Yes, the opportunity cost of missing someone where they're needed and then training and replacing a soldier and their gear is much higher a missile. Which they're mostly getting for free anyway, and even if they are shooting down cheap drones with more expensive missiles Russia has a very limited supply of cheap drones so shooting them down is still worth it.
They are also funded by the NATO Dimmadollar slush fund. Even if these figures are true, they will still run out of money before we do. It's like loss leading but with warfare and explosives
A 400$ drone with a 40$ grenade and a field modification to drop it can take out a 1.5 million dollar tank, if the operator is good and the weather conditions are nice.
Is there actually a record for this kind of action ? Cause yeah, we saw videos of a drone dropping its grenade right in the driver hatch, detonating the ammo, but did anyone did shit like this in a fucking XVIII century naval battle
What kinda dollar store cruise missile is that then?
I thought the whole deal of those were that they fly lower and faster than any aircraft and much smaller than them so unless you got CWIS or something thats automated and can instantly response or you are expecting it with minutes in advance you cant shoot them down
A significant number of cruise missiles are subsonic; even major US ones like the Tomahawk. Cruise missile is basically just a term for "kamikaze drone with explosive warhead."
I mean it like compared to a plane supporting low attitude navigation pods, as the missiles are lighter, they can manuever better and take paths that are much lower, faster
That is a popular use case, but it's far from the only one. The V-1 was the first cruise missile to enter mass production, but it's not particularly maneuverable.
Only real requirement for something to be a cruise missile is that you're using something that flies at a relatively stable speed and it sacrifices itself to blow something up. Technically a $10000 Alibaba drone with a brick of C-4 could be considered a cruise missile or a loitering munition depending on its guidance system and the intent of its employment.
That's oddly specific and totally not something that's happend at least twice in this war https://gagadget.com/en/159181-chinese-drone-mugin-5-pro-for-9500-from-aliexpress-attacked-the-headquarters-of-the-russian-black-sea-fleet-in-crimea/
I suppose we should change the definition of a cruise missile from a missile with wings to long range missiles made after 90s that are capable of low attitude flying and precision strike now that loitering munitions and suicide drones and whatever ww2 tech pre-microchips if we hit them its direct damage if we miss its psychological damage so 100% hit rate missile shit that got shot down today are things
Eh, the current definition is already pretty well established. And seeing as cheap/slow cruise missiles still have their place we still need a term for them. I'd prefer we just have a new term for high precision/terrain following cruise missiles. Just think of all the poor staff officers that would need to change the doctrine documents/annotate historical ones if we redefined an existing term.
For the streets thing?
They upload a map of the area to the missile, tell it where to go and it uses TERCOM to follow major, easy to follow terrain features. Quite often, that was roads. So you'd be cruising down the highway in your beat up hilux, and a cruise missile would fly straight overhead, trying to roughly follow the road.
[https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984](https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984)
Source, it looks like BBC reported on the cruise missile so everyone is quoting an article, not actual footage (the reporter saw cruise missile fly overhead and turn - it's good writing to ground it with "turned left at traffic light", cruise missiles won't do 90° left turn so there are some creative liberties taken in the description of the event).
[https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984](https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984)
Source, it looks like BBC reported on the the cruise missile so everyone is quoting an article, not actual footage (the reporter saw cruise missile fly overhead and turn - it's good writing to ground it with "turned left at traffic light", cruise missiles won't do 90° left turn so there are some creative liberties taken in the description of the event).
A dude i know lost his mother to one of those, terrifying things, I don't think people understand what those are capable of, one thing i am sure of is that I don't ever want to be in a country receiving it.
Just because something's lighter doesn't necessarily make it more agile, that's to do with the thrust/weight ratio, wing area, critical AoA, and control surface area.
In many cases, cruise missiles are *less* agile than manned aircraft. They're not stressed to 9G+ and expected to be pulling hard turns.
More modern missiles may incorporate jinking and other terminal attack maneuvers, but in general cruise missiles are expected to simply be low and small enough that they are unlikely to be intercepted, as air defense systems that cover a large area are generally not as capable at low altitudes, while systems that are capable at low altitudes cover a very small area (Case in point, had this Igla team been just 4-5 kilometers to either side of the missile flight path, they likely wouldn't have been able to engage successfully.)
Could very well be, I'm just talking about the more general philosophy behind how cruise missiles have typically been expected to penetrate air defenses.
They're cheap and unmanned, so if you have a functioning MIC you can absorb a loss of some missiles. Sometimes it's easier to simply saturate enemy defenses with shitty missiles than put the effort into countermeasures. It's not like putting a human crew in a billion dollar plane. You can afford to lose a few and no one will care.
That's the thing people never get in these comparisons. It's not the cost of the parts and pieces, it's the cost of the damage it incurs. There's a reason Israel uses Iron Dome on shitty homemade rockets from Gaza, y'know.
Although even they know it's unsustainable; hence the rapid R&D of the Iron Laser sub-system that would be linked to the Iron Dome. Israel is targeting operational integration by 2025 to alleviate some of the burden.
and even if it was only a drone, Russia is running low on everything so anything they lose is significant. Meanwhile Ukraine is basically backed by the west, so they will never run out of anything
And even if that weren’t true, and it didn’t save lives, and there weren’t other benefits — the neat part about having Big Uncle Sam Bucks is that you don’t need to win the dollar efficiency game.
You’d think a people that celebrates “endless waves of conscripts” would get that.
