S300 is very good AA, but in practice modern SEAD with a sizeable number of planes can outrange them and they're not great at protecting themselves. We saw this in India-Pakistan and seeing this again in Iran-USA. You can see more of a stale mate when they aren't getting outranged in Ukraine-Russia.

Air defense works in layers where each layer often covers for another. S300 is good, but it's just one piece of a useful anti air defense strategy.

There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.

The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.

It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.

There's a few of these guys that make posts about technology that doesn't materialize after a few years, they can be ignored. There are plenty of pro-China observers that offer grounded analysis of Chinese military-industrial base out there that don't make claims that China has unobtainium technology. /r/LessCredibleDefence has a shortlist of these propagandists.

Good question. I think China is undoubtedly far better than the US at advanced, cheap mass-production. So wouldn’t be surprising they could do that for the military too. Not to say the US couldn’t get better.

You don't have to assume: He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video.

Perhaps it'd be more difficult for him to broadcast if he had an anti-china perspective, but the content itself seems legitimate.

So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.

Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M

Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit.

I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?

> wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.

I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.

The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.

The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.

Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.

According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.

So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.

>"Do they hit their targets?"

Are you sure you want to find out?

> Nobody knows yet the true capabilities of the missile, but it doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter very much, the payload doesn’t matter very much. If it’s launched at a certain target in Tel Aviv, it still is going to hit something in Tel Aviv. The Israelis have no choice but to attempt an intercept, and will spend millions to do so

Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues

People thought the same on Iran, untouchable. China has the same air defense and tech as Iran, not effective in real world situations.

Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.

Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.

If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.

Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25

Or they bought a lambo, which is amazing, and goes really fast... but when you are out of gas, the Prius will keep going. :)

air defense is much more complicated and difficult to build.

Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.

Lasers have very limited applications, they have an inherent line of sight limits, and even the most powerful ship mounted lasers that can do like 50kW, take a minute to boil a kettle of water away, more if you wrap it in tinfoil.

And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.

Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.

Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.

Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].

In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.

[0] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf