A Russian main battle tank costs about $5 million. A Javelin anti-tank missile costing $175,000 can destroy it.
Russia has committed about 2,000 of its roughly 12,000 tanks to its Ukraine invasion. Those tanks cost Russia ~$10 billion, not counting crew training costs, and given a Javelin kill rate of about 92%, according to my calculator $380 million worth of Javelins can destroy them all.
A country whose $10 billion investment in tanks can be neutralized with $380 million of missiles probably will run out of tanks before its enemy runs out of missiles.
It’s not only Javelins giving the Russians fits. AOL News says (here) that Ukraine is making “terrific” use of small, cheap Turkish drones that can “loiter over tanks and artillery and destroy them with devastatingly accurate missile fire.” Here again, having your expensive weapons neutralized with cheap weapons is a surefire way to lose a war.
It doesn’t end there. A Stinger missile costing $120,000 can bring down a $47 million Mig-29; during the Soviet-Afghan War, when the U.S. supplied Stingers to the Afghan resistance, the Soviets were forced to fly above 10,000 feet to preserve their aircraft and crews, which rendered their airpower all but useless.
News reports indicate Putin’s military adventure in Ukraine is turning a lot of the Russian army’s expensive hardware into scrap. As for what survives, what good is it if you can’t use it without losing it? That, it seems, is the situation they’re finding themselves in.
And they haven’t even met the U.S.-made $6,000 “Switchblade 300” kamikaze drone yet (see story here and watch video here). Or maybe they have, but don’t know it.
All that military spending on fancy hardware for nothing.
