Artillery is surprisingly inefficient.

It takes about 15 rounds of 155mm artillery per battlefield casualty. Each shot costs about $5k.

Robots like this might cost the same as a single artillery shot but have the ability to get multiple kills each.

It’s a cold arithmetic, but I guarantee you someone at DARPA is thinking and planning the future of warfare in these terms.

I thought you must be wrong - $5K for a dumb arty round?

But some googling indicates this is about right, and prices have even gone up since the Russian invasion.

I don't have real numbers for anything, but I tend to do analysis like the above quite often when evaluating business models. It's usually within a factor of 2x to 10x of being correct, so please don't take it as anything more than that:

A typical round weighs around 40 kilos or 100lbs. For reference, from a quick web search, as commodities:

- 100lbs of TNT would be around $500

- 100lbs of stainless steel is around $250

I'm not sure what materials go in (I'd assume better explosives and worse steel), but I think $250-$500 is a good estimate for price of raw commodities (not including anything beyond that).

I would at least double that for having those shaped into an artillery shell, and add the cost of non-commodities (like a detonator), and you're easily at $1000. I would at least double that for the raw cost of distribution, sales, shipping, and logistics, and other overhead. We're probably at $2000.

At that point, toss in 30% profit margin for everyone along the way (30% to manufacturer, 30% to distributor, etc.). You're probably now around $3500.

I think that's a bare minimum baseline for what it would take to get a very, very dumb shell. This goes up if you want:

- Anything at all fancy or high-tech

- War profits

- NREs covered (building a factory, which might be idle 95% of the time and spin up for wartime)

- Military inefficiencies

- Regulatory compliance, quality inspection, etc.

Etc.

You can hit $5k very easily.

That's a great analysis. I didn't think about the sheer quantities of materials needed.

As does counter-artillery. Fighting against a technologically-savvy opponent, you get off one shot and you're dead.

It's possible to know where the humans are but be unable to destroy them with commonly available artillery payloads due to them being well dug in with overhead protection.

These could swarm in the back door.

I don't know, loitering munitions are pretty much bringing a renaissance to the field of blowing people up.

Drones are a solution to the targeting problem: the operator watches through a live video link, identifies the target, then deploys weapons. (Drops grenade/launches Hellfire/navigates into the enemy)

This is why, despite being technically feasible, we haven't seen drone swarms yet. You can easily build 1000 drones, but you can't have 1000 channels of live video over radio back to 1000 drone operators.