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Reported as AAQC.
Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through. The Gulf states are said to have intercepted 521 ballistic missiles out of 538 with an accuracy rate of 97% in the first four days of war; the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate. That's 1042 interceptors burned through on the very generous low end, or 260.5 per day. The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can). In other words, in the first four days they've consumed a year and a half's worth of interceptor production, it's likely the Gulf's stockpiles are running down fast. During the previous 12-day war the US burned through a quarter of its THAAD supply, and that was a relatively short war; interceptors are an extremely scarce resource.
Then again, Iranian missile facilities are also being bombed which limits its ability to wage a war of attrition, so it's going to be interesting to see which side wins the numbers game in the end. You better cross your fingers and hope Iran runs out before you do.
My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets, but I don't know that success has trickled down to the Gulf, or if the target set is such that they feel able to do this.
News to me if so, perhaps true for certain types of targets but I'm not confident that extends to many of the ballistic missiles types being used at the moment (MRBM/IRBM).
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Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.
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Can anyone explain why we live in a world in which we can scale any electronics but the military ones? Seems like no one including Russia can build missiles at scale any more. I am not specialist, but there is nothing in a rocket - tube, sensors array, cpu, explosive and propellant. Nothing of which is that complicated or with right design should require special labor or equipment.
Because you're literally hitting a bullet with a bullet (PAC-3 and THAAD are both hit-to-kill) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase can move at speeds of Mach 8-16? The extraordinary precision required to achieve interception is a pretty big technical feat that requires a lot of cost and time and stress-testing, including some very powerful avionics and computers that need to be not only small but deal with the conditions of being in a missile flying at Mach 8 and still working.
It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.
I am not sure this will be the case over the medium term. Small laser-guided rockets have already bent the cost curve backwards in certain situations for certain target sets; I think very large lasers might become effective against ballistic missiles as a point-defense weapon over the next decade or so.
The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.
These are, at least in the medium term, mostly point-defense weapons, meaning that if they mature ballistic missiles will likely continue to be effective as terror weapons but their ability to hit specific targets may decrease tremendously if those targets are protected by counter-missile systems.
Now, there are counter-countermeasures - the Oreshnik is probably well-positioned to make it past point-defenses, but there's also certain downsides to using submunitions, and forcing the enemy to rely on missiles that are maneuvering, hardened, or using submunitions will tend to drive the cost per missile up and/or efficiency per missile down compared to a unitary warhead.
This would be significant if HVP was capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at any meaningful rate by itself. But according to your source it travels at Mach 3, limiting what it can be used for (IRBM terminal velocity can be somewhere in the range of Mach 16).
This study is attempting to assess the feasibility of using HVP as an augment to current ship loadouts instead of used on its own, the model in use here combines HVP as part of a larger defence system alongside "analogues for the SM-6, designated in the simulation as “Taller”, the SM-2/SM-2ER (“Lancer”), Enhanced Sea Sparrow (“Robin”), and the Phalanx Close-In-Weapons-System (CIWS) (“Pillbox”). The ships defend against anti-ship missiles consisting of analogues of four types of sub-sonic and super-sonic enemy weapons".
Note also that the other interceptors it's being paired with are not cheap and ship VLS units utilise many of these, with the Ticonderoga Class Cruiser boasting "12 Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), three Standard Missile-2 Extended Range (SM-2ER), 56 Standard Missile-2 Medium Range (SM-2MR), 12 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), 10 Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), 32 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), six Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Missile (VLA), and eight Harpoon missiles". HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.
In addition, they didn't know what the kill rate for HVP was due to the newness of the technology, so they just made assumptions about its probability of intercepting a target. "With the probability of hit and kill for the HVP unknown, simulation runs were created for an HVP probability of hit of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3." And even using these assumptions, using a three round burst the inclusion of HVP increases salvo destroyed by.... 7.8% (this only applies to salvos of 75 missiles and above; it has a negligible effect on salvos sized 50 and below), using a five round burst it has an effect of 12%.
And as for the savings of HVP? It varies depending on salvo size, size of round and assumed kill rate, but for the most part they're not large, featuring savings in expended munitions like a cost of $284.7m being reduced to $279.7m, and other cost reductions in that ballpark (it bears noting that use of HVP increases costs in some contexts, particularly the ones where they carry the highest benefits wrt salvo destruction). The savings aren't nothing, but I'm unconvinced that they meaningfully alter the defence-offence asymmetry, and I'm very unconvinced it does anything when it comes to ballistic missiles capable of achieving super- or hypersonic speeds.
I don't think this is true, certainly not as a general statement - for instance, the Oreshnik is known for a top speed "above Mach 10" and generally speaking the top speed is not in the terminal phase, but rather in the midcourse where the atmosphere is thinner. CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase. This source gives a terminal velocity under Mach 3 for ballistic missiles generally. These lower speeds are particularly likely if the missiles are maneuvering at all. If the missiles are not maneuvering, the higher speed is offset somewhat by the vulnerability to pretty much anything that can react fast enough and shoot at them.
Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.
