Ares Industries – Building low-cost cruise missiles

I have been reading a number of books about Eisenhower recently, in preparation for writing a long form post about his decision making process. One of the recurring themes throughout his presidency was the conflict between the former Supreme Commander, who quite literally ordered thousands of men into battle and their deaths, that wanted to work toward some kind of peace and de-escalation with the Soviets with regards to nuclear weapons – and the military-industrial-political complex that pushed and pushed him to fund more weapons without any restrictions on the budget or geopolitical implications. Eisenhower of course was no fool and didn’t disregard the need for weapons, but he generally tried to navigate the narrow path between defending oneself and escalating an arms race.

One of the takeaways I had from this was essentially how powerless even the president was in pushing back against the arms race, even against his own people. This of course culminated in his famous farewell speech where he coined the term MIC.

In any case, if the dynamics of these kinds of companies interest you, I cannot recommend reading about Eisenhower’s presidency enough. There was actually a situation with Taiwan that is still quite relevant to today.

And I truly hope, but unfortunately doubt, that equivalent amounts of money are being put into startups or organizations that help solve, diffuse, and de-escalate conflicts.

I’ve been watching a lot of these war game simulations https://youtu.be/vSnbbifpiLw?si=d-ymKHwfnwdKoGOL. They have a lot of limitations to them, and they’re engineered to be entertaining first and foremost (it is YouTube), but they can be very informative too about the state of naval warfare. Some things I’ve learned from watching these:

1) Shooting down anti-ship missiles is very doable, even hypersonic and stealth missiles. A naval carrier group is pretty much invulnerable to any single weapon that exists today. However, they do have a limit to how many defensive SAMs they can carry. So firing hundreds of anti-ship missiles will overwhelm their defenses and eventually sink that $15 billion carrier with 4,000 people on board. 2) The British Navy’s upcoming strategy seems to be using large numbers of small anti-ship missiles that use AI to target critical systems of the ships they target (rather than just trying to sink the ship). This actually looks like it should be really effective since they can disable enemy ships or at least exhaust the defenders’ defenses before firing ship-killers at them.

Another thing I want to note: we really really really don’t want to go to war with China, and China doesn’t want that either. I think China would only try to take Taiwan if they knew two things: 1) they could take and hold Taiwan 2) they could exact such a heavy toll on American forces trying to defend Taiwan that the US would not want to get involved. Taking Taiwan is probably not worth it if the US fights. China needs to convince the US it’s not worth defending Taiwan. It is a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Saving taxpayer money in meeting the Constitutional requirements to provide for the Nation's defense is a noble effort, especially seeing as the likely threats are going to be cheap and reasonably effective in a generally permissive environment, a'la Ukraine's lopsided offensive capability vs. Russian ships. Your target cost of $300K is so significantly less than current available munitions that I'm curious what you intend to use to, from what I know from my own experience (I was a very early hire on an aircraft development called the Javelin some years ago), to reduce the cost of small propulsion systems. The FJ-33 we were going to use was around $400K each at the time, and Google tells me it's still around that price. Their effort to build the cheaper FJ-22 was abandoned after we blew one up on the test stand. I don't keep up with propulsion any longer, but I'm curious what you think might replace them in the (guessing) $100K range.

Having worked in the defense industry, in a sector directly related to missiles, I can see their argument - to rather focus on more small missiles, than one large.

But my experience was that some big reason for ballooning costs were:

- So, so many middlemen.

- "Defense" premium pricing on everything due to things needing to meet custom specs, and vendors knowing that they can charge extra because it comes out of the defense budget.

- Projects always being longer than planned. I don't think I ever worked on anything that met its deadline, and it was after that things started to get expensive.

- Extreme hierarchy, all decisions and negotiations have to traverse through the hierarchy.

- It is the polar opposite of "move fast and break things". We once had a contractor engineer fix a small superficial bug, which took him 5 mins to identify and one line of code to fix - when his manager found out, the bug fix was reversed, and added to the list of bugs. It took around 12 months before the bug was fixed again (exact same solution, of course).

Did I mentioned all the middlemen?

It's honestly like the insurance industry. Things that could have been affordable, simply aren't, because there are so many levels and layers of expenses. Everyone wants a cut.

Good. As the war in Ukraine shows.. the best guarantor of peace is a large stockpile of weapons.

Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Am I the only one that thinks this is very sad? Mass killing on a budget?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear to the strategic planners the obvious; that peer or near peer warfare is one of industry and attrition (which it always has been).

So while we may all, and should dislike war, it is ever more important to have our defence fully prepared for modern warfare.

Honest question: does building low-cost cruise missiles use microchips or other parts produced in China?

Or, maybe in Taiwan, or any other country that would probably stop shipping parts after such a war (involving China and the US, most likely also Taiwan) breaks out? Either due to the industry being damaged, or to avoid retaliation from China?

I'm so glad to see YC fund this. US defense spending is the lowest as a percent of GDP that it's been in 50+ years. We need innovative solutions for the end of Pax Americana.

The ethical considerations depend on who you are building weapons for. A state with noble goals is better equipped to pursue those noble goals if they are well defended. A state with malign intentions is better equipped to inflict those intentions if they are well armed.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to detect who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (but sometimes it is!).

Isn't Ares Arms one of the evil megacorps in Shadowrun?

Murder is wrong. War is wrong.

So if I read this correctly, nothing would make the fuckers from this company happier than if everyone could go to war with China as well. What a bunch of sick people, gunning for the destruction of humanity.

Great work to the team! You're doing vital work.

Hopefully you won't let the anti-defence industry voices get you down

An efficient and effective defence industry is vital to protect democracy.

Question: how does a software developer enter this industry? For pretty much all other industries it's easy to find documentation / examples / open source software, but obviously the war industry is much more secretive. What are good resources to get an idea of the industry from a developer perspective?

They should really work on homebrew cruise missiles for Ukraine. Constructing backyard pulsejet engines with nothing more than common welding and CNC machines and strapping an explosive payload to them with a mass-produced jamming-resistant guidance module.

It's a start. CCTV7 (PRC military channel) released footage of automated PLA cruise missile component gigafactory last october capable of making 1000 components a day, insinuating scale of their smart munition acquisition. Which is to say a few days of production can satuate existing US+co missile defenses in 1IC, assuming typical 1500km cruise missile range, US can literally move every land missile interception system produced and stuff every VLS cell of existing USN hulls with anti missile defense in theatre, and PLA cruise missile gigafactory going brrrt will saturate with a few weeks of production. Which is to say, they're indicating they can build so much cruise missiles, likely cheaper than ARES, that US + co simply don't have capability to preposition enough hardware to survive in attrition game. That said, doubt ARES can out compete PRC... on industrial output. Obviously an effort has to be made to increase munitions production, but I doubt ARES can do it for 10x smaller / 10x cheaper.

IMO focusing on antiship is misguided, there's plenty of advanced munitions to sink limited PLAN ships, the problem is PLA has enough land based fires to probably destroy most of US+co hardware in theatre with spares. IMO there's this misconception that destroying PLA navy will somehow stop PRC war efforts, when bulk of PLA fires is largely land based (magnitude more than naval fires), including eventually proliferating prompt conventional global strike to hit CONUS, at which point no US hardware is really save. Ultimately, PRC will gladly trade PLAN for USN... since US global security architecture breaks down without navy, and that 600x ship building advantage is going to help PRC reconstitute faster.

The actual US+co ordnance deficit is munitions for hitting PRC mainland, to take out PLA landbased fires, realistically can't cut much on size because 1IC deployment either means ships outside of PRC A2D2 range, or on land (likely limited to JP/PH) which means 1000km range just to reach PRC coast and 500-1000km more to hit interior sites. Unless you include SKR, but they're not that suicidal. Which means need something size of existing cruise missiles, if not larger. And depending on how it's deployed (i.e. on ship/airplane), the hardware has to be relatively over engineered to survive the logistics chain of being forward deployed (i.e. mechanical vibration / salt air). PRC's advantage is they can produce magnitude more munitions + with less demanding deployment + a lot more room to deploy launchers (most of mainland) vs US with limited deployment regions.

This is without mentioning modern anti air has nearly 100% interception rate on subsonic munitions. Question is going to be, can AREs make more cheaper cruise missiles than PRC can make interceptors. At which point it might be more cost effective to focus economizing higher end munitions. Remember it COSTS a lot in man power + logistics to just sustain deployment. Maybe this will be comboed with many autonomous launch platforms... but that's when you run into deployment geopolitics, i.e. JP citizens aren't going to like (or likely allow) 1000s of launchers dispersed on their roads for survivability, and you can only fit so much on Okinawa/Luzon. There's a lot of constraints to US trying to win the numbers game in both production and deployment vs PRC, but at the same time, peer power attrition warfare is a numbres game.

