Drones, Missiles, and the U.S. Munitions Shortage

While there is bipartisan support for drone development and procurement, what is the actual value of affordable mass for the U.S. military? Drones may be useful in ground wars, like Ukraine, or against lesser adversaries, like the Houthis and Iran, but would they be helpful in a war against China? U.S. forces must project combat power considerably farther from their shores than Ukrainian, Russian, Iranian, or Houthi forces have, and the United States already possesses advanced standoff and penetrating long-range strike capabilities that are highly capable.

There has been little study of which missions would be best suited for U.S. forces to use cheap drones, the conditions under which they are likely to be effective, and how they might best be used in Pacific scenarios.⁶ To better understand the role of affordable mass in future U.S. operations, this report examines the potential utility of lower-cost long-range drones for standoff strikes in a war against China.

In a potential war with China over Taiwan, the clearest and most strategically consequential application of kamikaze drones would be to attrite the Chinese invasion fleet. Affordable mass can also provide value in other ways: By saturating air defenses and suppressing air operations on coastal air bases, they—alongside stealth aircraft—can create temporary windows in which U.S. forces can conduct offensive operations. But cheap standoff weapons have three primary shortfalls. First, the sheer volume of weapons required to achieve a desired effect is, paradoxically, prohibitively expensive unless they are employed in tandem with other capabilities. Second, even extended-range attack drones cannot reach targets deep inside China. And third, these weapons will not have the capability to destroy hardened or buried targets.

As a result, the value of affordable mass for U.S. operations lies in supplementing existing capabilities rather than replacing them. One-way attack drones must be integrated into operational concepts with existing high-end weapons to create munitions depth, scale effects, and introduce new dilemmas for an adversary.⁷ While the Pentagon needs to replenish its high-end missile stockpiles that have been seriously depleted by the war against Iran, it just as urgently needs even larger stockpiles of new affordable mass weapons that can be produced more quickly.

This report is organized as follows. The first section overviews affordable mass and discusses how low-cost weapon applications vary depending on operational context. The second section outlines the overall contours of a potential war with China over Taiwan and discusses the missions in which affordable mass might be employed. The report then offers a methodological overview and presents two operational vignettes exploring the potential role and contributions in U.S. operations of affordable mass. The final sections offer conclusions and recommendations.

What Is Affordable Mass?

In the last several years, the Pentagon has launched many different initiatives to acquire “affordable mass,” a term that has come to be synonymous with low-cost drones or cruise missiles.⁸ These weapons are cheap because they use widely available commercial subcomponents (such as advanced microchips for flight controllers, inexpensive radios, Global Positioning System [GPS] modules, and jammers); 3-D-printed specialized parts; and open-source software and artificial intelligence models to automate guidance, targeting, and flight control. Historically, cheap rockets and missiles have been inaccurate and less effective because sensors, guidance, and flight controls were bespoke military technologies that were expensive and inaccessible to most. By contrast, today’s drones are accurate yet inexpensive weapons that can be manufactured at scale.⁹

Indeed, affordable mass is not only about buying cheaper weapons but also about possessing the industrial capacity to rapidly produce them.¹⁰ Rate of production is a key attribute that makes affordable mass weapons attractive and distinguishes them from sophisticated missiles, which take years to manufacture.¹¹ Lower-cost systems thus bring defense planners back to one of warfare’s most enduring principles: Mass matters. Concentrating forces and weapons at the decisive time and place can determine the outcome of a battle, and the ability to field larger forces and reconstitute losses enables a combatant to absorb significant attrition and ultimately triumph in a protracted conflict.¹² In short, the side with “superiority of numbers” prevails.¹³

Over time, the U.S. military came to believe that precision and qualitative superiority reduced the need for mass.¹⁴ For decades, the United States has bought small quantities of highly accurate and capable weapons, but never in the numbers needed for a high-intensity conflict against a peer.¹⁵ The folly of this approach has recently been borne out by just five months of an on-and-off war with Iran, where the Department of War has burned through its stores of long-range precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and must now search for cheaper alternatives that can be produced more quickly.¹⁶ Despite fielding the most advanced military in the world, the United States is behind in adopting affordable mass systems and is still working to understand the role these capabilities should play in its armed forces.