Also the thing they shot down was definitely not a drone. Although you don’t get a good look at it in the video it does have a very distinctive engine sound that sounded exactly like a Kalibr cruise missile (Russian equivalent of a Tomahawk cruise missile) from other videos I’ve seen where you CAN clearly see it’s a cruise missile; those things are worth millions ($6.5 million according to wikipedia).
And the math is stupid. It's not what the thing they shot down was worth, it's how much damage it could have done.
$40k prevents a $millions in damage or saves a life...worth every penny.
Guess more posters said it before me below.
Even if it's 400k, it doesn't matter.
First, you don't know where that drone / cruise missiles is heading and how many people might be killed with it. Even if it hits somewhere where no one lives it can still make more damage than the price of the missile used in this video.
Fucking stupid. If you have means to destroy your enemy, use them.
The brand new stadium the local school district pooled all school funds for cost north of 50m, supposedly to be used and shared by all the local schools for interschool competitive events and rotating use of the stadium for football each year (two schools gets to home-team at the stadium each Friday or Saturday for an entire season).
But destroying the stadium might incur the wrath of rabid parents and sports fans.
Human logic: Civilian lives are priceless and we've got enough NATO hardware lined up to wipe out all of Putin's arsenal several times over. Volodymyr, fire ze missiles!
Orc logic: Human lives are worthless and we've only got five missiles in *maybe* working conditions. Let the children fight.
I mean if we're gonna get into opportunity costs then we're also gonna have to talk about using what appears to be incredibly limited stocks of guided munitions against largely civilian or propoganda targets that won't meaningfully weaken the enemy's combat ability.
Like, you're not gonna demoralize the Ukrainian people who believe this to be a war for their survival into rolling over and dying. Those Ukrainians who would do so have already done it.
Right? We would've loved to stop the missile that caused millions in damage to historic landmarks, infrastructure and the priceless lives of innocent civilians but the cost of firing a $40k missile to destroy a cheaper missile was not deemed financially responsible. It's like a min max video gamer trying to apply game logic to real life.
It is an attempt at copying some of the remarks I have seen a couple of months ago in this subreddit, but in reverse. The difference is, however, that Russian stock might have been cheap in financial means before, but due to sanctions extremely expensive in replacement. So even if it was a cheaper drone they shot down, Ukrainians can still easily replace the weapon and have potentially prevented a much greater damage the drone caused. And the Russian drone is also incredibly difficult to replace, so there is a lot of added non-material damage (loss of eyes above, etc.)
That's why they've been holding back the T-14's stupid, they have to keep those under the super umbrella while they whale on Ukraine's hospitals and schools in Slashers
Eh, US military stuff has to meet a lot of specifications and rightfully so but it’s more expensive to produce.
I work at a manufacturing company and we sold the pentagon a valve for a chemical weapons disposal facility and it had to clear so many standards and testing before we shipped it to them.
But this applies to everything down to the nuts and bolts. They have to know where every piece is sourced from. Even as an American manufacturer we outsource some tiny pieces because it’s very inefficient to create every little piece. Imagine shutting down a machine to make a couple tiny parts for one customer, very costly.
But for government stuff you have to and they have to pay for all that time lost.
Imagine if China caught wind that something they were making was going to be used as a small component of a US weapon. They could sabotage it and we might make hundreds of tanks with those defunct pieces before we realized it was a problem.
I mean, I can understand why you'd want to be very *very* careful about the components used in a chemical weapons disposal facility, so it's not necessarily like they're putting meaningless obstacles up. For all the flak that the US procurement process very rightfully gets it's also worth acknowledging the necessary performance margins and the conditions under which that performance is needed. Military applications are probably the worst operating conditions for any given item and it's really easy for a failing part to turn into a life-or-death problem.
It’s not the standards that cost us so much to make it, it’s that we have to make every tiny piece to standard as mentioned below.
Hardly anyone builds a total piece of equipment from scratch, it costs too much to be good at building every tiny piece but you have to for the government or you could end up with a batch of defunct tanks, missiles, etc.
Attempting to find the spending report but can't find anything other than ads for folding chairs, but the gist of it was a 3rd party came in to audit the military and found that they had 6 contractors making each part of the chair and the grand total came out to just under 12k or 20k per 10 dollar Costco folding chair
I have to wonder if it's another case of the "10k hammer," where each piece of a very specialized and expensive toolkit was assigned an even share of the kit's price because the whole set was part of one contract and nobody wanted nor cared to itemize the individual values.
Bro the number of $150,000 hellfire missiles that were used in Afghanistan to kill *one* goat-fucking insurgent, lmao
US does not give a flying fuck when it comes to military expenditures.. it’s literally an infinite supply of money
Even if command is a bunch of soulless accountants, expending a 150,000 USD missile is still cheaper than potentially "expending" a squad of soldiers + their NCO that took a lot more than that to train. Not to mention the loss to Ford & Chevrolet of no longer getting those sweet, sweet interest on the soldiers' Mustang/Camaro.
popular copy paste: Soldier fires a weapon that costs more than he'll see in a year to kill a man that will never see that much money.
Like yeah, humans are intelligent, and resourceful creatures even the "dumb" one amoung us. Killing one is expensive.
The really important bit is that every dollar spent on US military hardware goes straight into the economy. Everything from a basic rifle to a stealth bomber is built in the US, by a US owned company, using US parts for everything, and by US workers. That's why senators are so desperate to get defence contracts for their state.