That's because in the scenario, the HVP was being used as part of a layered defense against extremely large salvo sizes. Ballistic missiles are rarely if ever fired 25 at a time against single-point surface targets. This is much more relevant for ships, but if you are, say, Ukraine, your tactical question isn't to how to stop 25 ballistic missiles from striking an artillery battery, it's how to stop a single ballistic missile from striking it (or how to stop a salvo from hitting a number of different targets). If "guided flak guns" can do the trick, it makes ballistic missiles less cost effective.
And if you can put that on a mobile system, the effects can be pretty large. Supposing hypothetically that you're a country with partial satellite targeting data, looking to hit 100 semi-mobile targets before they move. Your enemy has four batteries (40x) interceptors. You need to fire 140 missiles to hit 100 target fairly reliably (a few targets might escape by luck). But now supposing hypothetically that your enemy has replaced all of those batteries with forty road-mobile point-defense systems that can intercept a single ballistic missile at a time reliably. Now you need to fire 200 missiles to reliably hit ~all 100 targets, because you are not certain where the point-defense systems are and need to double-tap all targets. Basically you put the two-interceptors-per-incoming shoe back on the other foot.
This isn't exactly a realistic scenario, just an illustration, but I think you see my point.
Now, I don't think there's an easy solution to ballistic missiles. I'm just not convinced that they will be as relatively effective as they are now forever, or that missile defense is a losing proposition. I agree that if you cram enough missiles into a salvo against a single target, "the missile will always get through," but if you're forcing your enemy to shoot salvos of ballistic missiles against tactical targets, you're much more likely to be on the correct size of the cost curve.
Speeds can be possibly below Mach 5, yes, it depends on the IRBM in question. If you believe the Ukrainian reports on the Oreshnik, it has a terminal velocity of Mach 11, well within the hypersonic range.
But even if the ballistic missile in question travels at only supersonic speeds in its terminal phase, HVPs still can't hit them. Note that due to the limitations of HVP the study here does not even bother to engage it with weapons that come close to the speed of IRBMs, note in this model the offence is utilising anti-ship missiles that are "subsonic and supersonic", not hypersonic. The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.
Yes, you're potentially capable of saving large percentages when you're looking at small salvo sizes that the HVP can hit. This is not always the situation you are looking at, and you cannot utilise HVP against supersonic missiles, as admitted by the study itself. It may be able to be used instead of a more expensive missile, but if that salvo size of one is travelling at a high enough speed, using HVP to intercept it is not prudent, and you cannot rely on the assumption that the offence will use a missile the HVP can deal with.
Ultimately, the end effect of utilising HVPs like that is that you are capable of making the enemy waste some resources by forcing greater reliance on supersonic missiles in certain specific contexts where it would not otherwise have been used. It's an interesting technology capable of subtly shifting the balance of power in certain contexts, but I don't find myself particularly convinced that it will revolutionise missile defence wholesale or shift the cost balance anywhere near parity.
I don't think missile defence is intractable, but it is very difficult.
The study says, on the very first page, "the HVP is capable of supersonic speeds and mid-air course correction to intercept incoming ballistic missiles as well as engaging other targets as an offensive weapon" and BAE's fact sheet, linked to here, says that ballistic missile defense is in the mission set.
The study states that they only modeled using the HVP to engage subsonic targets "[b]ased on sponsor and stakeholder feedback" and as you point out the study did not model ballistic missile targets at all, focusing on more conventional anti-ship missiles. It's possible this means
Either way, I think you are correct that the capability for the HVP to destroy ballistic missiles is not yet present, and may never be present. But on the flip side, I don't think it's impossible that it is eventually operationalized, or for a similar capability to be developed.
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You are explaining me why it will be hard to R&D. Not why once you developed it you can only produce 600 and not 600000 per year.
Because, for the above reasons, it's super costly and the US can't commit infinite money to building and maintaining these. Also, you need to test every very complex component rigorously; quality control is not optional when the alternative is a missile taking out crucial infrastructure or killing hundreds/thousands. A single component failing rounds of testing can sometimes lead to production being halted out of QC concerns.
If we produced more the cost per unit will fall dramatically. If we produced more we wouldn't care that much about quality because we could afford to shoot more of them. If we decided that patriot is the only air defense system we will need - and our allies too - once again we should have produced more interceptors - so once again we get into the economy of scale.
Only if everything in the entire supply chain is reshaped with that in mind.
Mil spec anything costs ridiculous amounts because there's loads and loads of red tape, the parts have to be available for many decades, extra QC checks and parts binning, rigorous additional testing and of course because there fundamentally can't be much competition because it's not mass market so manufacturers have little incentive to reduce prices.
Yes, if the interceptors were built from COTS parts and modules with minimal bureaucratic processes, prices would fall dramatically but that's not how the US military does things.
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In classic US acquisition fashion, we actually have several systems, with the Navy maintaining Aegis and using different missiles with AFAIK similar capabilities.
There's been discussion about putting Patriot missiles in the Navy VLS cells. Probably won't replace the higher-end Standards for niche rolls but might help spread the cost out for general air defense.
