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I think the point being made was that our ship-based artillery would be enough to neuter Houthi capabilities and make them reconsider the ROI of trying to rope the West into their local conflict.
And it would be relatively cheap. Though artillery rounds themselves are about $10,000 each, which at first I found shocking until realizing they’re about 100 pounds, and 100 pounds of HEI ammo would cost about that much as well.
No munition is cheap. Artillery cheaper is cheaper than a missile only due to scale of production and complexity, but if you need 60 shells to decisively destroy a target you're shit outta luck compared to a high precision shell. CEP for GPS guided artillery is still not great, so precision missiles are best. The problem of course is that precision missiles are very hard to even get deployed in the area of operations, what with pilot skill and airframe being a very substantial barrier to entry.
Right now the meta is for cheap kamikaze drones, especially COTS DJI FPV kits which have the best in class flight controllers. These drones are all super vulnerable to electronic warfare, but even if that is solved the issue is that you need 1 operator per killshot. Max flight time is about 20mins per drone, so it is 1 guy for 2 shots per hour at best. An absolutely insane ROI by current military standards, but it is actually super taxing on the pilots. If you want to experience how draining it can be to be an FPV pilot try playing any flight sim game on oculus - the headset weight and physical disorientation can be extremely taxing.
A cost is borne to kill someone else. If it falls to a container full of sweaty dudes in killpods chugging DMD and an army of minions prepping new killdrones, it may be more expensive than a single fighter pilot with a full loadout.
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