Part of the difficulty is that affordable mass encompasses a wide range of weapons performing fundamentally dissimilar missions. In close combat, relatively basic, short-range drones in Ukraine, Libya, and the Caucasus have served as spotters for artillery and as direct-attack weapons.¹⁷ Small quadcopters and fixed-wing drones have transformed the frontlines in Ukraine by providing persistent surveillance and strike and by making offensive operations incredibly difficult.¹⁸

At the same time, Russia and Ukraine both use long-range drones for deep strikes against military and civilian targets.¹⁹ Within several months of invading Ukraine, Russia found that its long-range missile stores were running low, leading it to acquire Shahed-136 one-way attack drones from Iran. Russia has since established its own production lines and, through a process of trial and error, developed more effective strike tactics. Now, Russia routinely launches hundreds of drones in complex attacks that include relatively small numbers of advanced cruise and ballistic missiles.²⁰ Long-range drones have also enabled Ukraine to develop an independent standoff strike capability which NATO members were unwilling to provide. In 2026, Ukrainian long-range kamikaze drone strikes against Russian energy and civilian infrastructure have caused widespread fuel shortages and are contributing to the isolation of Crimea.²¹

In the Middle East, Iran and its proxies have fired cruder drones at military bases, commercial shipping, and civil and economic infrastructure. Between 2023 and 2025, the Houthis fired drones along with ballistic missiles at Western ships in the Red Sea, requiring costly offensive and defensive U.S. military operations.²² Similarly, Iran has employed its own long-range drones to destroy expensive air defense radars and U.S. aircraft parked in the open at air bases in the region.²³

This report examines a class of affordable mass that U.S. forces would need in a near-peer conflict: long-range one-way attack drones. These drones are expendable—like a munition—but, particularly in the case of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan, they must have ranges of over 800 kilometers. Cost scales with range because larger airframes require more fuel, which leads to cascading structural growth: More fuel demands more thrust, a bigger engine, and a heavier airframe, all of which cost more and require still more fuel.²⁴ Long-range drones tend to fall between $35,000 and $250,000—orders of magnitude more than small short-range drones, but also a fraction of the cost of high-end missiles.²⁵

The U.S. military currently has not fielded such a weapon at scale, but it has several developmental efforts underway, including LUCAS, Enterprise Test Vehicle, and Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM).²⁶ All of these weapons are intended to be modular in an effort to keep costs down, facilitate high-rate production, provide flexibility, and make them easy to upgrade. The following operational analysis considers how this class of affordable mass weapons could enable U.S. forces to successfully defend Taiwan.

Operational Vignettes: Affordable Mass in a U.S.-China Conflict

A war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over Taiwan remains the most demanding conflict scenario the U.S. military could face and thus offers an appropriate benchmark against which to consider new capabilities. Moreover, the scale of such a conflict—even if it is short and sharp, but particularly if it becomes protracted—is a core reason that the United States must consider the potential role of affordable mass in its operations. Qualitative superiority will only go so far against China’s significantly larger and comparatively advanced forces. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks noted, the U.S. military must find a way to “overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass: more ships, more missiles, more people.”²⁷

There are well over 2,000 potential military targets that the United States may want to destroy in a war with China. Many of these targets have multiple aimpoints and would likely need to be struck multiple times to cause the desired amount of damage. The Pentagon will need deep weapon inventories, the ability to replenish them quickly, and a force structure large enough to absorb attrition and continue effective operations.

This analysis examines the role lower-cost weapons would play in the context of an amphibious assault during a full-scale invasion scenario in which the United States comes to Taiwan’s defense. Although China could blockade or bombard the island, an invasion remains China’s most direct, and perhaps surest, way of defeating Taipei and forcing unification with the mainland.²⁸ The ensuing analysis is purely operational—no judgments are offered about the likelihood that U.S. forces would be permitted to strike mainland targets, nor about the escalation risks of doing so.²⁹

The Pacific area of operations is vast, and roughly half of the over 1,500 Chinese ground-based targets—including space stations, long-range radars, rocket forces, and long-range bomber bases—reside deep within China, inaccessible to range-constrained standoff weapons.³⁰ In Figure 1, these deeper targets are in the green and orange bands. However, many of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces supporting the invasion would operate in the Taiwan Strait or from bases relatively close (within 370 kilometers) to China’s coastline. These 800-plus targets lie in the red band, and many would be accessible to long-range drone or cruise missile attacks.

Figure 1: Distribution of Chinese Mainland Military Targets³¹

In a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan, two missions would provide favorable tests for the utility of affordable mass to the United States: sinking the invasion fleet and suppressing coastal Chinese fighter air bases. Both are central to a U.S. strategy aimed at defeating the invasion and denying Beijing a quick victory. They are also both arduous tasks that, over the course of a conflict, would consume tens of thousands of high-end munitions of which the United States currently possesses only a limited stockpile.³²

Although these are not the only missions that may involve lower-cost munitions, these vignettes are considered because of their direct relevance to the outcome of a U.S.-China conflict and their ability to illustrate affordable mass’s potential added value to U.S. operations in a high-end scenario. Given the stressing volumes, ranges, and operational constraints present in both mission sets, these vignettes also serve as useful cases from which to extrapolate the viability of lower-cost munitions to less-stressing cases (i.e., shorter ranges and more permissive environments). These vignettes should thus help policymakers understand the circumstances in which and the extent to which lower-cost munitions can help U.S. forces in future conflict. Missions against targets deep inside China, or against mobile and deeply buried targets, fall outside the analysis because they exceed what drones with a 900-kilometer range can plausibly accomplish from U.S. launch points in this scenario.

