The US interceptor missiles are something like 3 million dollars each. The Houthis drones are closer to 20 thousand. Eventually they will win on economic grounds.
To be really pedantic, a $20,000 drone out of Yemen is 0.1% of Yemen GDP.
A US interceptor of 0.000013% of US GDP.
So, yes, I know, LOTS of details (like Iran) here, but the overall point being even if our $3M missile is more than their $20K drone in absolute dollars, we can afford it more than they can.
Dollars aren't directly convertible to warmaking power. The factories and skilled labor that make weapons are a scarce resource that don't scale with mere market capitalization.
That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.
> That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.
The US has built a lot more cruise missiles than just its Tomahawks [0], and the US has a less cruise missile dependent doctrine because it is heavily invested in acheiving air superiority and delivering smart glide bombs, and shorter-range missiles that are much cheaper.
[0] ~7500 Harpoons, some large number I can't readily pin down of SLAM (AGM-84E) and SLAM-ER (AGM-84H/K) developed from the Harpoon, ~2000 AGM-86, ~1600 AGM-129, 2000+ AGM-158, plus some more developed ans retired in the first half of the Cold War
The 7500 RU launched cruise missiles haven't achieved a tenth as much as the Tomahawks the US hit Iraq with. After that, Iraq didn't have a working integrated air defence any more.
The RU missiles have killed plenty of civilians though.
Do keep in mind that Iraq had ancient SAMs (only about 75 of them) and practically zero ISR support. US coalition forces hit them hard from the get-go. Ukraine had/has several hundred modern(ish) SAMs with the ISR support of NATO. There's a reason the Russians don't fly too far into Ukraine.
The Ukrainian air defense was not even close to modern. It consisted largely of older S-300s, some Tor, Buk and Tunguska systems that were leftovers from the fall of the USSR. They had some even older systems (S-75, S-125, S-200). So this is largely 30+ years old, and not very well maintained.
S-300 is not really comparable in terms of capability to S-75 and S-125. There is a quantum leap between decentralized networked mobile IADS with a combination of radar types and missile types and Iraq's S-125 systems.
S-300 is still a very capable system today and 1990s' S-300 systems are only really a generation behind modern systems. They're about as recent as the systems on Ticonderogas and Arleigh Burkes that are very much still in service today.
I think you might be conflating airforce with air defense. There’s not a lot of Ukrainian AF flights these days and when there is, it’s more often than not, one way (unfortunately) - and with loaned gear. It’s why they’re asking for F-16s and more AD.
The point of these systems is that there's no launch site and it takes very little time to learn how to use them. The really key personnel are in Iran and very much difficult to assassinate (and easily replaced, too).
The drones are relatively light, cheap, and can be launched with nothing but springs and wood. There's no value in the launch locations and in fact you can launch them from anywhere.
> That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.
By their fruits you'll know them. If Russia was able to destroy the enemy like USA did with half the number of missiles - they absolutely would. But they can't (mostly because USA has system where it takes minutes from recognizing targets to destroying them, and in Russia it takes hours - so they can only hit stationary targets reliably), so they have to go into quantity instead.
Also USA use bombs much more often (because they could - because they obliterated the air defence in the first hours which Russia still can't do).
The US conducts war with a scalpel. Russia does it with a rusty hatchet. Those cruise missiles from Russia are (relatively speaking) very cheap and inaccurate.
Russian cruise missiles (true ones, not Shahed drones) are not cheap. Kalibrs cost around $6 million USD, KH-101s around $13 million. And both are quite accurate. The issue the Russians are facing isn't inaccurate cruise missiles, but a lack of accurate targeting data (combined with wanting to use them in terror attacks as opposed to degrading Ukraine's military capabilities.)
In all recent US wars civilian casualties vastly outnumber military ones. In the Ukrainian war civilian casualties constitute less than 10% of overall casualties. Outstanding precision for a rusty hatchet.
Most recent US wars have spent most of their time in an asymmetric counterinsurgency phase, the Russo-Ukrainian war is (in style of warfare) basically a symmetric force-on-force international war.