All that said, zero interest rate era is over. Tech needs to beg for defense money now. Expect more of this going forward, and who knows, maybe it'll disrupt defense aquisitions for the better.

Glad to see American tech companies supporting America in this geopolitically tumultuos time!

Slaughterbots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU) wasn't supposed to be a blueprint

Is this the same company or related to Ares inc, the company that made the 75mm autocannon for the HSTV-L? An insane amount of engineering went into that cannon.

The cognitive dissonance here is outrageous - people whos ideas ruled the world without great disruption ever since the cold war ended, offended by the idea the bloody mess these ideas helped to built and these weapons aim to solve, is somehow not there responsibility. Own your results people! If your ideas and ideologies arm and support blood thirsty dictatorships and they do bloodthirsty dictatorship things. Thats on you! Thats what you aimed to do. Not making the world a better place! More like making the world a better place for Nod!

Why was this flagged?

Really cool company and project!

I will say though your contact page on your website is broken; there's nowhere to enter information, all you can do is submit an email and phone number with no content.

The premise here feels wrong.

Yes Ukraine changed thinking on cost of munitions but trading an expensive missile for a ship is still a good trade.

Cheaper would be better sure but it’s not as compelling as presented

“Defense tech” should not be a capitalist for-profit venture. The incentives are all wrong. The business model is basically “milk the government for as much money as you can get, over the longest possible time period”, which is never a good business model for incentivizing efficiency or innovation. That is how American defense manufacturing got so slow and costly. It’s why America struggles to produce something as simple as cheap artillery shells at scale: simply not profitable enough. Much more profitable to sell fancy tech at $3m a pop.

If you're pro-war and support this kind of shit, you should know that every fight has two possible outcomes: you can win and you can lose. This is the same reason you don't wanna be a police officer or go to the military if you're not ready to die. After all the pain people have experienced in eastern Europe, Gaza, Middle East, it's sad to see this has been funded by YC.

It's pretty obvious it's the same "defense" system as AK-47. While it's easy to justify, it will be used, highly likely, to kill people.

This is much needed to deter an invasion of Taiwan, and to defeat the PLAN if they decide to do it.

It's very disappointing that we're at a point in time where this is important, but it is important. War is awful but ceding the western alliance, for all its flaws, to authoritarianism is far worse. Do what is right morally first, and for your business second, and good luck crossing the valley of death ;)

Are you going to go with the inevitable Anduril fork of nixpkgs?

Absolutely disgusting.

As a ukrainian, this makes me want to puke. We, Ukraine, had the historical chance to become a leading world manufacturer of practical and cheap military tech.

We have the vast engineering talent. We have the institutional memory. We have the need. We have the motivation. The government would want to purchase this.

We did produce exactly zero technology.

This, guys, is what corruption does to a state. It's a cancer that paralyzes the society even in face of immediate deadly threat.

So, my best wishes for Ares Industries and I mean it from the depth of my heart. Please produce this cruise missile and I sincerely hope we will never have to use it.

I didn’t expect YC to start investing in destruction weapons

What could go wrong?

The biggest bully on the world stage is the United States. I'm no fan of Russia or China, but they aren't in conflict with the US. If anything, the military industrial complex that the US bolsters, is the reason for conflict around the world; the US government buys from private US companies with tax money, which it then donates to states like Apartheid Israel to commit genocide. There's no defence with the US, only death, terror and destruction.

The fact that YC is supporting this is reprehensible.

This is disgusting.

> we can make sure the United States is prepared to stop a conflict and save countless lives

> building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics

Someone has never used their critical thinking skills. MLK Jr said the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. These missiles won't be used against rogue states, they'll be used to kill innocent people and children in the poorer countries that aren't behaving like the empire wants.

How is PG okay with this? LOL war with China.. the founder is Chinese.

It's so on brand for YCombinator to look at all the problems facing the world and finding that the issue that needs fixing is that destroying hospitals in the middle east could be cheaper.

I hope everyone involved is rewarded as handsomely as Perilaus was.