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The MIM-104 Patriot missile is a surface-to-air system that combines an avant-garde radar with an interceptor missile. First deployed in 1980 as an anti-aircraft weapon, ballistic missile interception capability was gradually added and enhanced throughout the 1980s and 1990s, though its success rate in conflicts like the first Gulf War remain highly disputed.

But at to the lowest degree i Patriot missile had a confirmed hit, admitting not a very bonny one. Speaking at a military symposium this week, General David Perkins told the audience that one of our allies had successfully used a $three.4 1000000 Patriot missile to destroy a quadcopter drone estimated to cost $200.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6v7nfB5bV3E%26t%3D14m54s

The good news, I gauge, is that our continually upgraded anti-ballistic missile organization is uncommonly good at stopping the kind of drones yous tin pick upwardly at Best Purchase. The bad news is that firing a $3.four million missile to end a UAV is rather overkill. And while the military drones that the The states government uses are vastly more expensive and far more than capable than a bones quadcopter, even those quadcopters can conceivably acquit very modest payloads. In fact, they've already been used to drop grenades in Iraq. In one assail, 2 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were killed as a result.

The wrong side of asynchronous warfare

Ii dead fighters is scarcely what big-scale attacks are made of, the vast difference in cost betwixt what it might take to defend against such attacks versus what information technology costs to build the drones is worrisome. One of the biggest reasons why the Navy is working on transport-mounted lasers and railguns is considering conventional ammunition has get then expensive, particularly relative to the objects we're shooting at. When you lot're using weapons that cost tens of thousands to millions of dollars to shoot at things that tin exist bought for $50 to $500, it doesn't accept an accountant to see you've got a problem. The Pentagon'south fixation on aircraft carriers is a Common cold War carryover that ignores simply how susceptible those enormously expensive ships are compared to the costs of the weapons that could accident them out of the water, as Foxtrot Blastoff points out.

Utterback

Image by Mitch Utterback, caption by the BBC

I expect the F-35, when and if it finally debuts, will face a similar problem. Even if future F-35s manage an $85 one thousand thousand flyaway toll, even our nigh expensive drones are vastly cheaper — $vi.66 1000000 for the Army'south MQ-1C Grey Hawkeye and $xiv.75 1000000 for an MQ-9 Reaper. I'm not claiming that either of these vehicles would exist able to destroy an F-35 in combat — they aren't designed for that office. But the gap between the price-per-vehicle for each program suggests hereafter drones that were theoretically capable of downing an F-35 might exist dramatically less expensive than the F-35 itself.

It'due south still not articulate how this situation volition evolve in the time to come, merely the price ratios seem unlikely to favor the United states and its allies.