Methodology

The following quantitative analysis relies on a simple probabilistic model of salvo effectiveness based on the overall quality of different weapons. In this narrative, the authors assign each weapon a particular effectiveness value—called the weapon quality index (WQI)—which reflects the likelihood that a weapon will destroy a target. Given the significant uncertainty about how different weapons would perform in this scenario, the authors present results parametrically. This allows the readers to select their own WQI and see how many weapons are required to achieve a 95 percent damage expectancy (DE) for a specific target. Additionally, the authors consider different types of targets and employment concepts. The arithmetic and structure of this quantitative analysis is described as follows.

WQI captures three characteristics of a munition: accuracy (A), survivability (S), and lethality (L). These inputs are expressed in terms of a probability between 0.0 and 1.0, and vary in value depending on the munition, salvo configuration, aimpoint type, and condition of adversary air defenses.

• Accuracy (A): The probability of the munition arriving on target and reaching the desired aimpoint (e.g., a ship’s radar system or a runway’s precise cut point)
• Survivability (S): The probability of the munition surviving interception attempts by adversary air defenses
• Lethality (L): The probability that a munition’s explosive power, upon arriving at the desired location, successfully disables or destroys the target

The formula for WQI is simple multiplication: WQI = A × S × L. The authors then use the WQI to calculate the total number of munitions needed to achieve 0.95 DE against a given aimpoint.³³

As an illustrative example, a notional munition with a 0.9 chance of accurately hitting its desired aimpoint, a 0.5 chance of surviving intercept attempts, and a 0.8 chance of disabling or destroying what it does hit, has a WQI of 0.36. Since each shot therefore has a 0.64 chance of not achieving any expected damage (1 − 0.36), the question to achieve 0.95 DE is: “How many times must 0.64 be multiplied by itself to reach 0.05 or below (1 − 0.95)?” The number of munitions required (Q) is the minimum number of weapons needed to reach 5 percent or lower. Mathematically, this is a logarithmic expression: Q = ln(1 − 0.95) / ln(1 − 0.36). The result is 6.71, which is rounded to 7 for whole munitions.

Figure 2 presents the WQI values and resulting per-aimpoint munitions requirements calculated for each weapon examined in this report under both homogeneous and multiwave salvo configurations. Because the authors do not weight the different components of WQI, the specific values assigned to accuracy, survivability, and lethality do not matter as much as the overall WQI score.³⁴ In the interactive Figure 2, readers can make their own judgments about the performance of different weapons and see how many weapons are then needed to have a 95 percent probability of destroying a specific target.

Figure 2: Cost to Achieve 0.95 DE vs. WQI: Single Aimpoint³⁵

In addition to weapons quality, an additional variable that affects damage expectancy is the type of target: soft, hard, buried, or ship. Soft targets include buildings constructed with standard resistance to blast damage (e.g., maintenance facilities or administrative buildings) and aircraft. Hard targets are reinforced structures, such as runways or hardened aircraft shelters, which require greater explosive power to destroy. Buried and ship targets respectively require munitions that can reach underground facilities and specialized sensors to track moving targets. In this analysis, if a weapon does not have the requisite explosive power or sensor, it is automatically disqualified from being able to damage certain types of targets.³⁶

The authors also vary the salvo composition and tactics employed by the United States. Both vignettes consider homogeneous attacks and heterogeneous multiwave salvos using scout and decoy drones. Rather than expand and complicate the above formulas, the effects of sequential attacks are primarily captured through improvements in the second wave’s accuracy and the cumulative depletion of adversary surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), which, if fully exhausted, sharply increases subsequent munitions’ survivability.

A single parameter (K) is used to denote total defender interceptor capacity. K is estimated differently for each vignette according to open-source assessments of relevant and available Chinese air defense systems. The authors’ model treats K as a bank that is sequentially depleted: Weapons engaging a target consume defender interceptor capacity (K) in order of arrival. Munitions arriving before K reaches 0 carry a baseline “defended” S value reflecting the normal probability that the munition is intercepted by ready and available defenses. Munitions arriving after K reaches 0 carry a much higher “saturated” S value reflecting the reduced probability of interception by exhausted air defenses. The authors assume that China will expend SAMs on cheap drones, especially to defend its ships, but readers can interchange these respective S values to experiment with different potential approaches China may take to conserve its SAMs.