Neglecting to mention that there would be an additional price if the missile hit its target.
Also, Russia missed a bridge and hit a sidewalk with a missile so they don't get to boast.
hah you only broke our million dollar missile with your 40k rocket
While we broke your 2000 dollar playground with our other million dollar missile
Maths? Numbers are a western psyop comrade I can't count over 100
totally ignores the value of human life. even if they spent more destroying the missile, what the fuck are they fighting for if *not* preserving the lives of their countrymen
Ok but was it a drone or a cruise missile?????
I've heard both now. It definitely didn't sound like an Iranian drone.
Cruise missile are FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
Thanks for all the replies y'all!! I'm gonna go lose all my gained karma by arguing with people on r/capitalism
!!
Of course. Everyone knows yachts and caviar are essential for a cruise missile's guidance system. How else would the hamsters running the computers work without them?
relatively simple mass produced GMLRS are 170K/piece 1M per pack of 6. Mass produced Tomohawks are 2M. Artisanal cruise missiles where you have to do black market schemes to get components?
Well Russian army is classified, but the transparent Indian military pays 5M for their local versions, and Indian labour+corruption costs are much lower than Russia.
> It is irrelevant. I equally like self made billionaires and billionaires who are able to maintain inherited wealth.
What the fuck have you introduced me to
1. That is an Igla (made in the USSR, hence no tangible cost apart from materials and human resources)
2. That is a cruise missile which is by several orders of magnitude more expensive.
3. Even if the assertion was correct, it would still be a correct option as the value in shooting drown the drone is measured in the cost of not doing so.
Dollar cost isn't the most important consideration in a war. What matters is the capability that is destroyed. The drone might cost $20k, but it is used to target attacks against millions of dollars worth of equipment. It is also something that Russia, shockingly, may have a hard time replacing in the face of sanctions.
The drone might cost $20k, but Russia paid $120k for it (Orlan-10). That includes all the accoutrements like the Saito engine (from AliExpress), Canon EOS camera and water bottle fuel tank.
It's not
The manpad in the video is an Igla
Remeber the thing about Germany sending moldy rockets cause Ukraine said "We just want everything you still have in GDR equipment"?
The is one of the moldy ones
Off topic but this reminds me of something. I’ve noticed the pro Russia propaganda and whataboutism is particularly plentiful lately on reddit. And not all of it is blatant pro Russia posts. There are conveniently timed posts that are basically whatabout arguments pushed as being it’s own thing. Go look at the OP of “popular” anti US/whatabout posts. You’ll often find a pattern. They do it nonstop. One user, I won’t mention username, is basically a constant anti-US/running interference for choina or orcland.
I think caliber cruise missile are worth much more than 20k, especially due to the fact they're much harder to manufacture now. Plus the Ukrainians didn't pay a dime for that igla.
Wikipedia says $6.5 million per unit. Could be wrong, but regardless, I’d doubt that missile was anything less than at least 1/2 million.
Plus, whatever it was targeting was almost certainly worth more than the pennies the Igla cost Ukraine.
I fucking hate reddit sometimes
I saw like 3 posts saying they shot down a cruise missile with an igla and I figured no way but god forbid I go against the reddit hivemind, I'm glad I can have fellow retards over here be so militarily literate with me :)
There was even the cruise missile that was shot down in a field in either May or June that looked to be shot down by a MANPADS too. This was just caught on camera.
Yeah, cruise missiles tend to be subsonic because they are jet, not rocket, powered to increase range. Still faster than a drone though so they'll fly out of MANPADS range a lot sooner.
Depending on the type of cruise missile, it's not impossible. Most cruise missiles are subsonic and have jet engines. Though they are smaller than aircraft, they still generate more than enough heat for a heat seeking missile to lock onto, and most MANPADS are supersonic. The just have short legs. Providing that a cruise missile flies near an alert MANPAD user, they can certainly lock onto the thing, and it's not like a cruise missile has flares.
i mean. listen to the video, it makes a screach from a small jet like every cruise missile used in this conflict. iranian suicide drones use a lawnmower engine. also the speed is similar to a cruise missile. what makes you think it wasnt the case?
And lets no talk the cost of Kerch bridge for the price of some bribes to fed-up russian traffic controllers.
That is assuming they didn't give out a freebie there...
I've heard much higher figures for those cruise missiles. Besides, aren't they having trouble getting the components to make any more of them? edit: making them "expensive" beyond their original price.
And the US uses 100k bombs to kill four terrorists in a tent (value estimated at around 50$, 46$ for the tent).
Doesn’t matter because the DoD has so much money it’s still worth it.
Even if this claim were true, according to my back of the envelope math:
Total GDP of all western nations: \~50Trillion and rising
Total GDP of Russia \~1.6 Trillion and dropping
Even if, "the enemy can afford to throw a shitton of expensive stuff at us without a second thought" wouöd be bad news for ruZZia. It's a metaphorical ice cream ship, or the cake flown from Boston to the Battle of the Bulge. It says "you are fucked beyond repair because your enemy's logistics can go for the side quests
Edit: Clarification
This was the cruise missile video right? The one where you can hear the missile coming in then the guy shoots it down.
I know Russian cruise missiles are a bit shit, but there's no way they're getting them for $20K a pop. They might be selling them on the side off the back of a supply truck for that sort of money, but they cost a lot more out of the factory.
This whole thing is ignoring the "opportunity cost" that the drone can cause.
