Ukraine @sopuli.xyz Wilshire @sopuli.xyz 2mo ago

Ukraine to Get 4,000 Javelins as Share of US Army $1.3 Billion Contract

www.kyivpost.com Ukraine to Get 4,000 Javelins as Share of US Army $1.3 Billion Contract

The Lockheed Martin and Raytheon “Javelin Joint Venture (JJV)” announced the contract on Aug. 28 to produce the man-portable, anti-armor weapons (ATGW), including 4,000 missiles for Ukraine.

16 comments

Ok, but....what if we sent them 4,000,000 javelins? And the idea is, they just fire them at absolutely EVERYTHING.

I'm sure they have to conserve ammo right now, but imagine we got them 2 million rockets for the 400,000 javelins. And told them basically "Yeah man, go nuts."
- I thought long and hard about this and I don't see any downsides.
Are there any numbers on how "efficient" those are? That is, how many destroyed Russian tanks will 4000 of them cause in practice?
- I've heard a Javelin missile is near 100% efficient if it can get a good lock. Wikipedia says "The Pentagon claimed that of the first 112 Javelins fired by the Ukrainians since the start of the war, 100 missiles had hit their target"
  
  It's good they hit their target.
  
  Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?
  
  That statistic is only the first element in the chain.
- And how many russian tanks are there left?
  
  Do they use javelins on MTBs too?
  
  Last I heard Ukraine had gotten through an estimated 2/3 of Russias entire tank stock, including tanks that could realistically be repaired. Doesn't account for potential purchases or getting really desperate and sending partially non-functional vehicles into combat.
  
  you can use the javelin on anything, it will lock onto a hot exhaust. one was used to take out a low-flying helicopter in occupied Ukraine, they were used regularly to take out vehicle-borne IEDs in Iraq, and those are just pickup trucks with armor welded on. I've been told it won't quite lock onto a person, but in direct fire mode you can use it against infantry
those things are $325k per?
- ~~yeah but they got a shelf life of 10 years. we were likely paying to replace them already anyway~~
  
  never mind, this is a brand new production run. looks like they're doing 4,000 new missiles for the existing CLUs. the missiles are about 250k a pop
  
  i gotta get me some of this action
Ooh ooh, now do HARMs

16 comments