The Iranians just hit an F35 with a proverbial box of scraps they put together in a cave. The Chinese military must have experienced collective euphoria when they saw that.
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/23/b-52s-launching-from-r...
How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million?
If Iran launched 10000 Shaheds towards Isreal, you can be sure quite a few would get by.
Maybe Ukrainian drone interceptors can be made cheap enough to be good enough against massed Shaheds.
We are still early in the new paradigm, there will be significant developments.
The intercept cost is now not only the cost of the interceptor, but also the cost of the flying hours of the launching platform, and the risk of losing the launching platform.
If you equip even some of your Shaheds with AA missiles (cheap manpads with autonomous IR target acquisition and guidance), like is already happening in Ukraine, the feasibility of APKWS becomes problematic. The technology is developing fast these days.
But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.
The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.
Second, it is rather short range, and that range is helped significantly by the speed and altitude of the launching platform. Launching from the ground upwards would significantly reduce its range, which is anyway just a few km.
Due to the short range, you will need a densely distributed significant numbers of them, and still be in danger of saturation attack (the attacker can saturate one route, you have to be ready for all possible routes). Having a carrier platform allows the missiles to be quickly brought where they are needed, so overall you need much less of them (still too much, as having enough carriers in air imposes limits as well).
You can have longer-range ground missiles, but then the costs rise. Also, I am not sure how feasible/robust is to laser designate air targets from the ground. I suspect it does not work over longer distances, i.e. you need a more sophisticated and costly guidance system/sensor suite on the missile.
The beauty of an anti-drone drone is that you have a much more robust human-assisted guidance, for cheap (camera and communication link). With advances to AI, even that human and communication link are becoming obsolete...
With rocket propelled missile you have much faster closing speed, and quite limited energy budget - essentially you have to make a correct decision fast and precisely, otherwise the missile is wasted. With a drone, everything is slower and easier to correct.
On the other hand the latest development with drone interceptors is rocket booster to quickly bring in within Shahed. So I guess there would be a convergence between APKWS and interceptor drones.
IR guided fire and forget is fine, but undoubtedly quite a bit costlier than the basic laser-guided one. If you want to use it against jet engined Shaheds while launching from the ground, you definitely need larger rocket motor, i.e. costlier interceptors. But that might be fine, the jet engined Shaheds are not as cheap as the basic ones anyway.
Actually, I am surprised they still use the Shahed platform for the jet engined drones. A Reaper-like platform with high aspect ratio wings would be much more aerodynamically efficient, allowing longer range/loiter time/larger payload. It is definitely more expensive airframe, but that jet engine might be the main cost factor anyway.
Re: IR seeker against plain Shaheds: does the basic weedwhacker Shahed have enough IR signature? (More precisely: does it have it if you did some basic precautions - cover the engine, some mixing of the ambient air with the exhaust.) The power level of that engine (= the whole source of IR energy) is quite low...
Shahed has sufficiently bright IR that even a basic seeker works. To keep the cost low no efforts were applied to minimize the signature.
It is fascinating how well designed Shahed was for its intended purpose of being the cheapest mass-produced platform that would saturate any advanced air defenses while hard to track launch site. However, with appearance of cheap mass-produced counter-measures it may no longer be optimal.
Why would the opening salvo be ICBMs?
Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict.
China also is not stupid, and no matter how much they posture, they won't invade Taiwan.
No one is invading China. Coupled or de-coupled is a completely irrelevant consideration. People think MAGA are crazy, but no one is suicidal. A war with China would be over in a matter of hours. And anyone who did not manage to get to Africa or extreme South America before the outbreak of hostilities would have a great chance of dying. The only question is will death be quick in a blast, or slow as you try to walk out of the US.
IADs not integrated by marginal operators =/= stealth radar didn't work aka, physics of stealth detection is basic, and parsimonious likelihood is US gave up strategic intangibles for VZ and IR side shows. Even if IADs wasn't integrated it would still be worthwhile for PRC to send out stealth radars knowing they'd get glassed because it's rounding error investment to get near F35s without luneburg. At the end of the day, these radars are networked/uplink to beidou3 for a reason, their primary function for PRC is to serve as cheap telemetry gathering nodes that gather strategic US ephemera like stealth profiles, ew, order of battle and beamed it back to CETC.