mo ago
Without necessarily disagreeing with your point, the driving consideration for Raytheon's production line is arguably not reliability. It's being able to charge the customer for perceived reliability. It's very hard to know from the outside how much of it is theatre, even if earnestly arrived at. There are incentives for these things to be expensive.
- esseph 7mo ago
  The US military is not "new" at this. There are whole career professions in the military around just this topic.
kdheiwns 7mo ago
If you think shelf life, QA, safety, blah blah blah matters when a rocket is 100 bucks, I have just three words: you will lose. The Ukraine war is being fought with a bunch of cheap toy style drones dropping grenades everywhere. The US got their bases blown to pieces across the Middle East by cheap drones that gently float through the air like a paper airplane in comparison to absolutely any missile. And let's not forget. The US had napalm, helicopters, bombers, incredible logistics, cutting edge equipment of all sorts. Vietnam had a bunch of sticks in a hole covered in poop. Those sticks sent Americans crying home and we still get movies and games with them crying about how bad it was. In war between great powers, yeah, high tech works because it's scary and civilians don't want to have that kind of stuff coming home. In a war where civilians are being targeted by great powers who terrorize them by blowing up schools and hospitals, a lot of people are thinking about how many weapons they can make to defend their home and for cheap. If America thinks an invasion is a good idea, they're going to be bringing their 50 million dollar tanks face to face with a few $100 toy rockets. And those toy rockets will be picking off tanks like fish in a barrel while a drone streams it in 4K live to the internet. I really do not think American who support current happenings are ready for the absolute mental torment they're going to endure if this continues.
- computerdork 7mo ago
  You have a point - cheap drones have changed warfare - but you might be simplifying the issue. As some warfare experts online have discussed, it isn't that cheap drones are the only weapon that is used in Ukraine (or warfare in general), it is one option in vast array of options based on the situation (although, agreed, it is taking on a much bigger significance). Look at the war in Iran. They did a pretty standard playbook and use stealth jets and cruise missiles to surgically take out air defenses in order to gain air dominance. This would be very difficult with just cheap drones. ... but, do agree that cheap weapons are still becoming extremely important. Iran is terrorizing the middle east and strait of hormuz with cheap drones, so they are definitely important. Yeah, in the war of attrition, low cost, high-volume options are clearly very important.
  - dgroshev 7mo ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
> propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. The further down the list you go, the more optional the requirements get in a sufficiently dire scenario. Shelf life doesn't matter if you are firing them as quickly as you can make them, especially if you actually can make them as quickly as you need them because they're so simple. QA and traceability may matter less if you just accept that you'll occasionally lose a launcher, and even occasionally have a stray missile land in someone's living room because that's better than having a non-stray Shahed in said living room. In terms of safety, I bet it'll still beat "cutting open existing munitions and literally duct taping random other fuzes to them", which seems to be the bar for "good enough".
- dgroshev 7mo ago
  I don't understand your point. Sure, Ukraine can cut a few corners that western militaries are unwilling to cut. They still can't produce a domestic ballistic missile at scale, because it's genuinely hard, and simple terror weapons like Qassams are useless for militaries. "100 rockets for $10k" is off by orders of magnitude.
  - edmundsauto 7mo ago
    I think the point is to look at the US requirements compared to the cost and explore ways that a country could gain strategic advantages by building objectively worse products. (But cheaper/faster, gaining an asymmetric advantage in the offense/defense scaling) I used to think the US dollars were well spent, because we felt it was morally important to deliver precision strikes which had higher cost requirements. Recent evidence demonstrates that is insufficient when the wetware making the targeting decisions is faulty.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    100 harmful rockets for $10k is off by orders of magnitude, but that was entirely not the point. The point is that if you're in a asymmetric position where you can't do much damage directly, then whatever you can do to make the other side waste expensive resources while putting them on constant alert is a win. You don't need a warhead, or a viable rocket, to do that. You need something that looks enough like a viable rocket to force a response, because the other side knows that x% are real. If that thing is cheap enough for you to fire large numbers of them, you multiply the problem for your opponent. Cheap enough, and you have the potential to overwhelm the capacity of their countermeasures entirely, at which point you increase the chance that some of their real rockets will make it through.
anigbrowl 7mo ago
Commercially, you are completely correct. Operationally, insurgencies can access supply chains and technology and are already making use of them for materiél, eg in Myanmar.
cucumber3732842 7mo ago
>safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. The guy you're trying to kill doesn't care about that. The missile he's firing was made last week and on a more than 5min timeline firing it is less dangerous than letting you continue uncontested.