The coarse analysis that follows is indicative rather than predictive. It aims to help readers better understand the munition requirements for a war against China and the role that affordable mass weapons could play in this scenario.

Defeating the Invasion Fleet

This vignette considers how different employment concepts for lower-cost and high-end missiles could contribute to damaging or destroying a Renhai-class cruiser—one of the Chinese air defense ships that would protect the invasion fleet. To consider the tradeoffs between different systems, the authors examine different salvo configurations using the long-range antiship missile (LRASM) and a notional, low-cost modular intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and antiship uncrewed aerial system (UAS) called HERON, which would be air-launched as a palletized munition or launched from the ground within the First Island Chain.³⁷ In two of the salvos, the authors include Scout HERONs, which are surveillance variants of HERONs that act as both scouts and decoys to improve the accuracy of follow-on waves.³⁸ Altogether, four strike archetypes are considered: homogeneous LRASM and HERON salvos, and multiwave HERON and LRASM salvos using complementary Scout HERONs. Figure 3 and Table 1 show how the performance assumptions made for these salvo configurations would affect munitions requirements.

Figure 3: Cost to Achieve 0.95 DE vs. WQI: Antiship Vignette³⁹

Table 1: Comparing Salvo Expenditure Against a Renhai-Class Cruiser⁴⁰

Although both LRASM and HERON-type munitions would struggle to sink a large warship, both weapons could achieve a mission kill by damaging a Renhai’s fragile radar or command bridge, which are located high on the ship’s exposed superstructure.⁴¹ Without functioning sensors or command networks, the cruiser would not be able to provide air and missile defenses, leaving China’s invasion force vulnerable to follow-on attacks.

A homogeneous LRASM salvo offers a baseline for a high-end attack. Superior target discrimination, stealth, and speed would likely enable a relatively small LRASM package to reach its target and penetrate the Renhai’s formidable layered defenses. If it accurately targets the radar, the missile’s 1,000-pound warhead would certainly achieve a mission kill.⁴² At the same time, the Renhai’s SAMs would likely intercept some incoming missiles, and some LRASMs would likely miss their mark due to jamming and the inability to receive targeting updates.

With a WQI of 0.440, a salvo of six LRASMs could achieve a mission kill on a single Renhai at a cost of $19.2 million.⁴³ Should the LRASM not perform as well and instead achieve a WQI of 0.350, the authors’ model calculates an additional LRASM would be needed to achieve the same result. Reduced performance could be due to GPS jamming that degrades LRASM accuracy, or the result of improvements in Chinese air defenses that enable them to better detect the stealthy cruise missile, thus reducing its survivability. Conversely, should the LRASM be more effective with a WQI of 0.8, only two would be needed to achieve a mission kill against the Renhai.

By contrast, a homogeneous HERON salvo is considerably less accurate and far more vulnerable to interception, though the HERON’s 100-pound warhead is large enough to damage vulnerable electronic systems on the ship’s superstructure.⁴⁴ Considering these factors, the authors assume that HERON has a very low WQI of 0.021. As a result, a homogeneous HERON attack must be large enough to compensate for the many weapons that miss and the even greater number that are shot down. To achieve a 0.95 DE on a Renhai with HERONs alone, the authors calculate that a salvo size of 140 munitions is required. It is worth noting here that numerically small changes in performance can achieve major increases in efficiency: At 0.150 WQI, a salvo of 19 HERONs would achieve a mission kill, and with a WQI of 0.200, the number of munitions required drops to 14. In all likelihood, these gains would only be achieved with improved sensors, speed, or networking that would significantly drive up cost.

Comparing these homogeneous LRASM and HERON salvos, an immediate finding is that lower cost per shot does not directly translate to a lower cost per effect because the HERON’s price advantage is offset by the size of the salvo required to achieve the same damage. Although each HERON costs roughly $200,000—16 times less than the $3.2 million LRASM—the homogeneous HERON salvo with 0.021 WQI would cost almost $11 million more than its LRASM equivalent, because the same effect requires 140 HERONs versus only 6 LRASMs with a 0.440 WQI. In short, a lower unit cost does not translate into a cheaper salvo when many more rounds are required to achieve the same effect.

