> US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of about 10k per shell.

50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense budget.

Now imagine for the same $10k cost making a cruise missile, instead. This is close to what a Shahed is -- the estimate is $20k-$50k / unit, so close enough.

This is bonkers. Countries can now afford for the same cost * to make not a 10-20 mile range artillery shell, but a 1500 mile effective range cruise missile.

* Defense costs are "fake" to a large degree. A lot of that is really corruption with money flowing from the taxpayers to the arms manufacturers, but still if we go by the numbers...

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pyuser583 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are fake in the sense individual items are listed as having costs that are not accurate.

But really the defense deals are very complicated, and not based around buying x number of items.

You’re making a not well-formed query. How much is a shell?

Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand.

	▲	rdtsc 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand. The shells are already made by the 10 and 100s of thousands, Shaheds are also not a research project, so either one is in amortized serial production now. What I meant is that a $10k shell doesn't cost that much. Russians are making the equivalent artillery shells for an _order_ of magnitude less for around $1k. A lot of defense costs are just overinflated simply because they can be. The government is spending taxpayer money, it's not really coming from the politicians' pockets. If the kickbacks are just right, they may in fact flow back into the politicians pockets.

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fpoling 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. So drones are effective at destroying big stationary civilian infrastructure and much less at long distance strikes at military targets. Russia's inability to destroy Ukrainian aviation is a good example.

But then with solar and batteries civilian infrastructure becomes much more resilient against drone strikes.

	▲	rdtsc an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. It's true but they are so cheap that launching a whole bunch and/or improving them incrementally is possible. Yeah they are for stationary targets mostly, for sure. And of course their sounds and relatively low speed does make them somewhat easier to shoot down with short range AA guns and can have automated acoustic early warning system (it's like a flying lawnmower or chainsaw).