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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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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.

Right. High-volume users can skip the thermal batteries with decades-long shelf life, and just spot-weld a few AAA batteries inside the weapon. Just stencil the thing "Best if used by DATE". Good for a year or two at least. Skip the anti-corrosion stuff and ship it in consumer-grade shrink wrap. Ukraine ships drones to the field in lightweight cardboard boxes, not rugged weapons containers.

Many US weapons are really old designs. The Patriot went into production in 1980. The Stinger went into service in 1981. There's been progress since then. Consumer-grade parts can do most of what's needed.

AAA batteries don't have the current. Li-Ion is too fussy and has a pretty high self-discharge.

Ukraine can afford the cardboard boxes because they are fighting in their own country. The US has an ocean to cross.

Ukraine can get away with short shelf life because they are at war right now. The US has to stockpile because the supply chain has to run at some capacity in peace time to be able to ramp up quickly when needed, and discarding the produced ammunition after a year would be incredibly wasteful.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia can defeat each others' air defence networks. The US has a lot of experience doing just that, while successfully defending against ballistic missiles. High tier capabilities matter.

The Patriot in 1980 is a very different system from the Patriot that is fielded today. Between PAC-2 and PAC-3, AN/MPQ-65A and LTAMDS it's a cutting edge air defence system. The progress is constantly incorporated.

The Stinger is a bit old, but mostly because the US doctrine has few uses for it. Regardless, NGSRI is coming.

> AAA batteries don't have the current.

Triple As might not, but back in the day plenty of rc planes flew just fine for an hour or three using 4 AA batteries to run the receiver and servos..

> The US has an ocean to cross.

But this is exactly the point: This approach allows for insurgents or parties subject to overwhelming but expensive force to strain the logistics and budgets of their opponent. This is something that would be far more costly for the US to counter.

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.

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.

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.

To "look enough" like a missile that can hit something a hundred kilometres away with enough precision to not be ignored you need a missile that can fly a hundred kilometres. This is not cheap.

Instead of repeating myself, I'll just link a reply, if you don't mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389309

> a missile that can hit something a hundred kilometres away

At no point did I mention "a hundred kilometres away"

> They still can't produce a domestic ballistic missile at scale, because it's genuinely hard

Also, because it costs a lot and there are only two benefits of ballistic over cruise (if you exclude delivering nuclear payloads, which Ukraine doesn't have): it's very fast and hard to intercept. Both are needed sometimes, but often not a requirement.

Ukraine is comparatively small, so air defenses can be packed close, Russia is big and harder to cover with air defense systems, so drones and cruise missiles are a better investment for Ukraine, since they can overpower the AD locally and are much-much easier and cheaper to produce, meanwhile ballistic is a better investment for Russia, since anti-ballistic systems are even harder to build and cost a lot.

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