China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000 (opens in new tab)

Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.

It sounds like marketing hype. The term "hypersonic" is so vague as to be almost meaningless, for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile. Can it usefully maneuver at hypersonic speeds? Can it track a target at hypersonic speeds? Without further evidence I'm going to assume the answer is "no".

Also, as the Iranians have recently demonstrated, the way to get get past someone's defences is to deploy multiple warheads (and a pile of random debris) from a cheap missile, not to bet on exotic hypersonic weapons.

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.

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.

To the point that defense spending prevents us from publishing an accurate financial statement for soon to be 30 years running.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25

Or they bought a lambo, which is amazing, and goes really fast... but when you are out of gas, the Prius will keep going. :)

Yes this is a great point. The great irony of the tech sector is that although tech creates efficiencies, the process by which tech is created is itself comically inefficient.

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.

The S400 and the Patriot etc all suffer from the same problem: They only deny the enemy high elevation flight.

Russian doctrine has been based around big, fast things going high. NATO doctrine has been about smaller, slower things going very low. Going low leaves you very vulnerable if you get too close to a defender, but there's no way there are defenders everywhere.

An extreme example of the problem was the Moskova--big, fast missiles that couldn't see something coming in just above wavetop height. There were only two launchers that had any possibility of engaging and only time for one launch cycle--and that probably only if they already had a bird on the rails. (Exposed to the elements, rather than safe in the magazine.)

air defense is much more complicated and difficult to build.

Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.

Pakistan and Iran's imported missiles from China have worked as-advertised. To say nothing of the PL-15's recent success, China's land attack missiles have been a serious threat ever since the Silkworm ASCM hit the export market.

Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].

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

The US won the cold war because the expensive defense programs were subsidized by the consumer market. The USSR lost because it wasn't. They cloned a lot of western ICs but never cost effectively because they only ended up in military products.

Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.

These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.

They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.

Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.

Lasers have very limited applications, they have an inherent line of sight limits, and even the most powerful ship mounted lasers that can do like 50kW, take a minute to boil a kettle of water away, more if you wrap it in tinfoil.

And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.

Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.

At this point no one is talking about using lasers to defend against hyper-sonic missiles (at least not anywhere near the target). All of the current laser systems require being focused on the targets for some amount of time to "burn though", which means they are only suitable for lower-speed targets (drones, cruise missiles, and some low-level ballistics).

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.

You think of laser as in star wars cutting light saber.

Actual lasers don’t do shit at those distances: it is used not to cut something in half but to blind, damage sensors, and what have you

Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.

Nuclear weapons gave us global stability (i.e. no WW3). Hypersonics, hopefully, will also give us regional stability.

According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.

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.

> Nobody knows yet the true capabilities of the missile, but it doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter very much, the payload doesn’t matter very much. If it’s launched at a certain target in Tel Aviv, it still is going to hit something in Tel Aviv. The Israelis have no choice but to attempt an intercept, and will spend millions to do so

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

>"Do they hit their targets?"

Are you sure you want to find out?

There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.

The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.

It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.

Air defense works in layers where each layer often covers for another. S300 is good, but it's just one piece of a useful anti air defense strategy.

S300 is very good AA, but in practice modern SEAD with a sizeable number of planes can outrange them and they're not great at protecting themselves. We saw this in India-Pakistan and seeing this again in Iran-USA. You can see more of a stale mate when they aren't getting outranged in Ukraine-Russia.

They will just get stuck at the customs :(

Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.

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.

People thought the same on Iran, untouchable. China has the same air defense and tech as Iran, not effective in real world situations.

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.

Good question. I think China is undoubtedly far better than the US at advanced, cheap mass-production. So wouldn’t be surprising they could do that for the military too. Not to say the US couldn’t get better.

There's a few of these guys that make posts about technology that doesn't materialize after a few years, they can be ignored. There are plenty of pro-China observers that offer grounded analysis of Chinese military-industrial base out there that don't make claims that China has unobtainium technology. /r/LessCredibleDefence has a shortlist of these propagandists.

You don't have to assume: He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video.

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