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This is what the US is currently trying to do but it's easier said than done, since there are many supply chain bottlenecks; you would need to scale production not only of the interceptors but also of their component parts like solid rocket motors and guidance seekers, which are quite underproduced. You'd need to significantly expand the base of skilled personnel and factory capacity across the supply chain, not only at Lockheed Martin but also at BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop, L3Harris and virtually anyone else involved, and many of these industries are hyperconsolidated as fuck. Many microelectronics, minerals and rare earths used in these interceptors are inherently limited in supply and also heavily leans on foreign sources, particularly China, which is a gigantic dependency of the US. And even then there's a limit to cost reduction through economies of scale.
Also, having quality uncertainties in something as critical as interceptors is a horrible idea even if you can manufacture a lot of them; having a somewhat accurate idea of your capabilities is crucial to war strategy.
If you need skilled workforce for manufacturing you fucked up royally during the design phase. Same for other stuff. And I keep hearing about those mythic rare earths and military and yet no one explains why they are needed in such quantities that to be a bottleneck compared to the obscene amounts we already throw away with the disposable vapes. And the biggest producer of semiconductors on earth will bend over backwards to allow us to produce more of those needed for interceptors if we just promise them to sell them some at any price.
And this is why any competent design is based on the assumption that everything will break and not work when you need it most, this is why stuff needs to be able to be produced at scale, with untrained personnel, sometimes under terrible conditions. Not treating any such system as a artisanal wunderwaffen.
With modern computers, cad cam, electronics - we should be able to design faster, iterate way faster, and produce more and cheaper. And that is obviously not true, at least until the war hits home - both Ukraine and Russia seems to be able to wage full scale next gen war with what could roughly be describes as US military toilet paper budget.
You can't build modern high tech equipment (which interceptors definitely are) with 70s low skilled manufacturing methods. The failure rates would approach 100%.
You can do this. The inherent tradeoff is that you're going to be stuck with Vietnam war era designs. If you want things to be buildable with only a hammer and screwdriver, you're going to be limited to things that can be built with such crude tools and no skills.
Consider this: Any high reliability electronics using BGA or QFN parts need x-ray inspection to filter out boards with short circuits caused by uneven solder flow. A shitload of components are only available in BGA or QFN packages and many are fundamentally impossible to build in any other packages (simply too many pins). That means you need highly skilled labor to build them or beyond state of the art automation which is only viable at massive cost which in turn means massive production amounts. The same goes for modern passive components that can be literally the size of small sand grains. And that's just one small part of the entire supply chain.
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FWIW, similar speculations have been aired in Finnish newspaper analyses about USA's short term available stockpiles for the war. Fancy defence missiles are expensive and limited while Iran's ballistic missiles and Shaheds are much cheaper. Further, Iran doesn't even have to hit all that regularly and as long as they can keep the threat level up, that's going to have a major effect on the economy of several of the gulf states and shipping (which in turn will have global economic effects). Iran can't win the war but they may be able to prevent USA also from winning.
This has historically been the case, but I have heard rumblings from Ukraine that mass production of drone interceptors for Shaheds has actually pushed the price of those to below that of the attack drones. On one hand, guidance for hitting a moving target is difficult, but the actual interceptors are pretty tiny compared to the bombs attack side, which is also more complex (decoys, maneuvering, hitting moving targets, non-GPS navigation). Modern manufacturing makes lots of small, complex electronics devices pretty cheaply and I can imagine materials cost starts dominating for moving bigger warheads longer distances at some point.
I would also be unsurprised if the quoted prices aren't quite even comparisons: are the attack side prices including R&D overhead, or just unit manufacturing costs? Most Western weapon costs I see quoted include overhead, but compare against per-unit costs. The "price" of interceptors, which we historically haven't bought huge numbers of, might have a lot of room to go down.
Or maybe that's an exercise in wish casting, but I think it's worth considering.
This may have effect on future wars but has no effect on the current war on Iran or even other near term wars the US participates in, particularly given how slow such procedures change in the US military.
For the moment the attack side has significant cost advantage.
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I doubt it, at least I certainly doubt it will equalise any time soon.
This source isn't exactly analogous to the situation in Iran and the Gulf since it largely deals with ICBMs in a nuclear-war scenario, but it is a pretty good attempt at assessing the difficulty of defence vs offence especially in a situation requiring moving large warheads long distances, and it turns out the unit cost of an ICBM is $42m if you include maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m after factoring in support and maintenance. The cost differential between offence and defence is massive, and if you want to filter out 90% of warheads shot you have to spend anywhere near 8-70 times as much as your attacker (8 times is a very best case scenario, 70 times is more realistic).
I suspect you're right on the ABM interceptors for now, but I remember people saying similar things about cruise missiles a few decades back. We've been able to intercept incoming mortar fire at least a decade at this point, which was probably incomprehensible back in, say, Vietnam.
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Doesn't that heavily incentivise people to go even harder on offense, because the only sustainable defense is actually preventing people from firing the missiles in the first place?
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