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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Oh, right lets replace cheap simple and dumb artillery we can't produce with super complex guided missiles with 1/10000th the production capability.

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The rationale is that the ordnance on target ratio is way higher with missiles. 10,000 shells can be displaced by 100 missiles.

A conflict like Russia/Ukraine isn’t happening with the US. A US / Russia conflict would have resulted in US air supremacy or a nuclear exchange.

> 10,000 shells can be displaced by 100 missiles.

That might still be a bad tradeoff given that these 155mm shells are apparently $8,000 each, whereas a Storm Shadow is apparently $3,200,000 a pop.

You’re not hitting the same targets with a storm shadow

Plus, leveling the target area with dumb shells is not necessarily working, exhibit A the Western Front in WW1. And if said target area is a city, the leveling is kind of frowned upon nowadays (depending of course on who is levelling and who is being levelled).

The alternative is guided artillery shells. And those are damn expensive.

I read that the UK Storm Shadows are configured as bunker-busters, with two warheads - one for breaking into the bunker, one to explode inside it. The French Storm Shadows (can't remember what they call them) carry cluster warheads, which I suspect are more use to Ukraine during the current positional warfare.

The Russians apparently have 600 tanks queued up right now for an advance. And while apparently they don't use the tanks as mobile guns for their infantry there is probably a good number in support of those tanks, and it seems unlikely one would fire missiles at infantry. Which is why we were dumping 50 year old stockpiles of dumb bombs in Afganistan. Which leads to the question of how one maintains air superiority for flying bombers in the face of more advanced MANPADS...

Manpads: flying at high altitudes. AA: flying low.

But anyway, the golden bullet solutions is drones. /s

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