The latest missile update highlights the growing dominance of expendable munitions in modern warfare. As technology evolves, these cost-effective and versatile weapons are reshaping military strategies worldwide.
This is brief note is free.
Defense analysts’ first conclusions from the Middle East and Ukraine missile wars suggest the PLA’s strategic preparations were sound as per missile update. Let’s see why.
Israel
Theodore Postol, MIT Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy, analyzed Iran’s mid-April drone and missile attack on in Israel. A summary:
The evidence shows that all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems. Whether drones or not, all of the targets are shot down by air-to-air missiles.
The cost of a drone is $10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is about $100,000. Their 4-hour, 1500 km flight to Israel allowed US Navy E-2 Hawkeyes AWACS to very effectively vector fighter aircraft to targets they quickly destroyed. The USAF workhorse air-to-air missile is the $500,000 AIM-9x Sidewinder and the Israeli government says the cost of defending Israel was $1.3 billion! [Non-government sources say $2.3-3.3 billion].
Commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones with capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them. This means that the cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high – even unsustainable – unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.
Ukraine
Analyst Armchair Warlord says Russia’s anti-air system is extremely effective and, apparently, financially sustainable:
Artillery shells have become the standard metric of the Ukrainian War, and Soviet-legacy gigafactories burying Western supply chains in mountains of steel its leading story. But shells are just steel. What if I told you the Russians were beating us in high-tech manufacturing?
One of the sleeper stories of the war has been the Russian air defenses’ extraordinary capability to defeat the most difficult targets: Russian SAMs routinely down GMLRS, Storm Shadows, and even AGM-88 HARMs that were specifically designed to destroy them. Russian air defenses in the Crimea have been downing ATACMS missiles – a supposed war-winning superweapon – like pheasants.
But I have never seen anyone remark on Russia’s bottomless supply of modern air defense missiles.
Just that week, they shot down no fewer than 1,715 aerial targets, 95% of them drones. Even assuming 75% of the drones were engaged with small arms or EW, that’s still 400 antiaircraft missiles expended for the week. The Russians do this, week after week after week, and show zero signs that their air defense inventory is even under stress.
Meanwhile the West is out of modern missiles and desperately trying to keep Ukraine going with 1960s systems like HAWK, Chaparral and improvised Sea Sparrow launchers. Guided missiles are not simple to make – they’re complex and require sophisticated manufacturing to tight tolerances. Western manufacturers have never been able to make them in large quantities, even at the height of the Cold War. And yet here the ‘gas station with nukes’ is stamping out enough ammunition to keep their Buks and Pantsirs on the firing line after two years of a war featuring an order of magnitude more aerial targets than any previous conflict.
PLA prescience
Russia and China already share the world’s leading missile update defense technology, so we can assume that also share the Niagara of data from both conflicts. Pray for some insightful crumbs from their table.
Until then, however, we can appreciate the PLA’s foresight in building a chain of 24×7, 100% automated, high-precision missile factories, each producing 1,000 rounds a day.
In conclusion, the latest missile update underscores the transformative impact of expendable munitions on modern warfare. These cost-effective and versatile weapons are not only reshaping military strategies but also ensuring that armed forces can maintain dominance while managing expenses efficiently. As technology continues to advance, the role of expendable munitions will likely become even more pivotal in global defense systems.
A final thought: All war involves math.