Russia hitting civilians isn’t really accidental. They’re quite happy to terrorize the population, and are quite comfortable deliberately committing atrocities (see Bucha, et al). Flattening whole cities is longstanding practice of theirs, too; it’s largely how they won Chechnya 2.
At best, their weapons aren’t terribly precise and they don’t particularly care about that.
I advise you to educate yourself. The US killed 300 thousand civilians in the second Iraq war using their 'precision' strikes. That compares to 10 thousand civilians who died so far in the Ukrainian war. Both of these numbers are provided by the US gov itself.
> The only long-range weapons Russia has launched thousands of are the Iranian-made long-range suicide drones.
They've also used lots of (mostly, IIRC, air launched) ballistic missiles and (conventional) cruise missiles. The reason there have been deep strikes by Ukraine on Russian bomber bases are because those bombers were used to fire long range missiles into Ukraine.
Though the “suicide drones”, while designed as loitering munitions, are basically used as propeller driven cruise missiles rather than in a loitering role.
I feel like your argument shows the opposite: there are significant economies of scale to making munitions. If we have to make a lot of interceptors, in the long run-- it's going to be much cheaper than it is currently.
As an engineer, saying that $20k, the price of a cheap car, is 1/1000th of a GDP of a whole country does not pass the smell test. Google says that Yemen's GDP is $21.61b, so a drone is 0.0000925% of the GDP. In other words it's about a million drones per year for Yemen, and about 7.7 million interceptors per year for the US.
The question isn’t how much each missile/drone costs. The question is, how many of those does each side have and how quickly can you get more?
Maybe $3M missile isn’t that costly to the US, but if you have like 1000 of them and it takes 6 months to replenish the stock, while the other side has 10000 drones that they can replenish in 3 months, you have a massive problem at your hand. (The same problem Ukraine is having re: stockpiling artillery shells that are sourced from US/NATO)
The problem is also the stock value of the industrial military complex. If your artisanal rockets are out competed by smart flying sand with a stick, your actual evaluation is in for a correction, fiscally as tactically.
About what a third of $3mm is to the U.S. (15x larger) or U.S. defense budget (50x larger). A 3x production-cost advantage in an economically unconstrained conflict is not an advantage. It’s at best a Twitter PR point.
The conflict is actually not far from being constrained by production, which is difficult to scale up for a 3mm$ munition, because private contractors expect lengthy contracts to justify long term amortization of increased capital expenditure.
Given that Iran is producing thousands to tens of thousands of these missiles every year, and is looking to expand production even more, there actually really is a risk that the stockpiles will not keep up, after which dozens of billions of dollars will have to be expended to seriously ramp up production. This dynamic is also the reason why it's been so difficult to ramp up artillery production in support of Ukraine.
Additionally, given that the expensive parts in these drones seem to be homemade in Iran (engines, fuselage, even some of the electronics), and given the sanctions, USD equiv. GDP isn't a great metric since there's no free market to convert Iranian production to USD.
Then there's the problem that these missiles are sorely needed in case of a war in China, so actually going through a significant expenditure, even if money is allocated to increase production in 2-3 years, means that the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA, should the need arise. Its' ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal.
> conflict is actually not far from being constrained by production
If anyone is talking about escalation risk, production isn’t the bottleneck. We are nowhere close to being resource constrained in the Middle East.
> the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA
In a production contest it’s maximum sustainable flows, not stocks, that matter. (Stocks buy you time to get flows up.) To the extent challenging the PLA is a concern, boosting production to counter the Houthis is a net win.
> ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal
You’re arguing both ways. If their value is marginal, expending them now is fine.
Your broader point—I think—is correct. America doesn’t want to spread itself thin. But that’s a constraint at the CVN level. Once the carrier strike force is positioned, it’s immaterial whether it’s firing off missiles or guns.
Anyone positioning Iran et al v America et al is missing key pieces in the logistics of war.
The stocks are not sufficient to buy time to get the flows. There are only around 500 SM-6 missiles (long range, suitable to protect large numbers of vessels at various distances, 5mm$ each), and there is only capacity to produce a few hundred for the short to medium term.
