So much this. Reliability and durability only matters because the thing costs a million dollar a piece. When you have stuff with a mere 5-digits price tag or less, you simply don't care if half of them miss their mark or doesn't fire 10% of the time.
Half of munitions missing means doubling the logistical burden of delivering the munitions to where they need to be employed. The trucks/plains/ships that carry your munitions need to be fuelled and protected, too, so the expense is super-linear, especially when it's a distant war and not a war fought on the country's own soil, like in Ukraine.
Cheap munitions sometimes explode before they are launched, killing crews and destroying platforms.
Cheap munitions mean that CAS is a roulette. You waited for ten minutes for a support fire mission? Sorry, wait for ten more, whatever we launched has failed. Or maybe you're dead because the munition has hit you instead.
Cheap munitions can pin you down. Those cheap FPV drones that are supposedly cheaper than Javelins require dedicated immobile units to launch and guide to targets. Javelins are organic to infantry squads.
Cheap munitions are either very expensive or impossible. There's no cheap anti-ballistic missile and no cheap missile that can sink a warship in the Taiwan strait when launched[*] from Guam.
[*]: alright alright an LRASM would need to be flown closer by an F-35 but the point still stands
> Half of munitions missing means doubling the logistical burden of delivering the munitions to where they need to be employed
It means doubling the transport capacity, but not doubling the burden. A bunch of crates carrying 155mm shell (cheap munitions) is much easier logistically than a PAC-3 missile for the same weight.
> Cheap munitions sometimes explode before they are launched, killing crews and destroying platforms.
Ill designed/manufactured munitions do, but it's not proportional to cost (again, a 155mm shell is a cheap munition even though it's being manufactured and designed in a way to reduce the kind of risk you're talking about).
> Cheap munitions mean that CAS is a roulette. You waited for ten minutes for a support fire mission? Sorry, wait for ten more, whatever we launched has failed.
That's not how it works. You'd launch two at the same time to take the possibility of failure into account (in fact we already do that with expensive anti-air missiles).
> Or maybe you're dead because the munition has hit you instead
Every munition can do a blue on blue strike, we mitigate those through engagement rules, which are calibrated by weapon types.
> Cheap munitions can pin you down. Those cheap FPV drones that are supposedly cheaper than Javelins require dedicated immobile units to launch and guide to targets.
They don't "require" it, it's how they are being employed today in Ukraine. Notice that javelins have pretty much disappeared from the Ukrainian battlefield so it's really not a good comparison.
> Cheap munitions are either very expensive or impossible. There's no cheap anti-ballistic missile
And it's fine to use an expensive weapon for that reason. Nobody is saying no to all expensive weapons (nukes ain't cheap either).
> no cheap missile that can sink a warship in the Taiwan strait when launched[] from Guam.
> []: alright alright an LRASM would need to be flown closer by an F-35 but the point still stands
A Magura isn't a missile, but it has shown its capability of completely shutting down the Black Sea Fleet.
> It means doubling the transport capacity, but not doubling the burden
Which is my point, doubling the capacity at the end of the spear is more than double the burden. The scale is superlinear. The further out the front is (for the US, it's over at least one ocean), the more superlinear the scaling is.
> but it's not proportional to cost
You might've heard of the cheap North Korean shells exploding in barrels, destroying Russian howitzers. It is indeed very disproportional, that's why spending severalfold on better shells is a great tradeoff.
> You'd launch two at the same time to take the possibility of failure into account
It depends on the ability to launch two. Oftentimes it's impossible; cheap FPV drones interfere with each other, or maybe you don't have double the planes to fly CAS.
> how they are being employed today in Ukraine
It's logistically impossible to employ the kind of drones Ukraine is employing on the go and organically to infantry. Features and CONOPS that enable organic employment lead to a substantial increase in per-unit prices, see Rogue 1.
> A Magura isn't a missile, but it has shown its capability of completely shutting down the Black Sea Fleet.
It's three Black Seas worth of distance between Guam and the Taiwan strait. On top of that, nowadays those boats are pretty effectively countered. Overindexing on the war in Ukraine would be a mistake.
> You might've heard of the cheap North Korean shells exploding in barrels,
The problem comes from the shells being “North Koreans” not because they are cheap (and I don't know why you assume they are, by the way).
> or maybe you don't have double the planes to fly CAS.
Spoiler alert, western army do actually fly CAS missions with pairs of planes already!
> It's logistically impossible to employ the kind of drones Ukraine is employing on the go and organically to infantry.
Says who? The Ukrainians where doing just that two years ago, with FPV drones. The doctrine has evolved though because it didn't make much sense to do so in the first place! When you have stand-off munitions that can hit 10-30kms away, you don't give them to infantry to manage like you would for a short-range weapon, and instead you use specialized drone units that are responsible for CAS.
> It's three Black Seas worth of distance between Guam and the Taiwan strait.
You can deploy them from closer range using a ship like you'd do with F35 for AS missiles. And you don't need to attack from Guam in the first place if you're not afraid of the first strike on your assets worth billions of dollars and can disseminate them closer to the Taiwan straight.
> On top of that, nowadays those boats are pretty effectively countered
Lol. Tell that to the russians. The only effective counter they've found being to keep the remains of the fleet locked inside the Novorossiysk naval base (where they've been sitting ducks for flying drones attacks in recent days).
