Everybody is talking about drone warfare, which has democratized long-range, low-risk strikes on adversaries. 

Capabilities that used to be the exclusive province of major militaries with large, very capable air forces with stealth aircraft are now available to everyone, including countries like Iran and even terrorist groups living in medieval conditions like the Houthis. 

Even before Trump and Biden decided to ramp up their attacks on the Houthis, the US had spent nearly a billion dollars and expended a lot of hard-to-replace munitions to shoot down inexpensive drones that have been attacking commercial shipping and naval vessels, shutting down almost all shipping in the Red Sea. 

You can argue that the cost was worth it--it probably was, as Alex Hollings of Sandboxx News argued, but you can't argue that there aren't much better and cheaper ways to accomplish the task. Sending a multi-million dollar missile to shoot down a $25- or $50-thousand dollar drone is a bad exchange ratio, and finding a cheaper way to accomplish the task was necessary. 

And that cheaper way is here. Much cheaper, easier, and replaceable than an SM-3 or SM-6 missile that might be needed to fight China someday soon. Ammunition magazines are not infinitely stocked, resources are not unlimited, and our responsibilities extend far beyond ensuring that the sea lanes for European trade are kept open. The mission might be important, but it is not the only important mission.

Xi Jinping probably chuckled every time we fired a multi-million dollar missile to take down a Shahed drone. 

So I was intrigued when Alex described a new mission for the old, reliable, but not especially accurate unguided missile that has been in use for many decades. As with unguided bombs to which JDAM kits were installed, some clever engineers have managed to turn these rockets into drone killers that are remarkably cheap, reliable, and that give a modern fighter jet an amazing magazine of ammunition to take down drones at a rapid rate. 

Take a look at the massive drone attack on Israel in which a coalition of Middle Eastern countries and the United States collaborated to shoot down over 100 drones and missiles aimed at Israel. It was a grueling and expensive task to defend Israel from an overwhelming drone swarmed aimed at civilians. 

Most of the kills came from expending very expensive air-to-air missiles, and each aircraft can carry relatively few of them. The task was so urgent that many aircraft resorted to firing guns, with extremely limited ammunition and poor accuracy, endangering the aircraft and accomplishing relatively little compared to the time involved. 

Now the alternative has arrived. 

And that’s where the AGR-20 FALCO, also known as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (or APKWS II), comes in. Rather than using multi-million-dollar interceptors like the Navy’s SM-6, or even pricy air-to-air missiles like the Sidewinder or AMRAAM, the AGR-20 is effectively a cheap 70mm Hydra unguided rocket married up to the semi-active laser-guidance system out of the Hellfire missile.

Originally designed for use against lightly armored ground targets back in 2008, this system takes an existing 2.75-inch fin-stabilized but unguided rocket and adds a soda can-sized mid-body guidance unit, called the WGU-59/B, behind the warhead but ahead of its existing Mk 66 Mod 4 rocket motor. In order to make sure these weapons still fit in their standard launch tubes, BAE Systems incorporated the guidance sensors into four small, foldable wings, each housing laser-seeker optics that are blended together into a single, wide field of view.

The cost? About $25,000, making for a 1:1 or even 2:1 cost ratio. And, obviously, $25,000 means a lot less to the USA than to Iran or the Houthis. 

And as for the depth of the magazines? It's a lot better than carrying standard air-to-air missiles. 

Consider the attack on Israel to get a sense of what this capability brings to the table:

All told, those six Strike Eagles flew a combined 14 sorties, landing and re-arming in record time to go after more drones as they flew by overhead, with maintainers and tech turning these jets around while air defense systems fired all around them and debris rained from the sky.

Altogether, this heroic effort saw a total of 112 interceptors brought to bear against airborne targets across 14 Strike Eagle sorties. But if these six fighters had each been equipped with, say, four LAU-131A rocket pods instead, each jet could have taken to the sky with a whopping 28 interceptors underwing, allowing the formation to bring an incredible 168 targets down with just one sortie each. 

And while the cost to replace those Sidewinders and AMRAAMs will range from as little as $52 million (if they were all cheap Sidewinders) to as much as $146 million (if they were all pricier AMRAAMs)… the cost of replacing all 168 expended rockets would have been a comparatively tiny $4.2 million. 

You could literally buy an F-35 and two Black Hawk helicopters with what these weapons could have saved in that single engagement alone.

I highly recommend Alex Hollings' excellent article on this weapon, and recommend following him on Sandboxx News, X, and YouTube. His stuff is excellent, his videos fun to watch and informative, and it's an easy way to keep up with developments (and sometimes history) in the military realm.