Anduril's product engineering machine

I can draw only 2 conclusions from this story:

- Anduril is overstating the effectiveness of their cheap and cheerful elbow grease solutions, and for example, you can't replicate the functionality of a Mach-whatever interceptor like the Patriot to shoot down a cruise missile with a cheap and slow drone that just tries to 'stand in its path'

- Anduril is replicating the cambrian explosion of combat systems (drones, jammers, whatnot), we've seen in the Russian/Ukraine war. These are made out of largely commercial components, or stuff that can be built in any well-equipped machine shops and commercially available components, and a country of .

Both can be true at the same time, but especially the latter should be concerning to the defense industries and militaries of the world. It means, that if systems build out of commercial components for hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars can either replicate or counter a large chunk of million to billion dollar systems, then that means that, huge parts of the defense expenditure conferred no advantage. Considering we saw columns of both Russian and Western tanks blown up, each worth millions, this I'm confident is true.

The other thing is that this means the US has lost its technological edge when fighting even third-tier militaries who decide to procure and manufacture these system. I'm sure after the war, the expertise to build these will be readily available on the market, and the components (both used by Anduril and these smalls shops) are nothing special.

> you can't replicate the functionality of a Mach-whatever interceptor like the Patriot to shoot down a cruise missile with a cheap and slow drone that just tries to 'stand in its path'

But they weren't trying to shoot down cruise missiles. They were shooting down drones.

From the article:

Consider the challenge of defending vast territories against cruise missiles. Conventional systems, like Patriot PAC-3 and NASAMS batteries, typically cost millions of dollars per installation. So we asked ourselves a simple question: What if we could create a forcefield of low-cost drones to intercept cruise missiles worth millions?

The concept seemed absurd at first, even to our team—the overmatch appeared too extreme. But we stripped the problem again to its fundamentals. Cruise missiles are fast, but they follow predictable flight paths. If we could accurately determine that flight path using two ground-based IR passive sensors (what we called Wide-Area Infrared System for Persistent Surveillance, or WISPs), we wouldn’t need expensive targeting systems on the interceptor itself.

We modified our Anvil drone to carry no sensors at all—the drone would simply position itself in the projected path of the incoming missile, aligning with where the missile would pierce our virtual “force field.” Despite the initial skepticism, we demonstrated the concept successfully, destroying a target that could fly an order of magnitude faster than our interceptor.