The older SM-2s may have more plentiful stocks, but most of them have been deemed too dangerous to use after causing serious damage in test firings, and there are only around 180 modernized versions available, and the missile itself is no longer produced.
Defending against a saturation attack means that the value experiences a step function. Either you have enough missiles to stop most low-tech enemy missiles, and you're going to be largely fine, or you don't, and your entire fleet might sink. It's not something you can afford to. The US Navy is never going to allow stocks to go under what is necessary to stop at least a long-range Chinese attack, and that means at least 600 missiles, which is a serious chunk of what remains.
Boosting production to counter the Houthis is surely something the US will do. It will take 2-3 years to bear fruit. In the meantime, stocks are not sufficient to tank Iran's capability to produce these kinds of missiles.
I think that the most likely outcome is either more shipping companies negotiating terms to transit unharmed, like China's COSCO has all but admitted to have done, or these detours to continue.
> Additionally, given that the expensive parts in these drones seem to be homemade in Iran (engines, fuselage, even some of the electronics), and given the sanctions, USD equiv. GDP isn't a great metric since there's no free market to convert Iranian production to USD.
I wouldn't be so sure that the parts are locally sourced.
Not the same type of hardware. They might need larger engines for their reusable drones, but the ones they used for Shaheds are in-house clones (funnily enough, a Wankel engine for one of them). The Wikipedia pages for the suicide Shaheds has teardowns and sources.
Yemeni rebels don't pay for these, though. It's free 'aid' from Iran. So arguing costs doesn't make much sense. Similarly mujahedeen in Afghanistan got free Stingers MANPADs
Most of the missiles and other weapons are being smuggled in relatively small boats. It simply isn't practical to stop and search most of them. In theory the US and other nations could declare a blockade and simply sink any vessel that enters Yemeni territorial waters, but that would be a major escalation and require a lot more naval forces to be deployed
That assumes the US won't fight back. US contributes ~6% of Yemen GDP in foreign aid. Yemen is a big food importer. US could shut off foreign aid and blockade Yemen and collapse their economy - they wouldn't be able to afford food, let alone 20k drones.
The Houthi strategy isn't an economic strategy, it's a "hope the US isn't willing to kill us" strategy.
There is a non-zero chance we are headed for a situation where global warming and sea level rise will make hundreds of millions, mostly from equatorial regions, desperate refugees. It could be that an attitude of self-righteousness might become impossible to maintain. Friends come and go.
The Saudis with help of the US has already tried to get rid of the Houthis. That didn't exactly went well.
Never in my wildest dream would i think that the Houthis would be one doing the first modern blockade of a strait. I always expected the US to do the first modern block in the Malacca strait, when China is forced to do a Armed reunification with Taiwan.
> US interceptor missiles are something like 3 million dollars each. The Houthis drones are closer to 20 thousand
That’s a 150x cost difference. Well within an order of magnitude of America versus Iran’s economies and defense budgets.
Which is irrelevant, since before this becomes a production problem it would become the diplomatic ones of bombing Houthi supplies in Yemen and intercepting IRGC vessels on the high seas.
While the Houthi drone itself is inexpensive, the cost to the economy of a drone hitting shipping is substantially greater than the $3M cost of the US interceptor missile.
Good.How about ten drones ($200k) and ten interceptors ($30m)? Is the cost of the economy still greater? Alright, let's up the numbers. Forty drones vs forty interceptors, $800k vs $120m. Do the numbers still work for the US? Like, would Yemen gladly pay $800k to kill an american vessel? I guess yes. Would it be economically effective to spend $120m on a protection of said vessel? Perhaps not.
So, at a certain number between one and forty drones the economy stops making sense.
This is what happens here in Ukraine as well: russian drones are cheap and readily available, while interceptors are expensive af and quite scarce.
the average value of goods per container ship is ~$350M per ship not including the value of the ship itself. However I think the impact to the economy from a missile hitting a ship far exceeds the value of the goods, the ship, and the cost of any missiles used to defend those goods.
