Missile defense is NP-complete

It's a frankly insane piece of engineering, and that insanity is only multiplied by the fact that it works, and multiplied again by the fact that it works exceptionally well. No gimbal lock. No ball bearings.

"Actually it's really easy to precisely know your position and velocity in space, just float a special metal sphere in some fluid and touch it super gently"

I only know how exceptional it is because the video I linked above compared it's declassified specs to publicly available ring laser gyro specs. I am not a domain expert. There might be military inertial systems that beat even that nowadays. The US has been over-reliant on GPS guidance which is demonstrating it's weakness, but we used to be very very good at inertial platforms. However, that platform was so precise and accurate that improving it won't actually increase your missile accuracy that much. So maybe we have cheaper versions.

You probably know this but for trivia: Another standard ballistic missile position fix system is that they boost themselves up into space, and then take a moment to look at the stars, which is a remarkably workable system itself.

These floating balls of magic were essentially hand built, hand calibrated, with some components having upwards of 10k tests for verification. They cost several million dollars per system back in the 80s.

This is where a large portion of your tax dollars in the defense industry go: Paying very skilled americans to do very precise labor here in the US. General dynamics for example is about half the size of Pepsico, and takes a similar profit margin, but instead of overpriced water and potato products, we sometimes get the most advanced metrology money can produce.

APKWS launching from air is a stop-gap measure in any case. The detection range for Shahed-type drones is tenths of kilometers, not hundreds, like with fighter jets or big missiles. One cannot have that many fighter jets in the air all the time even without the threat of manpads.

But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.

The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.

> 10 attack drones

It seems as if you anticipate airplanes being destroyed at the same rate as drones? You're right, that doesn't work.

But the idea of airplanes with machine guns is it is cheap to destroy the drones.

Terminal maneuvering vs interceptor kinematics difficult don't scale same at same rate with speed increase, a few Gs on reentry is magnified on interceptor end, the physics is not fair between attacker/defender.

Higher threats are not exo atmosphere & midcourse that NGI targets, actual speculative high end threats (since we talking about speculative NGI capabilities) are hypersonic glide in upper atmosphere, which NGI can't target. It's even more extreme intercept problem, the intercept math for those class of threats is on paper even more lopsided against defender.

NGI basically ensure US keeps pace with modern penetration aids proliferation, i.e NKR tier adversaries if they ever improve RVs + decoys from shit tier to mid tier. Chevaline was 50 years ago, not really relevant example, since issue was really economics of decoys vs just spamming mirv. Regardless, NGI trying to maintain 3/4/5 interceptor ratio instead of 30/40/50/100s against exo threats, which on spectrum is low/medium end. It does 0 against actual future highend threats of glide phase interception, an entirely different category.

The unfairness goes both ways, but one way MUCH harder.

On terminal interception, RV weight less critical factor - the unfairness is RV kinematic requirements simply lower than KKV kinematic requirements, and ceiling where KKVs physically cannot intercept regardless of weight / sensor / motor quality is below theoretic ceiling for RV, and closer offense moves towards that ceiling (+speed, +maneuver even minor jiggles) the worse KKV approach (and economics) breaks down. Weight might be proxy for cost, i.e. salvo + interception math. Which is fair, but then we don't know NGI cost and we don't know if adversaries can simply build more missiles at lower cost to extend exchange ratio gap anyway.

On midcourse vs hypersonic, GPI like DEW vs high-end missiles is hypothetical/speculative interception stack, i.e. low technology readiness level, given actual harder interception physics / maneuver gap for non vacuum vs vacuum midcourse, there's no indication it will ever "work", i.e. stuck in TRL >In practice, the rate is substantially higher than 50%.

For exo atmosphere midcourse, in practice we don't have any solid data (more accurately in on paper none actually exist) on midcourse interception rates vs highend, i.e. tier1 missiles + penaids. Only data we have is highly scripted/goldilocks FTM44 without penaids on maximum convenient interception conditions/geometry. Since SPKK doesn't scale linearly vs missile or penaid performance, SPKK of single digit approaching 0 is not out of question for missiles with complex penaids or improved kinematics.

> decoys end up weighing roughly the same as warheads.

Due to tech limitations 30-50 years ago. Modern missiles have massively reduced size of penaids vs payload, i.e. Iskander miniaturized (6) EW/active spoofing penaids is like ~5% of the warhead weight. High end ICBMs speculated to have 30-50.

Chevaline/early decoys were bruteforce mass/physics mimicry methods, and tier1 powers like like UK/US figured better off stuffing actual warheads for strategic/nuclear under those conditions. VS less capable adversaries who may have to go warhead + penaid route due to limitations, i.e. lower end adversaries only ground/TEL leg and limited nuclear warheads #s, who'd much better off spreading limited warheads over many missiles with penaids then hedge on MIRV stuffing.

>splitting ... strategic threats

I think more useful to split strategic threats by levels, NGI is designed to stay at pace or ahead of mid/low end adversaries modernizing ballistic threats... which granted is basically everyone except PRC and maybe RU. VS high end adversaries, if we look at the speculative roadmap of hypersonic glide vs glide phase interceptor and high end penaids, in terms of technology readiness and implementation, the gap could very well be increasing, i.e. PLARF with mass hypersonic glides 5-10 years from now has much higher chance of overmatching GPI progress. AFAIK, there isn't even a PROPOSED midcourse interception solution(golden dome mostly tracking) vs powered glide (i.e. scramjets) with sustained maneuverability. The TLDR is short/medium term forecasted missile defense (i.e. GPI is 2035s) is not even in the same room as deployed/fielded highend missile offense (assuming they work) and not in the same building as forecasted (highend) short/medium term missile offense.