Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit.

I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?

I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.

The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.

The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.

If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities.

Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.

Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.

Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.

In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.

[0] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.

For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.

So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.

Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues

If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.

Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.

Perhaps it'd be more difficult for him to broadcast if he had an anti-china perspective, but the content itself seems legitimate.