vidarh 7mo ago

TFA is literally about a $96 rocket. > propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. You're entirely missing the point. These do not need to be reliable for the scenario I hinted at. They also do not need to be armed. They need to be large enough that if one of them is a higher quality rocket (not part of the $10k) that contains actual explosives, you have serious destruction on your hand. Maybe something that looks large enough for that will drive the cost up and we're talking $20k or even $100k instead of $10k. The precise cost is largely irrelevant, as long as the total cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of a missile interception. The point is you'd be multiplying the cost assymmetry by forcing a massively outsized response. Because if you don't try to intercept them, every future barrage will include a real rocket. If you do try to intercept them all, you'll be burning through massively expensive interceptors to take out a bunch of cheap toys. If I was ever considering an insurgency, or a war, I'd be stocking up on vast quantities of toys, with the intent of making every radar constantly lit up by a number of possible threats.

dgroshev 7mo ago
> TFA is literally about a $96 rocket It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably. To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. Maybe your solid rocket motor would be a touch smaller because you're not delivering hundreds of kilograms of explosives, but it still has to be large because of the rocket equation. With a large motor you're looking at a lot of damage if it explodes at the launch point, so you need quality casting. You can't really save much money on the motor. Then, you need a TEL. Because the motor is large, the launcher has to be comparable to the real thing. You probably don't want to have two different vehicles, so you keep the same vehicle; it needs to be armed, driven around, and set for launch. Not that different from the real thing. So you've done all of that, and then you realise that your empty warheads are too light and the missiles (or warheads, if you split) don't interact with the atmosphere in the same way as non-decoy missiles do. What's worse, modern radars are perfectly capable of noticing that and discriminating the decoys. All of that effort, and you didn't win anything. Might as well add the payload. The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. In the end, relying on decoys doesn't really work, they are too expensive. Fancier CPUs change very little of this calculation, because compute is a very little part of the cost to begin with.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- mosura 7mo ago
  > The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. OTOH if you built a successful decoy system that is exactly what you would want people to believe.
- vidarh 7mo ago
  > It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably. Doesn't matter at that cost. > To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. That is relevant in a conflict like Iran at the moment, where the distance that needs to be covered is large. It's not relevant in e.g. an insurgency or the moment you put boots on the ground, where it only needs to look like something potentially explosive coming towards your truck or your helicopter or your people and you have 20 seconds to decide whether to waste munitions on it or not.

pjc50 7mo ago

> price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. I wonder how much of that Ukraine is bothering with. Or Iran. Certainly Hezbollah are building down to a budget.

hermitcrab 7mo ago
I wonder how many Hezbollah rocket operators get blown up by their own rockets? A not insignificant number, I suspect.
- coredog64 7mo ago
  And then as a follow-up question, how many civilians next door to a Hezbollah launch site get blown up by poorly manufactured rockets?
  - WaxProlix 7mo ago
    Probably some fraction of the civilians blown up by Israeli terrorist phone strikes and bombing raids; there's a reason Hezbollah maintains some level of support in the region.
- halflife 7mo ago
  Last week they launched 200 rockets in the span of one day, about 40 of those fell inside Lebanon border, that’s not counting the number of rockets that did not fire at all.
dgroshev 7mo ago
Ukraine does bother with all of that when they can afford it. I'd even say that FPV drones are the main exception, and only because Ukraine was so pressed for immediate results and had stockpiles to repurpose. There are only so many old RPG warheads you can reuse with a detonator made of live wires, and maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day under artillery fire gets old fast. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, they don't need their contraptions to work reliably. GMLRS serves an entirely different purpose to rockets made of repurposed telephone poles, and is much more useful for a military force. Also, don't forget the distances. Ukraine is fighting a war in their own country, with direct ground lines of communication to the frontline. On the other hand, you can fit three Ukraines just between Guam and Taiwan.

regularfry 7mo ago

Without necessarily disagreeing with your point, the driving consideration for Raytheon's production line is arguably not reliability. It's being able to charge the customer for perceived reliability. It's very hard to know from the outside how much of it is theatre, even if earnestly arrived at. There are incentives for these things to be expensive.

