In the spotlight is South Korea’s home-grown surface-to-air missile, Cheongung, also known as M-SAM, which has emerged as a viable alternative to the US-made Patriot system as Gulf nations bolster defences against Iran’s barrage of drone and missile attacks.
The key selling point for manufacturers Hanwha Aerospace and LIG Nex1: similar performance to the US$4 million (S$5.1 million) Patriot PAC-3 missile for about a quarter of the price.
One of the weird problems of American weapons exports in the future is that the domestic market (the USA/the Pentagon) is so bloated, it’s entirely price-insensitive. It’s similar to the situation in health care - who is going to take the $200 hospital gown, when you can buy one from Temu for $2?
One of the lessons I learned during the Dot Com Bust in 2000 was that cheap infrastructure is a huge competitive advantage. All the startups that did Oracle on Sun Microsystems died, only the rack-mount cheapo servers running Linux/FreeBSD survived. Ukraine is showing how it’s done in drone warfare, South Korea apparently in SAM defense systems, I wonder what Taiwan has come up with.