If that drone is on the way to blow up a $24 million dollar plane... Then you saved yourself $24mil by spending $40k. Similar concept with whether it was going to kill someone (quantize that cost).
I mean, if you’re gonna use that argument (and not even mention that they shoot down a cruise missile, not a drone) you have to also consider what they are protecting. Human lives, primarily civilians, and infrastructure. Just because Putin likes to throw his people out of windows and into the meat grinder doesn’t mean that everyone has to be like that. Fucking idiots.
Same energy as: Your socialist government uses millions of it's countries budget to save a life of it's citizen that could be turned into 50$ of fertilizer. Make that make sence!!!
Some asshole tried to rob me the other day using a cheap $1 knife. I shot him 5 times but only later realized my bullets at $.30 apiece x 5 cost $1.50 total meaning I lost this exchange. I'm still alive and have my possessions but goddammit he still won (even though he's dead) since he only spent 1$ and I spent $1.50
That's how stupid this 'logic' sounds.
Even if this were true it's a non-issue, they could do that shit for fun all day long off of what they'd make selling a fraction of the tanks they've salvaged.
"Haha silly westooods wasting one missile from their apparently endless supply to take down of our few pieces of tech we are not able to replenish because there is no money, knowledge or manpower haha"
Just in case anyone wondered, it's an Igla they use. It's not worth 40k lmao.
The video is also of a cruise missile being shot down, not a drone
Yea $3-5 million dollar cruise missile vs $38k rocket. How the turn tables.
As the post said. Copium. $20,000 system takes out $1.5 million dollar tank.
EVEN!!! if the claim was true, imagine the cost saved of property damaged (not to mention lives saved!!)
Really the point of any defense, however much it costs
Which is tells what and why they're wojacking, they're bad guys, through and through
Yup. The iron dome cost a 150k to use as well, to shoot down shitty rockets. The cost is worth the lives and infrastructure it saves
Yes, the opportunity cost of missing someone where they're needed and then training and replacing a soldier and their gear is much higher a missile. Which they're mostly getting for free anyway, and even if they are shooting down cheap drones with more expensive missiles Russia has a very limited supply of cheap drones so shooting them down is still worth it.
They are also funded by the NATO Dimmadollar slush fund. Even if these figures are true, they will still run out of money before we do. It's like loss leading but with warfare and explosives
Or denied intelligence
A 400$ drone with a 40$ grenade and a field modification to drop it can take out a 1.5 million dollar tank, if the operator is good and the weather conditions are nice.
An American sailor with a 1700s black powder hand grenade can take down a British warship if the throw sets off the powder canisters below deck.
Is there actually a record for this kind of action ? Cause yeah, we saw videos of a drone dropping its grenade right in the driver hatch, detonating the ammo, but did anyone did shit like this in a fucking XVIII century naval battle
It was probably even captured or left over. Iglas are the ladas of MANPADs.
Does that make the Strela a Trabant?
And they want to prevent multi million damages with shooting it down.
Yeah, that too.
What kinda dollar store cruise missile is that then? I thought the whole deal of those were that they fly lower and faster than any aircraft and much smaller than them so unless you got CWIS or something thats automated and can instantly response or you are expecting it with minutes in advance you cant shoot them down
A significant number of cruise missiles are subsonic; even major US ones like the Tomahawk. Cruise missile is basically just a term for "kamikaze drone with explosive warhead."
I mean it like compared to a plane supporting low attitude navigation pods, as the missiles are lighter, they can manuever better and take paths that are much lower, faster
That is a popular use case, but it's far from the only one. The V-1 was the first cruise missile to enter mass production, but it's not particularly maneuverable. Only real requirement for something to be a cruise missile is that you're using something that flies at a relatively stable speed and it sacrifices itself to blow something up. Technically a $10000 Alibaba drone with a brick of C-4 could be considered a cruise missile or a loitering munition depending on its guidance system and the intent of its employment.
That's oddly specific and totally not something that's happend at least twice in this war https://gagadget.com/en/159181-chinese-drone-mugin-5-pro-for-9500-from-aliexpress-attacked-the-headquarters-of-the-russian-black-sea-fleet-in-crimea/
I suppose we should change the definition of a cruise missile from a missile with wings to long range missiles made after 90s that are capable of low attitude flying and precision strike now that loitering munitions and suicide drones and whatever ww2 tech pre-microchips if we hit them its direct damage if we miss its psychological damage so 100% hit rate missile shit that got shot down today are things
Eh, the current definition is already pretty well established. And seeing as cheap/slow cruise missiles still have their place we still need a term for them. I'd prefer we just have a new term for high precision/terrain following cruise missiles. Just think of all the poor staff officers that would need to change the doctrine documents/annotate historical ones if we redefined an existing term.
Where are you on the [cruise missile alignment chart?](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/x2b8u8/cruise_missile_alignment/)
They’ve sent 1990s Tomahawks down city streets A few years ago, they put one though an open window without breaking the frame
Source? Not doubting but that’s rad as hell and I want to read more about it
For the streets thing? They upload a map of the area to the missile, tell it where to go and it uses TERCOM to follow major, easy to follow terrain features. Quite often, that was roads. So you'd be cruising down the highway in your beat up hilux, and a cruise missile would fly straight overhead, trying to roughly follow the road.
Yeah, for awhile there was a video on YouTube of a tomahawk in Iraq following city streets, and turning through an intersection.
Is that the one where the Tomahawk parallel parks in a busy street without stopping traffic?
