When a metric becomes a goal.
Kegseth: “well how many missiles have you fired?”
General: “at Iran, sir?”
Kegsbreath: “spare me your womenly technobable soldier, just answer the question”
General: “1800, sir. About 19 years worth, sir.”
K: “good, that sound like a lot.”
When the depth of their incompetence becomes more apparent over the coming years, people will not be able to believe it.
You’re right. They simply will not believe it.
Cost of a PAC-3/MSE is $4-5M, let’s go with $4.5M * 1800 = $8,100,000,000 in defensive missiles alone.
And the future ones will probably cost more because China has been lowering it’s exports of rare earths
In the interest of being factual I have to point out that it’s not quite that bad. You’re quoting the export price, but the US Military gets them for closer to $1M per because they funded the development of the system and have ongoing contracts for delivery.
Still not great when you’re spending a million a shot to intercept $20,000 dollar drones.
The bigger issue though is production capacity. Raytheon can’t just magically quadruple their output overnight. Patriot is an extremely complex device that requires skilled personnel and complex tooling to manufacture, as well as a LOT of safety procedures (it is a missile after all), in addition to the rare earth requirements you noted. Even if the US offers to start buying them at export price Raytheon can’t just make that production capacity appear out of nowhere. And in order for them to scale up capacity they’re going to want guarantees of ongoing purchases so that they don’t just do a bunch of capex to meet a short term need.
This is why maybe you don’t want a publicly traded military industrial complex beholden only to shareholders; you end up with an expensive system that doesn’t win wars and a systematically impoverished country that needs war to sustain itself.
In all fairness to Raytheon, Patriot is incredibly good at what it does. The problem isn’t the platform, the problem is that what it does is shoot down $80m combat aircraft. When that’s your target, $1-5M a shot is cheap. And Patriot is deadly accurate. Ukraine has used it to basically neutralize the Russian airforce.
The fault here is with US Military command, who point blank refused to take drones seriously while everyone else was working overtime to adapt to them. Ukraine actually offered to partner with the US on training and technology specifically to intercept shahed drones and the US turned them down.
Now, we can only speculate as to why that is, and it’s certainly possible that arms industry lobbyists wanted to avoid Ukrainian defence companies gaining any share of the US market. But that would only be speculation. I suspect it has far more to do with American arrogance; “What can little Ukraine teach us about war?”
Maybe you’re right, but imagine you’re a Raytheon executive watching the Pentagon spend millions of dollars a pop to shoot down thousands of Shaheds. You would call in sick, admitted for IV fluids after a near-fatal jizzing spree. Point being, they have to love how badly those weapons are being squandered.
And yes, chief War Bro Hegseth has an arrogance issue. But he’s only the latest paragraph in a story several decades long.
Oh, I never specifically claimed this was a Hegseth problem. Notice I said “American” arrogance. This problem has been going on much, much longer than the current electoral cycle.
I only name-checked him because I think he was the one in charge when Ukraine offered drone collaboration, you’re correct about that.
I think it’s just the way with empires that haven’t fully faded. Feels like the US is close to having its Spanish Armada moment, especially after they’ve run out of Patriot missiles.
Wtf
Gotta protect Israel.
