In the spotlight is South Korea’s home-grown surface-to-air missile, Cheongung, also known as M-SAM, which has emerged as a viable alternative to the US-made Patriot system as Gulf nations bolster defences against Iran’s barrage of drone and missile attacks.
The key selling point for manufacturers Hanwha Aerospace and LIG Nex1: similar performance to the US$4 million (S$5.1 million) Patriot PAC-3 missile for about a quarter of the price.
$4 million per SAM missile and America still fails to stop Iran’s tin cans? boy I wonder where all that money really goes. talk about a waste of money.
One of the weird problems of American weapons exports in the future is that the domestic market (the USA/the Pentagon) is so bloated, it’s entirely price-insensitive. It’s similar to the situation in health care - who is going to take the $200 hospital gown, when you can buy one from Temu for $2?
One of the lessons I learned during the Dot Com Bust in 2000 was that cheap infrastructure is a huge competitive advantage. All the startups that did Oracle on Sun Microsystems died, only the rack-mount cheapo servers running Linux/FreeBSD survived. Ukraine is showing how it’s done in drone warfare, South Korea apparently in SAM defense systems, I wonder what Taiwan has come up with.
We shouldn’t be using US$ 1 Million interceptors to shoot down drones which cost US$ 50000/-. Apparently, Iran has a stockpile of about 80000 drones … We definitely need cheaper options which can be mass produced and which has a high kill ratio.
CRAM go brrrt
Just about the only idea I have on the subject as I’m not a military expert.