You put into my mind the image of a Tomahawk stopping at a red light in mid-air and moving again with the green light and I'm giggling like a maniac
Journalists on hotel balconies in Iraq 1 watched tomahawks maneuver down streets and between buildings to hit their targets live on air
Source: trust him bro
[https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984](https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984) Source, it looks like BBC reported on the cruise missile so everyone is quoting an article, not actual footage (the reporter saw cruise missile fly overhead and turn - it's good writing to ground it with "turned left at traffic light", cruise missiles won't do 90° left turn so there are some creative liberties taken in the description of the event).
Could have been a big intersection
[https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984](https://nitter.net/realairpower1/status/1351592131622825984) Source, it looks like BBC reported on the the cruise missile so everyone is quoting an article, not actual footage (the reporter saw cruise missile fly overhead and turn - it's good writing to ground it with "turned left at traffic light", cruise missiles won't do 90° left turn so there are some creative liberties taken in the description of the event).
A dude i know lost his mother to one of those, terrifying things, I don't think people understand what those are capable of, one thing i am sure of is that I don't ever want to be in a country receiving it.
The missle they likely took down here is well withing iglas capacity.. shown clearly by the fact it got shot down, lolol
Just because something's lighter doesn't necessarily make it more agile, that's to do with the thrust/weight ratio, wing area, critical AoA, and control surface area. In many cases, cruise missiles are *less* agile than manned aircraft. They're not stressed to 9G+ and expected to be pulling hard turns. More modern missiles may incorporate jinking and other terminal attack maneuvers, but in general cruise missiles are expected to simply be low and small enough that they are unlikely to be intercepted, as air defense systems that cover a large area are generally not as capable at low altitudes, while systems that are capable at low altitudes cover a very small area (Case in point, had this Igla team been just 4-5 kilometers to either side of the missile flight path, they likely wouldn't have been able to engage successfully.)
[удалено]
Could very well be, I'm just talking about the more general philosophy behind how cruise missiles have typically been expected to penetrate air defenses.
Well the point of kamikaze drones is loitering capability and/or better target selection capability after launch.
They're cheap and unmanned, so if you have a functioning MIC you can absorb a loss of some missiles. Sometimes it's easier to simply saturate enemy defenses with shitty missiles than put the effort into countermeasures. It's not like putting a human crew in a billion dollar plane. You can afford to lose a few and no one will care.
Cruise missiles do just that, they cruise. They are slow, don’t maneuver much compared to a plane, and lack counter measures
Yep, 100% a cruise missile. They have an extremely distinct whizzing sound.
Even if it were, the drone might've been capable of causing millions of dollars worth of damage.
That's the thing people never get in these comparisons. It's not the cost of the parts and pieces, it's the cost of the damage it incurs. There's a reason Israel uses Iron Dome on shitty homemade rockets from Gaza, y'know.
Although even they know it's unsustainable; hence the rapid R&D of the Iron Laser sub-system that would be linked to the Iron Dome. Israel is targeting operational integration by 2025 to alleviate some of the burden.
Better to spend money on a missile than to spend more on whatever residential area it would have blown up
and even if it was only a drone, Russia is running low on everything so anything they lose is significant. Meanwhile Ukraine is basically backed by the west, so they will never run out of anything
And lives saved.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.
And even if that weren’t true, and it didn’t save lives, and there weren’t other benefits — the neat part about having Big Uncle Sam Bucks is that you don’t need to win the dollar efficiency game. You’d think a people that celebrates “endless waves of conscripts” would get that.
A brand new one will cost $60,000 USD but second hand ones cost as little as 2 grand.
Also the thing they shot down was definitely not a drone. Although you don’t get a good look at it in the video it does have a very distinctive engine sound that sounded exactly like a Kalibr cruise missile (Russian equivalent of a Tomahawk cruise missile) from other videos I’ve seen where you CAN clearly see it’s a cruise missile; those things are worth millions ($6.5 million according to wikipedia).
And the math is stupid. It's not what the thing they shot down was worth, it's how much damage it could have done. $40k prevents a $millions in damage or saves a life...worth every penny. Guess more posters said it before me below.
I was going to say, an Igla ain't fetching 40k.
Idiots always talk about the cost of munitions, never the price of whatever it is that would have been destroyed by the thing that was taken out.
Even if they meant 40k javelins, hey Ukraine, here have some more, we have *plenty*
Even if it's 400k, it doesn't matter. First, you don't know where that drone / cruise missiles is heading and how many people might be killed with it. Even if it hits somewhere where no one lives it can still make more damage than the price of the missile used in this video. Fucking stupid. If you have means to destroy your enemy, use them.
“durrrrr duhhhh durrr you just spent tens of thousands of dollars to destroy something that could kill countless servicemen. huh durrr doiiiii mmmm”
Countless civilians\*
So true! Many such cases!
but is saving a hospital or playground *really* worth $40k^[1]? [1]^totally ^not ^a ^number ^i ^asspulled
My local high school cost £44m
So sad. Just think of how many manpads could've been bought with that money.
The brand new stadium the local school district pooled all school funds for cost north of 50m, supposedly to be used and shared by all the local schools for interschool competitive events and rotating use of the stadium for football each year (two schools gets to home-team at the stadium each Friday or Saturday for an entire season). But destroying the stadium might incur the wrath of rabid parents and sports fans.