esseph 7mo ago
The US military is not "new" at this. There are whole career professions in the military around just this topic.

kdheiwns 7mo ago

If you think shelf life, QA, safety, blah blah blah matters when a rocket is 100 bucks, I have just three words: you will lose. The Ukraine war is being fought with a bunch of cheap toy style drones dropping grenades everywhere. The US got their bases blown to pieces across the Middle East by cheap drones that gently float through the air like a paper airplane in comparison to absolutely any missile. And let's not forget. The US had napalm, helicopters, bombers, incredible logistics, cutting edge equipment of all sorts. Vietnam had a bunch of sticks in a hole covered in poop. Those sticks sent Americans crying home and we still get movies and games with them crying about how bad it was. In war between great powers, yeah, high tech works because it's scary and civilians don't want to have that kind of stuff coming home. In a war where civilians are being targeted by great powers who terrorize them by blowing up schools and hospitals, a lot of people are thinking about how many weapons they can make to defend their home and for cheap. If America thinks an invasion is a good idea, they're going to be bringing their 50 million dollar tanks face to face with a few $100 toy rockets. And those toy rockets will be picking off tanks like fish in a barrel while a drone streams it in 4K live to the internet. I really do not think American who support current happenings are ready for the absolute mental torment they're going to endure if this continues.

computerdork 7mo ago
You have a point - cheap drones have changed warfare - but you might be simplifying the issue. As some warfare experts online have discussed, it isn't that cheap drones are the only weapon that is used in Ukraine (or warfare in general), it is one option in vast array of options based on the situation (although, agreed, it is taking on a much bigger significance). Look at the war in Iran. They did a pretty standard playbook and use stealth jets and cruise missiles to surgically take out air defenses in order to gain air dominance. This would be very difficult with just cheap drones. ... but, do agree that cheap weapons are still becoming extremely important. Iran is terrorizing the middle east and strait of hormuz with cheap drones, so they are definitely important. Yeah, in the war of attrition, low cost, high-volume options are clearly very important.
- dgroshev 7mo ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago

> propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. The further down the list you go, the more optional the requirements get in a sufficiently dire scenario. Shelf life doesn't matter if you are firing them as quickly as you can make them, especially if you actually can make them as quickly as you need them because they're so simple. QA and traceability may matter less if you just accept that you'll occasionally lose a launcher, and even occasionally have a stray missile land in someone's living room because that's better than having a non-stray Shahed in said living room. In terms of safety, I bet it'll still beat "cutting open existing munitions and literally duct taping random other fuzes to them", which seems to be the bar for "good enough".

dgroshev 7mo ago
I don't understand your point. Sure, Ukraine can cut a few corners that western militaries are unwilling to cut. They still can't produce a domestic ballistic missile at scale, because it's genuinely hard, and simple terror weapons like Qassams are useless for militaries. "100 rockets for $10k" is off by orders of magnitude.
- edmundsauto 7mo ago
  I think the point is to look at the US requirements compared to the cost and explore ways that a country could gain strategic advantages by building objectively worse products. (But cheaper/faster, gaining an asymmetric advantage in the offense/defense scaling) I used to think the US dollars were well spent, because we felt it was morally important to deliver precision strikes which had higher cost requirements. Recent evidence demonstrates that is insufficient when the wetware making the targeting decisions is faulty.
- vidarh 7mo ago
  100 harmful rockets for $10k is off by orders of magnitude, but that was entirely not the point. The point is that if you're in a asymmetric position where you can't do much damage directly, then whatever you can do to make the other side waste expensive resources while putting them on constant alert is a win. You don't need a warhead, or a viable rocket, to do that. You need something that looks enough like a viable rocket to force a response, because the other side knows that x% are real. If that thing is cheap enough for you to fire large numbers of them, you multiply the problem for your opponent. Cheap enough, and you have the potential to overwhelm the capacity of their countermeasures entirely, at which point you increase the chance that some of their real rockets will make it through.

anigbrowl 7mo ago

Commercially, you are completely correct. Operationally, insurgencies can access supply chains and technology and are already making use of them for materiél, eg in Myanmar.

cucumber3732842 7mo ago

>safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. The guy you're trying to kill doesn't care about that. The missile he's firing was made last week and on a more than 5min timeline firing it is less dangerous than letting you continue uncontested.