Massive Stealthy Cruise Missile Attack.
<p><i>Stealthy cruise missiles</i> are cheap. One US defense contractor reported his company could build a –30db (front and rear aspect) cruise missile with 300 NM range for $100,000. He then added that one should not buy this missile from his company; a company with less overhead could build the same missile much cheaper.8 Expected advances in production technologies combined with economies of scale (driven by large procurement runs) should cut the costs of very low-observable cruise missiles even further.
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Such low unit costs will allow a peer attacker to employ stealthy cruise missiles in waves. At $100,000 per copy, a fleet of 100,000 stealthy cruise missiles would cost only $10 billion. Such a sum is well within the range of any peer anticipating war with the US. A fleet this size could launch waves of attackers. Each cruise missile would be cheaper than the US defensive weapon sent against it (SAMs, AIMs). The current US aerospace defense CONOPS, which shoots expensive missiles at even more expensive aircraft and ballistic missiles, is ill- suited to a massive, continuous attack by cheap cruise missiles.
<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force" title="United States Air Force"><img alt="United States Air Force" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg/22px-Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg.png" decoding="async" width="22" height="22" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg/33px-Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg/44px-Seal_of_the_United_States_Department_of_the_Air_Force.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="356" data-file-height="356"></a> Jeffery R. Barnett, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
Future War: An Assessment of Aerospace Campaigns in 2010, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/barnett/b5ch2.htm#F-4">Chapter 2. Peer Competitor.</a>