Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.

Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M

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?

> wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.

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.

Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.

People are taking the absolute wrong lesson from Ukraine. The cheap drone munition isn't the innovation, it's the supply chain that can rapidly iterate.

So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.

Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them?

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.

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Actually fighting for your life doesn't bestow any superhuman powers. Russians there are fighting for their lives too. There's enough videos of people in Ukraine being killed by $1000 drones, $100 landmines, and 50 cent bullets.

It's just the way war has always turned. Battleships were obsoleted by airplanes 1/1000th their cost. Machineguns and trenches ended cavalry. Arms companies still profit in war and people still die in them, doesn't matter what an individual gun or missile costs.