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Comment by alecnotthompson | Hacker News Reader

This is disgusting.

> we can make sure the United States is prepared to stop a conflict and save countless lives

> building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics

Someone has never used their critical thinking skills. MLK Jr said the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.

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> These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.

They’re antiship missiles. Are there innocent children on missile cruisers somewhere I am unaware of?

Cruisers? These are meant for stuff like destroyers. Wimpy stuff that can't put up the defense a cruiser could.

I do agree, however, that anti-ship missiles will always be aimed at military targets. You use missiles to penetrate hostile airspace. If you don't need standoff capability you can put more boom on target cheaper with a laser guided bomb.

There are only a few places you could live and not live under the umbrella of safety that the United States Military offers.

If you don’t and are safe, you live under one of a very few other umbrellas.

It’s easy to be stridently principled under the protection of the people you’re criticizing.

This is conflating different things. Most people want the US to be able to defend itself and potentially others. But almost all of the military conflicts the US has been involved in lately have had dubious value to that end.

Once you build a better weapon, you can’t control how it will be used anymore.

If you have an issue with which wars get fought and why, that’s an issue for the voting box.

If you oppose a potent military you’re either an irrelevant minority or soon to be a victim of those who endorse one.

Yeah, that's what the mafia guys will tell you when they come round to collect their protection money. "We keep you safe". What they don't say: "... from people like us".

I agree that the cheer leading for military products strikes me as disconcerting.

But let's keep this in perspective. A cheap anti-ship missile available in large quantities has a very focused purpose in the near term: to deter China from an invasion of Taiwan. Such a prospect would be tremendously bad for the entire world, and turning Taiwan into a missile toting equivalent of a porcupine might be worth it if it prevents such a disastrous invasion.

The deaths you describe won’t be changed by these type of products.

These types of weapons are critical in actual, legitimate wars where enemies have air defense systems, large front lines, and thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops. Particularly, if air defenses are present, you have to evade them or overwhelm them. The Russia-Ukraine war has largely demonstrated the later wins out.

The American airstrikes on defenseless “assets” in foreign nations will continue to use high value, precision weapons. The strikes are generally limited in nature and unlikely to be intercepted by air defense systems.

It’s an anti-ship missile. Firing at a warship has the least chance of collateral damage of any target I can think of.

What's to stop our allies who buy them from repurposing them for striking apartment buildings?

Potentially nothing, but apartment buildings don't move, so an artillery shell at one-hundredth the cost would probably be the preferred option anyway for nations motivated toward such things.

Well, I've seen our allies use a $249,000-a-pop FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile against a solitary soldier where a $0.49 rifle shell would do [1], so I don't price matters. Especially when we're giving the stuff away.

[1] /r/CombatFootage

Nothing, but they can do that already. Since residential apartments don’t often come with anti-air defenses, they’ll be guaranteed a hit with a high quality, precision missile.

These missile are about overwhelming quantities in a hostile environment. We’re basically seeing this in the Russia-Ukraine war, in two different ways:

* some missiles attacks will be a mix of high precision weapons and loads of low precision weapons. The low precision weapons eat up air defenses allowing the high precision weapons to hit their intended target.

* “cheap” drones are sent in large quantities. Many will be shot down, but enough will make it through to targets to be effective.

As anti-ship missiles, you can imagine how huge quantities could overwhelm relatively limited number of available defense assets.

You'll have to rip out the whole seeker to do that.

And even Russia isn't shooting missiles at apartments. Rather, they are shooting missiles at things they consider a military advantage to destroy (although Geneva would disagree with some of it--things like taking down the power so the people are cold isn't acceptable even if you gain advantage from it) and their guidance systems are junk.

And a lot of what Russia does looks very much like the result of a boss making impossible requests and not listening to reason. The underlings do whatever they think is as close to the request as possible, even when it's just flailing.

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