New 10x smaller, $300K cruise missile for US Armed Forces undergoes 1st flight test

Current anti-ship missiles weigh 3,000 pounds and cost about $3 million each. Ares claims that the company will sell such missiles for $300,000.

Compatible with existing launch platforms

According to Ares, these new cruise missiles will be compatible with existing launch platforms, deliver smaller payloads at high subsonic speeds, and take out ships hundreds of miles away. 

The company will initially focus on ground—and ship-launched variants but will expand into air-launched versions with extended ranges and different payloads.

Y Combinator Management, an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm, funds the company.

Jared Friedman, the founder of Y combinator, said in a social media post that two forces in the world make the development of such low-cost missiles a particularly good idea now: the current missile producers have become bloated and can’t meet demand, and drone ships mean the U.S. needs smaller missiles.

When Spacex entered space launch vehicles in 2002, Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed a duopoly. Similarly, Friedman said, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are the only two big players that supply cruise missiles today.

And just like when the ULA made all the space-launched rockets, the missiles these companies make have become bloated by years of cost-plus and no-bid contracts, he added. “As a result, the idiot index of missiles is extremely high, often over 100”.

“We also just can’t make nearly enough missiles.  Like other areas of our industrial base, our missile industry has severely atrophied. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, we launched 800 Tomahawks.  At today’s production rate, that would take us a decade to replenish,” Friedman said.

Taiwan’s crisis

The other problem is that anti-ship missiles only come in one size: big. Friedman said these missiles were designed to blow up huge destroyers, but the Chinese Navy frigates are much smaller. And now we have drone ships, and it makes no sense to take out a $200K drone ship with a $3M missile.”

While the world is focused on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world is much closer to a war in the Taiwan Strait than most people realize. “In a war with China, we would fire thousands of anti-ship missiles a week, and our stockpiles would run out in days,” Friedman added.

“The ability to produce enough missiles to be competitive is the best way to deter a war. The team at Ares went from starting the company to flying a test missile in 11 weeks. They’ve been able to move so fast because they’ve done it before—they’ve worked at two previous missile startups”.

A war with China in the Taiwan Strait would be nothing like what it is in Ukraine or the Middle East. 

Wargames within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and military experts agree that long-range anti-ship or cruise missiles would be the most useful weapons in such a conflict.

According to Ares, the U.S. is not adequately prepared. In a potential conflict, the stockpiles will run out in weeks, and the U.S. currently doesn’t have the industrial capacity to build at a rate that could win a war, much less deter China. 

Higher-ups in the DoD are waking up to the problem, and generals such as Major General Cameron Holt and officials such as Chairman of the House Select Committee on China Mike Gallagher have echoed this sentiment.

Recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that the U.S. weapons are too large and too expensive for the wars of today. 

The DoD needs smaller, less expensive cruise missiles, and lots of them.