The challenge is both the production time and the high cost of such a high-tech missile. Typically, the US Navy fires two missiles at each given airborne target to guarantee its downing, and an interceptor missile costs millions of dollars, much more than the Iranian missiles it shoots down.
This was always going to be a problem and it’s their fault for not moving sooner on it.
If an adversaries missiles costs a million dollars, how do you challenge them? Make missiles that costs less and overwhelm them.
Not only do you gotta worry about Iran’s or others cheaper missiles, but now there’s drones that are a fraction of the cost.
If the US enters a major conflict, I wouldn’t be surprised to see high value assets get lost or damaged due this problem.
Lets see the US come out with some new advances in tech with lower cost.
An IRIS-T costs on the order of a quarter million Euros and certainly doesn’t have a worse track record. This isn’t just about having other things to shoot easy targets with but US military tech being quite overpriced. And this isn’t even comparing to South Korea who produce notoriously inexpensive stuff this is German tech, with all the usual gold plating.
…also, apparently, eye-balling that figure of “several hundred” patriot missiles per year: That’s probably fewer than the production rate of IRIS-T (450-500 this year) and definitely fewer than next year (Diehl said they’re double the rate).
An IRIS-T is for area defense. It’s an easier problem because the target is generally headed right at you. Part of the issue here is that the Navy is largely doing mid-course intercepts which requires a significantly higher performance interceptor in most cases. The AEGIS-BMD mission was designed primarily around fleet defense, not swatting rockets out of the sky which are targeting things much farther away. It can obviously play that role, but most of it requires using much higher performance missiles to do it.
There are several US Navy ships in active service that are trialing directed energy point defense systems. There is movement. We just don’t announce it like Russia and China do, because keeping adversaries guessing is more important than bragging rights.
They’ve been talking about those trials and pre-trials for many years, probably over a decade at this point.
Everything I’ve heard is they still haven’t figured out how to do it effectively on a ship. Stationary land based would probably be easier though as that removes the size/power restrictions.