This doesn't take into account the cost of smuggling the drones from Iran to Yemen. There is a reason cocaine is an order of magnitude cheaper in Colombia than in Miami.
That is the big question here. How much can/should the US scale production. We know from several current wars the cheap drones are a big issue. So we need to come up with a solution. Can we develop a new anti-drone weapon system that is cheaper? Can we mass produce these missiles and thus get them much cheaper? Some other option I'm not aware of? Whatever, the fact is every half-competent wannabe general now knows that drones are cheap to build and expensive to defend against. The US needs to respond somehow or we will lose to them.
Drones are cheap. EW is even cheaper. The US has multiple C-UAS systems in use and even better ones in development. Some are just EW systems, some are cheapo gun based systems, and other are directed energy weapons. Missile based systems are the best but also the most expensive of the currently deployed solutions. The cheapest missile system is probably the APKWS that we've shipped to Ukraine. This uses a laser to guide the missile to the drone. But for countering FPV/Mavic type drones, even those are overkill. Just jam the entire area on the frequencies in use, and deny everyone drone use.
It's important not to draw too many conclusions from the Ukraine war. The combatants are fighting a much different fight on both sides than what the US would do.
EW is very much not magic, and both Russia and Ukraine absolutely do use it.
The problem with barrage jamming is that it's extremely locatable and your jammer just ends up getting blown up. The solution is to have many smaller jammers, but then range is decreased dramatically, and it can still be economical to just bomb them, possibly with an anti radiation munition (slapping such guidance on a drone is not expensive).
That said, the range is sufficiently small that it doesn't matter - cheap systems can just use visual odometry and inertial sensors and fly themselves the remaining 300 meters to the target. There are videos of Russian lancets operating exactly like this, flying high, locating a target, and then autonomously homing in as they get into jamming range.
The idea that neither Russia nor Ukraine tried just EW is quite ridiculous. It's well known that Russia had excellent EW, there was a report in the Texeira leaks that Ukraine could no longer use Excalibur guided shells because Russian long range jamming rendered them useless - the GPS jamming made them unable to arm, and that even US guided HIMARS missiles and JDAMs had to rely on inertial sensors for much of the trajectory with significantly reduced accuracy.
Yeah, our military says HIMARS are pretty much done due to the russian EW. By dragging this war, the US gave russians the opportunity to learn and battle test their solutions against HIMARS.
Excaliburs are on a much different level though. Word is, you don't need much EW at all. You merely have to give them a strong look and that's enough to drive it way off course.
Excalibur is highly effective when not being jammed by Pole-21 systems. It's just that Ukraine currently doesn't have enough systems to counter the GPS jamming. GMLRS faces the same issues. Both systems have inertial guidance in the face of jamming, but the accuracy drops off quite a bit. Just means you need to launch more GMLRS per target, or attack when jamming is off.
Never said EW was magic, nor that neither Ukraine or Russia was using it? If they weren't, the battlefield would be even more lethal. Russia has been a leader in EW for decades.
But it is the most cost-effective solution. Russia has been deploying vehicle mounted EW systems to jam drones (with some success), as well as jamming GPS. And the Ukrainians have been jamming as well. There's no wunderwaffe in any war, it's more a game of cat and mouse.
Just like APS is now becoming standard on tanks and AFVs, localized EW jammers targeting control frequencies of small drones will be the cost of having a real military. There's also been research into using APS against drones (this would require additional sensors).
And the JDAM/HIMARS jamming is a bit overrated. Even in inertial mode, JDAM has a 30m CEP, and HIMARS has a 60M CEP. Definitely not as good as with GPS, but still a serious issue for the Russians.
In a previous similar thread, it was mentioned that directed energy weapons could be an effective & efficient response to drones, and have already been in development and testing by the US military for some time.
No, they won't, because the immediately coming war between the US-led coalition organized to reopen the sea lanes and the Houthis is not going to be conducted by simply trying to intercept attacks.
A US interceptor of 0.000013% of US GDP.
So, yes, I know, LOTS of details (like Iran) here, but the overall point being even if our $3M missile is more than their $20K drone in absolute dollars, we can afford it more than they can.