Kinda feels like we should add a 0 to that, given the jiggery-pokery that China is also getting up to these days. I’m sure Taiwan wouldn’t mind a few shipments of the anti-ballistic variants.
10,000 missile x 4 million dollars = 4 billion dollars. Maybe this is why I stopped checking how expensive war is, it makes it more depressing when we talk numbers.
Taiwan has seven Patriot batteries. For reference, Ukraine initially got two Patriots, and a third one in December. They have to cover a lot more territory than Taiwan, but they’ve basically shut down Russian missile attacks. Including Russia’s hypersonic missile, which is a very important datapoint for military planners to know.
I know Patriot missiles are relevant to traditional airframes… But aren’t they completely irrelevant when it comes to drones? I’m pretty sure each missile costs at least 1000x the price of what it’s most likely to be aimed at.
Edit: at four million a missile it’s closer to 10000 or 100000x
These aren’t for the small disposable drones. They’re for other missles and large aircraft. For the missles in particular, you should also factor in the potential cost of the damage they’ll cause if not intercepted.
I think they’re referring to the cheap drones that Ukraine and Russia have been using. They’re very simple and can’t carry much of a payload, but they’re incredibly inexpensive and easy to produce.
Even the cheap wedding drones that were converted at the start by Ukraine were in the $400 range. Now the cheapest quadcopters they’re using are $1000 on the low end, with the ones Russia is using have a low end $35,000 price tag. Still ridiculously cost effective compared to a Patriot Missile.
The Ukrainians and houthis are having successful attacks with consumer drones that have hand grenades or ieds taped to them. You don’t need a “military grade” drone to fly an explosive where it shouldn’t be
I’m not saying they replace Patriot missiles, obviously that’s not the case. I’m just saying you can cause a lot of damage with a $100 dollar drone and some c4, pretty similar damage to a $400,000 missile. The missiles aren’t really showing their cost-impact ratios to be good if what the Russians are spending on Ukraine is to be taken as evidence
Don’t forget scouting. Giving soldiers in the field the ability to poke one over a hill can be useful. A $25 FPV drone off Amazon can do that job if that’s all you can afford.
Not that you’d use a Patriot against that, either.
You might want to put the hypersonic part in quotes, they’re basically just really expensive ballistic missiles that fly slightly faster. Considering their price tag, Russia would have probably been better off never developing them anyways
Yes, but afaik the hypersonic term applies to weapons over mach 4. NATO also adds additional requirements for hypersonics, such as manourerability. But they have enough speed to qualify.
Yes exactly, also each icmb would qualify (during re-entry they also pickup “some” speed)… but it seems like hypersonic is sort of a marketing sticker thing, like “green” and “low fat”.
The NATO hypersonics that are being worked on should be able to make evasive manouvera at speed, will be interesting to see.
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