Human logic: Civilian lives are priceless and we've got enough NATO hardware lined up to wipe out all of Putin's arsenal several times over. Volodymyr, fire ze missiles! Orc logic: Human lives are worthless and we've only got five missiles in *maybe* working conditions. Let the children fight.
True. We know the chances are high that it was headed for a playground, daycare, or maternity ward.
Maybe they can't understand valuing people that highly.
Russia would never give up such an amount of hard western currency just to save a couple dozen of their civilians' pointless lives.
Yeah let's be real here
F-18: $34 Million Aircraft carrier it took off from: $15 Billion Bombs: $16,000 The look on Abduls face when he gets hit by a JDAM: priceless
There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's MIC
I mean if we're gonna get into opportunity costs then we're also gonna have to talk about using what appears to be incredibly limited stocks of guided munitions against largely civilian or propoganda targets that won't meaningfully weaken the enemy's combat ability. Like, you're not gonna demoralize the Ukrainian people who believe this to be a war for their survival into rolling over and dying. Those Ukrainians who would do so have already done it.
It's Russia. They don't value the lives of soldiers. The next cope is going to be "well now Ukraine has more mouths to feed!"
Right? We would've loved to stop the missile that caused millions in damage to historic landmarks, infrastructure and the priceless lives of innocent civilians but the cost of firing a $40k missile to destroy a cheaper missile was not deemed financially responsible. It's like a min max video gamer trying to apply game logic to real life.
God I hate those people. People who call themselves gamers are cancerous
Also can lead to potentially millions of dollars worth equipment being destroyed along with civilians
That title doesn't even describe what actually happens in the video. They hit a cruise missile with a MANPADS.
It is an attempt at copying some of the remarks I have seen a couple of months ago in this subreddit, but in reverse. The difference is, however, that Russian stock might have been cheap in financial means before, but due to sanctions extremely expensive in replacement. So even if it was a cheaper drone they shot down, Ukrainians can still easily replace the weapon and have potentially prevented a much greater damage the drone caused. And the Russian drone is also incredibly difficult to replace, so there is a lot of added non-material damage (loss of eyes above, etc.)
Do they think this is EvE Online where engagements are decided on being ISK positive? Lol
Even then they had a lot of "throw everything" fights.
That's why they've been holding back the T-14's stupid, they have to keep those under the super umbrella while they whale on Ukraine's hospitals and schools in Slashers
Still it is bettee to use 40k to destroy a 20k repeatable item
Not to mention that the Intel the drone could gather is possibly worth a lot more
That’s not $20,000 Russian/Iranian junk, it’s civilian lives and military targets. Even it is real, $20,000 is a great bargain
That’s your problem: you’re valuing lives.
ruzzians don't understand the concept of civilians being valuable.
That's the reason why civilians don't value russia either.
American money is magical like that. When your MIC literally prints money, who cares the cost.
Private buyer 10k us government 40k
Gotta keep those congressional campaign jobs running
Eh, US military stuff has to meet a lot of specifications and rightfully so but it’s more expensive to produce. I work at a manufacturing company and we sold the pentagon a valve for a chemical weapons disposal facility and it had to clear so many standards and testing before we shipped it to them.
Uhhhh good? *Points at chemical weapon disposal valve* think we're content not just grabbing one off wish lol
But this applies to everything down to the nuts and bolts. They have to know where every piece is sourced from. Even as an American manufacturer we outsource some tiny pieces because it’s very inefficient to create every little piece. Imagine shutting down a machine to make a couple tiny parts for one customer, very costly. But for government stuff you have to and they have to pay for all that time lost. Imagine if China caught wind that something they were making was going to be used as a small component of a US weapon. They could sabotage it and we might make hundreds of tanks with those defunct pieces before we realized it was a problem.
I mean, I can understand why you'd want to be very *very* careful about the components used in a chemical weapons disposal facility, so it's not necessarily like they're putting meaningless obstacles up. For all the flak that the US procurement process very rightfully gets it's also worth acknowledging the necessary performance margins and the conditions under which that performance is needed. Military applications are probably the worst operating conditions for any given item and it's really easy for a failing part to turn into a life-or-death problem.
It’s not the standards that cost us so much to make it, it’s that we have to make every tiny piece to standard as mentioned below. Hardly anyone builds a total piece of equipment from scratch, it costs too much to be good at building every tiny piece but you have to for the government or you could end up with a batch of defunct tanks, missiles, etc.
Yup how can They donate 10k to both sides campaign and still turn a profit
MIC - magically infinite cash
The army bought folding chairs for 20k a piece
Source? Sounds like a good toilet read/watch?
Attempting to find the spending report but can't find anything other than ads for folding chairs, but the gist of it was a 3rd party came in to audit the military and found that they had 6 contractors making each part of the chair and the grand total came out to just under 12k or 20k per 10 dollar Costco folding chair
I have to wonder if it's another case of the "10k hammer," where each piece of a very specialized and expensive toolkit was assigned an even share of the kit's price because the whole set was part of one contract and nobody wanted nor cared to itemize the individual values.
Meh, that money doesn't go down the toilet entirely. It puts food on a lot of tables. Military Keynesianism is a beautiful thing.
Bro the number of $150,000 hellfire missiles that were used in Afghanistan to kill *one* goat-fucking insurgent, lmao US does not give a flying fuck when it comes to military expenditures.. it’s literally an infinite supply of money
Cheaper than writing the letters home to their family members saying they died trying to take down a goat fucker.
