[1] https://xcancel.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1993158707056984359
All three countries have denied providing nuclear weapons tech to Pakistan - there is credible history to account for both Pakistan and India to have independantly developed enrichment programs and weapons on their own*.
All things are possible, a plausible explanation for the flurry of accusations against China from 2000 onwards from both the US State Dept. and India was the bald fact that the US, the premier global atomic watchdog, was caught absolutely pants down and blindsided by the events of 1998** ... India detonated a series of nuclear weapons tests and Pakistan responded within 30 days with a slightly longer series ( 5 blasts Vs six in response .. IIRC )
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagai-I
U.S. Intelligence and India’s Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned - https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.Also, as the Iranians have recently demonstrated, the way to get get past someone's defences is to deploy multiple warheads (and a pile of random debris) from a cheap missile, not to bet on exotic hypersonic weapons.
Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., 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?
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.
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'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.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
The enemy gets a say in your plans, and is much more likely to have low cost weapons available then high cost ones.
The interceptor for a SHAHED is a quadcopter which doesn't need to fly as far or carry as much payload. Anyone can build this.
The interceptor for an Iskander ballistic missile is a Patriot interceptor: literally nothing else can successfully stop it reliably. Only the US can build this.
If your attacking systems are cheap, then the enemy can field just as many: Russia has a lot of drones in Ukraine now too, they were just playing catch up.
"The next war" won't have surprise drones as a problem, it'll have highly developed and optimized drone and counter drone systems.
If you want to turn it around, sure. Let's see how you'd want to take out a Patriot: high cost weapons, like an Iskander might try it? Costs about as much as a Tomahawk? Would need multiple ones, because the Patriot would defend itself against even multiple ones? But the Patriots cost as much and you want multiple interceptors for each Iskander sent its way?
What if I could send, for less money/resources, a drone swarm that also takes out the Patriot or at least expends more money/resources in interceptors shot from it, than I had to spend on the drone swarm?
I totally agree, it's "just a race". If I build an offensive drone swarm for $x, which is less than your high cost interceptors, you better build an "anti drone whatever thingie" (which might be anti-drone drone swarms) that's even cheaper.
But, thanks, essentially you're agreeing with me: Don't use your high cost stuff to take out SAMs and then use cheap drones. Instead, use cheaper stuff to swarm it out of existence. Just gotta be faster at being cheaper. Doesn't matter if you're the attacker or defender.
Zerg vs. Protoss.
In reality: Ukraine reliably downs Shaheds using a mix of low cost technologies.
They mostly can't defend against ballistic missiles without high cost interceptors.
The Shaheds could do a lot of damage to the Patriot site if they could hit it...but they never get anywhere near it. That's the point: your low cost system does not have the capability to threaten the high cost one.
And in all this you've forgotten that attacking the SAM site is only being done to enable other operational objectives. The Patriot battery is defending targets many times it's value, including the logistics and launch sites of all those low cost defensive systems - or the logistics and launch sites of your own low cost offensive systems.
To the article: the Tomahawk missile costs about $2 million per shot. Assuming this article is true, the missile in question gives you maybe a 20:1 cost advantage...but can it do the same mission? Does it have the same range, or targeting, or precision? If you cannot fire these from the same range as a tomahawk, or they don't realiably hit targets, then they can be substantially worse for a much higher logistics cost to deploy (perhaps total: the truck blowing up because you had to drive it to the front line is rather a problem).
This is a classic "you show up prepared for the last war"
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.
I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
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)
I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?
Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!
Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.
Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.
But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.
They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.
Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.
Ukrainian society is also very bottom up, and individual units are empowered to procure what they want, based on price or quality, from online systems that operate like Amazon. No general issue, just customization all the way to soldiers getting to choose from a wide variety of drone models from many manufacturers, and the manufacturers are competing to supply to the needs of individual units:
US military leadership is all about empowering units to solve problems on their own, at least whenever I read their books that's the message I get. Ukraine seems to have taken it even further.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) that doesn’t mean you can drive 10x as fast and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Backgr...
While the SR71 was more capable than the MIG, if the Air Force would've wanted to build a thousand of those in 5 years, it would've been impossible, not to mention the maintenance burden.
So while the planes you mentioned might've been more capable, in a real conflict they wouldn't have mattered much, as they could not have sustained a volume of strikes to be relevant.
Interesting how quality and quantity have changed over the years: in WW2, giant factories pumped out airplanes on endless production lines by the tens of thousands, yet those planes couldn't drop bombs accurately.
In contrast, 4th gen fighters were made in still significant volumes, and their smart bombs could hit a target accurately enough so that a hundred pound bomb can do the job you would need a WW2 B-29 to drop its entire payload for.
I think that was a peak in quality X quantity in aviation.
Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
> So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
Not sure why you think this.
The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
The 4th F-16 (also a great plane!) had 4600 built since 1976.
[1] Yes, despite all the negative press and the amount of time it took to get right, it's a great plane. See eg https://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned... where the editorializing is anti-F35 but the pilot who flew it only has positive things to say.
How many MIG-25s flew over the borders of the United States mainland during the cold war?
Yes the MIG-25 was a cheaper and more practical plane, but that wasn't the MO of the sr71.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
(And the MIG-25 was a maintenance nightmare.)
The star fighter, or f15 or f22 would be more apt.
