3 ms·

> 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,

by pjc50 8mo 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 8mo ago
I wonder how many Hezbollah rocket operators get blown up by their own rockets? A not insignificant number, I suspect.
- coredog64 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
- cuu508 8mo ago
  > maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day I was thinking about that. Wouldn't you be able to make it so the detonator gets armed by the operator remotely only once in the air and away?
  - dgroshev 8mo ago
    That's entirely possible, but doing so reliably and safely is difficult and expensive enough that for a very long time Ukrainians were accepting the risk instead. The risk appetite countries in existential conflicts have is quite different from what we're used to. For example, there are plenty of videos of Ukrainian soldiers angle grinding cluster munitions open to extract submunitions to put on drones, but that's not a strategy that western armies can rely on.
- Mars008 8mo ago
  > Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation That depends from which side you are looking. From the other side they are patriots and defending their people and land, sacrificing their lives. Looks like in NATO you haven't seen that. The same in Vietnam, Iraq,.. there is a long list of 'terrorists' of this sort. Almost like 'suffering minorities'.
  - dgroshev 8mo ago
    It's an objective statement of their tactics, not something relative. Modern precision guided weaponry is meant to selectively destroy military targets. WW2 style strategic bombing was targeting civilian populations mostly trying to disrupt industrial production in support of military action. Randomly firing a few unguided rockets into civilian population centres can't possibly achieve either. The only goal is to provoke terror in the civilian population, therefore it's a terrorist organisation. You can see similar tactics in the "human safari" the Russians are running in several Ukrainian population centres.

by pjc50 8mo ago

hermitcrab 8mo ago

I wonder how many Hezbollah rocket operators get blown up by their own rockets? A not insignificant number, I suspect.

coredog64 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.

cuu508 8mo ago
> maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day I was thinking about that. Wouldn't you be able to make it so the detonator gets armed by the operator remotely only once in the air and away?
- dgroshev 8mo ago
  That's entirely possible, but doing so reliably and safely is difficult and expensive enough that for a very long time Ukrainians were accepting the risk instead. The risk appetite countries in existential conflicts have is quite different from what we're used to. For example, there are plenty of videos of Ukrainian soldiers angle grinding cluster munitions open to extract submunitions to put on drones, but that's not a strategy that western armies can rely on.
Mars008 8mo ago
> Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation That depends from which side you are looking. From the other side they are patriots and defending their people and land, sacrificing their lives. Looks like in NATO you haven't seen that. The same in Vietnam, Iraq,.. there is a long list of 'terrorists' of this sort. Almost like 'suffering minorities'.
- dgroshev 8mo ago
  It's an objective statement of their tactics, not something relative. Modern precision guided weaponry is meant to selectively destroy military targets. WW2 style strategic bombing was targeting civilian populations mostly trying to disrupt industrial production in support of military action. Randomly firing a few unguided rockets into civilian population centres can't possibly achieve either. The only goal is to provoke terror in the civilian population, therefore it's a terrorist organisation. You can see similar tactics in the "human safari" the Russians are running in several Ukrainian population centres.