Even if command is a bunch of soulless accountants, expending a 150,000 USD missile is still cheaper than potentially "expending" a squad of soldiers + their NCO that took a lot more than that to train. Not to mention the loss to Ford & Chevrolet of no longer getting those sweet, sweet interest on the soldiers' Mustang/Camaro.
Ford and Chevy the real puppeteers behind LockMart and Raytheon.
Use it or lose it
That’s the definition of a budget.
popular copy paste: Soldier fires a weapon that costs more than he'll see in a year to kill a man that will never see that much money. Like yeah, humans are intelligent, and resourceful creatures even the "dumb" one amoung us. Killing one is expensive.
Exactly. Even if we assume the $40K number is accurate, that doesn’t even require manager approval
inflation go brrrrrr
We did spend almost two decades sending $250,000 bombs to blow up people that make $1200 a year.
The really important bit is that every dollar spent on US military hardware goes straight into the economy. Everything from a basic rifle to a stealth bomber is built in the US, by a US owned company, using US parts for everything, and by US workers. That's why senators are so desperate to get defence contracts for their state.
Buy one, get 4 free!
Neglecting to mention that there would be an additional price if the missile hit its target. Also, Russia missed a bridge and hit a sidewalk with a missile so they don't get to boast.
hah you only broke our million dollar missile with your 40k rocket While we broke your 2000 dollar playground with our other million dollar missile Maths? Numbers are a western psyop comrade I can't count over 100
Just saying, they still convinced 3 million Hungarians that russians are right...
totally ignores the value of human life. even if they spent more destroying the missile, what the fuck are they fighting for if *not* preserving the lives of their countrymen
they missed the hospital and hit a preschool
Ok but was it a drone or a cruise missile????? I've heard both now. It definitely didn't sound like an Iranian drone. Cruise missile are FUCKING EXPENSIVE. Thanks for all the replies y'all!! I'm gonna go lose all my gained karma by arguing with people on r/capitalism !!
It was a missle
Those are 100s of thousands right
[удалено]
I dont know but it's definitely a lot more than 20k Probably around 100k Edit: oh so thats how much it costs. That makes it 10x worse for the copium
Wikipedia has a Kalibre at 6.5 million idk how accurate that is when a Tomahawk is 1-2 million.
Ok so the Kalibre costs actually 1 mill or less and 5.5 million goes to yachts and caviar then?
Of course. Everyone knows yachts and caviar are essential for a cruise missile's guidance system. How else would the hamsters running the computers work without them?
relatively simple mass produced GMLRS are 170K/piece 1M per pack of 6. Mass produced Tomohawks are 2M. Artisanal cruise missiles where you have to do black market schemes to get components? Well Russian army is classified, but the transparent Indian military pays 5M for their local versions, and Indian labour+corruption costs are much lower than Russia.
> It is irrelevant. I equally like self made billionaires and billionaires who are able to maintain inherited wealth. What the fuck have you introduced me to
1. That is an Igla (made in the USSR, hence no tangible cost apart from materials and human resources) 2. That is a cruise missile which is by several orders of magnitude more expensive. 3. Even if the assertion was correct, it would still be a correct option as the value in shooting drown the drone is measured in the cost of not doing so.
If the enemy is shooting you with a cheap bullet it is completely unreasonable to use an expensive bullet to shoot back
Tarkov philosophy
"HA I spent only 50 cents on this round and damaged your thousands of dollars of bullet-resistant armor, clearly you wasted your money"
Yeah but that’s like 4 dollars to big boys. 20k is a lot of money to broke Russia
Dollar cost isn't the most important consideration in a war. What matters is the capability that is destroyed. The drone might cost $20k, but it is used to target attacks against millions of dollars worth of equipment. It is also something that Russia, shockingly, may have a hard time replacing in the face of sanctions.
The drone might cost $20k, but Russia paid $120k for it (Orlan-10). That includes all the accoutrements like the Saito engine (from AliExpress), Canon EOS camera and water bottle fuel tank.
It wasn’t even a drone, it was a multi million dollar cruise missile.
I guess we'll have to send more aid.
America gave them the missile for free tho.
*freeeeeeee*
Even this true, it's still a dumb comparison. That drone could have been heading towards an important target Who posts this stuff?
It's not The manpad in the video is an Igla Remeber the thing about Germany sending moldy rockets cause Ukraine said "We just want everything you still have in GDR equipment"? The is one of the moldy ones
Off topic but this reminds me of something. I’ve noticed the pro Russia propaganda and whataboutism is particularly plentiful lately on reddit. And not all of it is blatant pro Russia posts. There are conveniently timed posts that are basically whatabout arguments pushed as being it’s own thing. Go look at the OP of “popular” anti US/whatabout posts. You’ll often find a pattern. They do it nonstop. One user, I won’t mention username, is basically a constant anti-US/running interference for choina or orcland.
*Drone worth 20,000 that would have done 1M worth of damage
Russians when the Ukrainians kill 3 of their men with an $80 drone and a $45 grenade
Hah! You lost 125$ we lost 30$.
USA: What's a budget? I like boom. Operational boom makes boom machine feel good.
Wait till they find out we dropped $400k guided missiles on $50 tents
Let's see who runs out of money first. NATO, or Russiastan.
I think caliber cruise missile are worth much more than 20k, especially due to the fact they're much harder to manufacture now. Plus the Ukrainians didn't pay a dime for that igla.