TLDR special purpose tool vs general fighter cannot be compared
Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.
Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.
It's like removing test code when you ship a binary.
Getting the design right the first time requires vision, foresight as well as a deep understanding of all relevant parts and priorities. Very few people can do it without hindsight.
I'm an experienced software engineer and team lead who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was that they were often way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.
Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors, monitoring and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed and needs runtime monitoring and fallbacks, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.
The safety mechanisms only end up making themselves useful by increasingly the likelihood of failure to begin with.
My view on fallback mechanisms is that, in the event of failure of the main system, they shouldn't be so complex as to try to keep the system running as if nothing had happened; they should just provide graceful failure and sometimes they aren't needed at all. Just an error log is enough.
Russian doctrine has been based around big, fast things going high. NATO doctrine has been about smaller, slower things going very low. Going low leaves you very vulnerable if you get too close to a defender, but there's no way there are defenders everywhere.
An extreme example of the problem was the Moskova--big, fast missiles that couldn't see something coming in just above wavetop height. There were only two launchers that had any possibility of engaging and only time for one launch cycle--and that probably only if they already had a bird on the rails. (Exposed to the elements, rather than safe in the magazine.)
Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.
Two obvious and concerning corollaries are that state capabilities eventually become easy to obtain for non-state terrorist groups and, later on, unbalanced individuals. Consider what ISIS would have done with these, and then think about what the unabomber would have done.
I'd fully expect this particular company to face multiple hurdles in actually exporting any of these missiles. They might not be able to actually deliver at the quoted price-point. China might not permit it, due to the political blow-back. Israel and the U.S. obviously have an interest in making sure none of these missiles wind up in Iranian hands. The execs of this company are probably feeling a bit like a target has been painted on their heads right now.
However, controlling technology like this is ultimately a game of whack-a-mole. If this company fails, gets regulated, decapitated, sucked up by the Chinese military, etc., ten other companies will pop up all over the place that can produce the same thing or better, cheaper. There's also a supply chain of components behind this company that can now export critical parts to those building their own. We've simply reached (or are about to reach) the point where missiles of this sort can be made very cheaply.
Here's hoping missile defence gets better and cheaper fast.
In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
We've seen a shift towards cheap offensive capacity that gives middle powers or even smaller actors the capacity to hit hegemons where it hurts, very visible in Ukraine and the Middle East now. This leads to instability only temporarily until you end up in a new equilibrium where smaller players will have significantly more say and capacity to retaliate, effectively a MAD strategy on a budget for everyone.
Consider a future where individuals can relatively easily engineer a pathogen or manufacture a nuclear weapon. It's not hard to imagine how that would threaten global stability.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
It reminds me of a funny piece of news. A noodle manufacturer in China, for some reason—maybe to make more money—secretly produced quite a number of small aircraft and even managed to sell many of them.
Time for those laser-defenses to come up to speed.
And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.
Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.
You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser
Still being researched. And yes, was part Regan's "star wars" Strategic Defense Initiative.
Laser defense system is a very expensive paperweight in those conditions.
Actual lasers don’t do shit at those distances: it is used not to cut something in half but to blind, damage sensors, and what have you
So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.
in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.
It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .
Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..
I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.
Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.
Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues
The term "hypersonic" is incredibly overloaded.
The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.
It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.
As you mention they did not fare very well in the India-Pakistan conflict.
No idea why a story about a YC company was flagged.
Well they've perfected manufacturing at scale. I see no surprise here.
they use thousands of fishing boats to practice blockades
they are building massive oil reserves and getting most of population into electric vehicles
let's just hope they wait to next decade and not like 2028
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.
Also China is friendly with Russia they have land border so they can build pipelines.
Lmao, quantitatively and qualitatively China is more than an order of magnitude bigger
China's factories are in another world - Mar 23, 2025
Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025
Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026
Prediction: China will win the new race to the moon for this very reason.
'Hypersonic' missile makes it sound like it's alien technology, no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory with a computer from 1970.
The raw materials cost less than half of a standard car.
Since the original story here does not provide many details, we can't know which side of that fence this falls on (assuming it is real).
It's not a great idea in war to assume your enemy is incompetent (even when they are).
Hypersonics do not. They are extremely fast and extremely low flying.
It does not imply anything about speed, just automatic or controlled maneuvering later in the stage than normal missiles do.
sigh
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archive...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_weapon
Do you have something to add to this discussion?
We just redoing definitions, or what?
Out of these, Mach 5 and inside the atmosphere have been doable for several decades. Pretty much all countries that make missiles can make missiles with these two characteristics.
My point, which you seem to either misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent, is the other one - "maneuverability" - being the distinguishing factor for what we call hypersonic missiles. That makes these difficult to defend against.
Think of it like calling humans hyper-limbed animals, but limbs being not what really distinguishes humans from, say, chimpanzees.
Perhaps it'd be more difficult for him to broadcast if he had an anti-china perspective, but the content itself seems legitimate.
Does he? The only sources seem to be a CNSpaceflight tweet from last november of a promo animation from the missile company, and a South China Morning Post article that is just quoting commentators on Chinese state TV talking about the the possible capabilities of the missiles.
The other sources (someone else's substack that's sourced from a December article[1] from The Independent, and two articles on "interestingengineering") all just quote the same animation and commentators.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-hypersonic-...