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Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actu

Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago
[flagged]
- throwaw12 7mo ago
  > kill 30 000+ of their own Hasbara or do you have credible facts?
- sephamorr 7mo ago
  Well, the IRGC folks actually fighting probably don't have a luxurious future in a reformed Iran, so they might not be far off fighting for their lives.
- exabrial 7mo ago
  I think you're misreading my comment and attacking a scarecrow. I've never defended Iran in any way nor did I say anything about Iran in my original comment. I'm purely referring to that fact that the future of warfare is becoming asymmetric again because the US Military Industrial complex can only deliver extremely expensive weapons, which can easily be wrecked by stone age ones. That is it.
  - gpderetta 7mo ago
    Even in 2026, wars are won by the side that can shoots more bullets (or artillery rounds, or rockets, or missiles, or drones). They better be cheap.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  Take a few days away from the internet man. I mean it with all sincerity.
jollyllama 7mo ago
So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.
- epistasis 7mo ago
  I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
  - jollyllama 7mo ago
    Hypersonics would not appear to be definitively offensive or defensive.
  - nozzlegear 7mo ago
    I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating. (Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
    - epistasis 7mo ago
      well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
wahern 7mo ago
Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt-putting-affordable-mass-on-target.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit. I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?
- XorNot 7mo ago
  The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets. The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.
  - tharkun__ 7mo ago
    namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets. That makes no sense to me. Why would I spend millions times, dunno how many do you need for a guaranteed kill for an S-400, if you could spend hundreds of thousands on cheaper ways to kill the same S-400, while the S-400 still defends itself with millions worth of its own missiles? That's precisely what Ukraine was/is doing and has developed. The West provided lots of military support, including the US of course, but way not enough as we can see now play out in even the US itself vs. Iran. They developed cheap drones that can shoot down cheaper Shaheds. Shaheds that are way too cheap to use regular interceptors for. But even cheaper drones tip the scales back. Why would I want to waste Tomahawks 1:1 vs. S-400 interceptors, if I can kill it with a much cheaper drone swarm? Not saying those precise conditions/weapons exist today. I have no idea. But if they did, why would I still waste my high cost weapons.
epistasis 7mo ago
> wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot. I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia. The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones. The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.
- bigiain 7mo ago
  > I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.
  - epistasis 7mo ago
    Ah, I hadn't thought of that sort of slingshot! I was thinking more "primitive rock throwing."
    - zer00eyz 7mo ago
      There is also a cost aspect of it as well. The long range drones that are being shot down are the "expensive products" of a military industrial complex. The US solution to this problem is even more expensive. For the cost the Ukraine's solution might as well be a rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone)
torginus 7mo ago
Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.
- throwaway85825 7mo ago
  A turbo fan may be simpler but the tolerances are much tighter.
_2d30 7mo ago
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them? If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities. Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.
- timcobb 7mo ago
  > ... isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots ... Yeah they want Patriots but they want them for taking out relatively expensive Russian ballistic missiles. If those ballistics/hypersonics start costing $100k, Patriots will not be a viable defense against this.
throwaway85825 7mo ago
People are taking the absolute wrong lesson from Ukraine. The cheap drone munition isn't the innovation, it's the supply chain that can rapidly iterate.
- morkalork 7mo ago
  I'd argue WW2 was when that innovation happened. The spitfire plane had something like 20+ design iterations over the course of the war.
stinkbeetle 7mo ago
Actually fighting for your life doesn't bestow any superhuman powers. Russians there are fighting for their lives too. There's enough videos of people in Ukraine being killed by $1000 drones, $100 landmines, and 50 cent bullets. It's just the way war has always turned. Battleships were obsoleted by airplanes 1/1000th their cost. Machineguns and trenches ended cavalry. Arms companies still profit in war and people still die in them, doesn't matter what an individual gun or missile costs.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

[flagged]

throwaw12 7mo ago
> kill 30 000+ of their own Hasbara or do you have credible facts?
sephamorr 7mo ago
Well, the IRGC folks actually fighting probably don't have a luxurious future in a reformed Iran, so they might not be far off fighting for their lives.
exabrial 7mo ago
I think you're misreading my comment and attacking a scarecrow. I've never defended Iran in any way nor did I say anything about Iran in my original comment. I'm purely referring to that fact that the future of warfare is becoming asymmetric again because the US Military Industrial complex can only deliver extremely expensive weapons, which can easily be wrecked by stone age ones. That is it.
- gpderetta 7mo ago
  Even in 2026, wars are won by the side that can shoots more bullets (or artillery rounds, or rockets, or missiles, or drones). They better be cheap.
Forgeties79 7mo ago
Take a few days away from the internet man. I mean it with all sincerity.

jollyllama 7mo ago

So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.

epistasis 7mo ago
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
- jollyllama 7mo ago
  Hypersonics would not appear to be definitively offensive or defensive.
- nozzlegear 7mo ago
  I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating. (Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
  - epistasis 7mo ago
    well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.

wahern 7mo ago

Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt-putting-affordable-mass-on-target.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit. I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?

XorNot 7mo ago
The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets. The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.
- tharkun__ 7mo ago
  namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets. That makes no sense to me. Why would I spend millions times, dunno how many do you need for a guaranteed kill for an S-400, if you could spend hundreds of thousands on cheaper ways to kill the same S-400, while the S-400 still defends itself with millions worth of its own missiles? That's precisely what Ukraine was/is doing and has developed. The West provided lots of military support, including the US of course, but way not enough as we can see now play out in even the US itself vs. Iran. They developed cheap drones that can shoot down cheaper Shaheds. Shaheds that are way too cheap to use regular interceptors for. But even cheaper drones tip the scales back. Why would I want to waste Tomahawks 1:1 vs. S-400 interceptors, if I can kill it with a much cheaper drone swarm? Not saying those precise conditions/weapons exist today. I have no idea. But if they did, why would I still waste my high cost weapons.

epistasis 7mo ago

> wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot. I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia. The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones. The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.

bigiain 7mo ago
> I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.
- epistasis 7mo ago
  Ah, I hadn't thought of that sort of slingshot! I was thinking more "primitive rock throwing."
  - zer00eyz 7mo ago
    There is also a cost aspect of it as well. The long range drones that are being shot down are the "expensive products" of a military industrial complex. The US solution to this problem is even more expensive. For the cost the Ukraine's solution might as well be a rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone)

torginus 7mo ago

Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.

throwaway85825 7mo ago
A turbo fan may be simpler but the tolerances are much tighter.

_2d30 7mo ago

Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them? If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities. Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.

timcobb 7mo ago
> ... isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots ... Yeah they want Patriots but they want them for taking out relatively expensive Russian ballistic missiles. If those ballistics/hypersonics start costing $100k, Patriots will not be a viable defense against this.

throwaway85825 7mo ago

People are taking the absolute wrong lesson from Ukraine. The cheap drone munition isn't the innovation, it's the supply chain that can rapidly iterate.

morkalork 7mo ago
I'd argue WW2 was when that innovation happened. The spitfire plane had something like 20+ design iterations over the course of the war.

stinkbeetle 7mo ago

Actually fighting for your life doesn't bestow any superhuman powers. Russians there are fighting for their lives too. There's enough videos of people in Ukraine being killed by $1000 drones, $100 landmines, and 50 cent bullets. It's just the way war has always turned. Battleships were obsoleted by airplanes 1/1000th their cost. Machineguns and trenches ended cavalry. Arms companies still profit in war and people still die in them, doesn't matter what an individual gun or missile costs.