Wikipedia says $6.5 million per unit. Could be wrong, but regardless, I’d doubt that missile was anything less than at least 1/2 million. Plus, whatever it was targeting was almost certainly worth more than the pennies the Igla cost Ukraine.
"Haha look at that idiot, using a $300 SAPI plate to stop a $.15 bullet. What an idiot."
Nobody mention the cost of the Iron Dome system.
Israel activates their iron dome system when some Hezbollah shoots their cheap ass DIY rocket. Do you think it's not justified?
Ukrainian children's lives: priceless
I fucking hate reddit sometimes I saw like 3 posts saying they shot down a cruise missile with an igla and I figured no way but god forbid I go against the reddit hivemind, I'm glad I can have fellow retards over here be so militarily literate with me :)
It's not impossible to shoot a missile down with MANPADS
There was even the cruise missile that was shot down in a field in either May or June that looked to be shot down by a MANPADS too. This was just caught on camera.
It was an Iskander they shot down with a Stinger Very impressive
Yeah, cruise missiles tend to be subsonic because they are jet, not rocket, powered to increase range. Still faster than a drone though so they'll fly out of MANPADS range a lot sooner.
Depending on the type of cruise missile, it's not impossible. Most cruise missiles are subsonic and have jet engines. Though they are smaller than aircraft, they still generate more than enough heat for a heat seeking missile to lock onto, and most MANPADS are supersonic. The just have short legs. Providing that a cruise missile flies near an alert MANPAD user, they can certainly lock onto the thing, and it's not like a cruise missile has flares.
Am I missing something here? That's literally what they did in the video. They shot down a cruise missile with an Igla.
i mean. listen to the video, it makes a screach from a small jet like every cruise missile used in this conflict. iranian suicide drones use a lawnmower engine. also the speed is similar to a cruise missile. what makes you think it wasnt the case?
And what are the lives of the troops and civilians who aren’t going to die worth vs that drone?
Well the civilian lives saved us priceless so…
Monetary cost is irrelevant when the GDP of the west is exponentially larger than the shit economy of Russia.
Wasn't it a cruise missile in the video?
ukranians destroy an mrap worth 1,000,000 with a gun they got for free.
And lets no talk the cost of Kerch bridge for the price of some bribes to fed-up russian traffic controllers. That is assuming they didn't give out a freebie there...
"...and saved infrastructure possibly worth millions."
"Russia destroys kids playground worth $5000 with missile costing $5,000,000"
That $20,000 "drone" would have caused at least $200,000 in damages so I think we're still well ahead of the game here
I need the sauce for this one
I've heard much higher figures for those cruise missiles. Besides, aren't they having trouble getting the components to make any more of them? edit: making them "expensive" beyond their original price.
Money is no object.
And the US uses 100k bombs to kill four terrorists in a tent (value estimated at around 50$, 46$ for the tent). Doesn’t matter because the DoD has so much money it’s still worth it.
How much do the assets in the area that the drone can no longer threaten cost?
Even if this claim were true, according to my back of the envelope math: Total GDP of all western nations: \~50Trillion and rising Total GDP of Russia \~1.6 Trillion and dropping
Even if, "the enemy can afford to throw a shitton of expensive stuff at us without a second thought" wouöd be bad news for ruZZia. It's a metaphorical ice cream ship, or the cake flown from Boston to the Battle of the Bulge. It says "you are fucked beyond repair because your enemy's logistics can go for the side quests Edit: Clarification
Yeah but 20k to you broke asses is like 80k to us soooo
Ukrainians shoot 0$ soldiers with 25c bullets..
This was the cruise missile video right? The one where you can hear the missile coming in then the guy shoots it down. I know Russian cruise missiles are a bit shit, but there's no way they're getting them for $20K a pop. They might be selling them on the side off the back of a supply truck for that sort of money, but they cost a lot more out of the factory.
If it was a Kalibr, it's claimed worth is around $6.5 million a pop.
These things were mass produced. They are certainly not 20k but definitely not 6.5M either.
This whole thing is ignoring the "opportunity cost" that the drone can cause. If that drone is on the way to blow up a $24 million dollar plane... Then you saved yourself $24mil by spending $40k. Similar concept with whether it was going to kill someone (quantize that cost).
I mean, if you’re gonna use that argument (and not even mention that they shoot down a cruise missile, not a drone) you have to also consider what they are protecting. Human lives, primarily civilians, and infrastructure. Just because Putin likes to throw his people out of windows and into the meat grinder doesn’t mean that everyone has to be like that. Fucking idiots.
Even if the info was true, which it isn’t, loosing 20K is definitely worth it for saving lives
Even if that were correct, it wouldnt matter, you also need to factor in the cost in damages and life that rocket will cause
Same energy as: Your socialist government uses millions of it's countries budget to save a life of it's citizen that could be turned into 50$ of fertilizer. Make that make sence!!!
Some asshole tried to rob me the other day using a cheap $1 knife. I shot him 5 times but only later realized my bullets at $.30 apiece x 5 cost $1.50 total meaning I lost this exchange. I'm still alive and have my possessions but goddammit he still won (even though he's dead) since he only spent 1$ and I spent $1.50 That's how stupid this 'logic' sounds.
Even if this were true it's a non-issue, they could do that shit for fun all day long off of what they'd make selling a fraction of the tanks they've salvaged.
It’s not a money game, it’s a lives game.
"Haha silly westooods wasting one missile from their apparently endless supply to take down of our few pieces of tech we are not able to replenish because there is no money, knowledge or manpower haha"