A more promising approach appears to be mixed, multiwave salvos using Scout HERONs to locate the ships, draw fire, and deplete the Renhai’s defenses so that a smaller number of LRASMs can deliver the decisive blow. This combination improves the cost-exchange ratio and raises the probability of a successful strike. For example, as illustrated in the third salvo configuration, 25 leading Scout HERONs linked by a mesh network would force the Renhai to expend some interceptors to engage them and would relay more up-to-date targeting data to trailing LRASMs, either directly or through other airborne relay nodes.⁴⁵ In this respect, Scout HERONs could help overcome the targeting and discrimination challenges that complicate long-range maritime strike, while simultaneously straining the cruiser’s finite stock of interceptors. After such a “jab” of 25 drones, a second wave of three missiles becomes sufficient to deliver an “uppercut.” This combination costs $4.6 million less per salvo than a homogeneous LRASM attack and almost $11 million less than a homogeneous HERON strike.

However, the most cost-effective results come from pairing strike HERONs with their cheaper scout counterparts. As previously discussed, HERON’s low survivability and accuracy scores mean that even slight improvements recoup major gains in effectiveness. Sending advance ISR drones to support follow-on HERON strikes thus allows the munitions to achieve more than the sum of their parts. In this multiwave HERON salvo, 47 drones could achieve a mission kill for only $9.4 million per target—the most affordable salvo of the four models presented by a margin of $5.2 million.

These cost savings compound when considering the scale of the entire invasion fleet: This model suggests that 400 combat ships could be serviced by HERON-type salvos at roughly $4 billion less than an approach that exclusively relies on exquisite munitions. Moreover, HERONs would be even more effective against smaller landing craft, civilian ships, maritime militia vessels, and decoys that lack organic defenses. With larger numbers of cheaper antiship weapons, the United States can also conserve its sophisticated weapons for the adversary’s largest and most challenging surface combatants and large transport ships. Properly employed, lower-cost munitions open the door to restoring much-needed U.S. inventory depth.⁴⁶

Increasing U.S. standoff maritime strike capability and capacity with lower-cost antiship weapons creates multiple problems for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). PLAN ships would have to contend with a larger number and different types of incoming threats, creating discrimination problems and forcing them to employ scarce SAMs. Regardless of how many ships are sunk, larger and more frequent American airstrikes against the invasion fleet would likely disrupt the PLA’s landing plans, creating delays that could leave Chinese landing forces in disarray. Moreover, because HERONs are much cheaper and easier to produce than existing antiship missiles, the United States should be able to more rapidly replenish HERON stockpiles.⁴⁷

A deep U.S. maritime strike inventory could also overwhelm the PLAN’s air defenses, leaving the entire fleet vulnerable to air attacks. Facing hundreds of potential incoming threats across successive waves instead of a smaller number of high-end weapons, Chinese forces will more rapidly expend SAMs that cannot be reloaded at sea. Counterintuitively, high-end weapons’ greater lethality limits their ability to exhaust air defenses because of their smaller salvo size and ability to avoid detection, whereas large salvos of cheaper weapons that are easier to defeat but still pose a threat force Chinese ships to fire all of their interceptors.⁴⁸ Successive waves of lower-cost strikes would at worst deplete Chinese interceptor inventories and at best disable ships themselves. China is likely to integrate lower-cost counter drone defenses onto its ships, but many of these counter-UAS defenses can also be exhausted.⁴⁹

This analysis ultimately suggests that affordable mass can significantly contribute to the most important mission in a potential U.S.-China conflict. By increasing the United States’ volume of maritime fires, low-cost weapons working in concert with higher-end missiles could deliver effects that an exquisite-only force cannot generate at the required scale.

Suppressing Chinese Air Bases

This second vignette considers different salvo configurations and tactics for attacking Huian Air Base, a representative People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) fighter base just 270 kilometers from Taiwan.⁵⁰ In this vignette, the authors analyze two land-attack weapons: the extended-range variant of the joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM-ER) and a notional extended-range LUCAS (LUCAS-ER) drone based on the system recently debuted in Operation Epic Fury. Provided a 100-pound warhead, this notional LUCAS-ER system could be launched from the air as a palletized munition or from the ground within the First Island Chain.⁵¹

Counterair strikes against PLAAF air bases, which are located on mainland China, are more challenging than the maritime strike mission. While air bases themselves are fixed and thus easier to target than moving ships, they are farther away from where U.S. forces would launch standoff attacks, requiring longer-range weapons. Moreover, this distance also provides the PLA with increased warning time of an incoming strike, enabling them to disperse forces and prepare defenses. Accordingly, coastal Chinese bases are protected by a dense network of overlapping air defenses and are well hardened.⁵² Finally, bases present many different types of potential targets, including reinforced concrete runways and parking ramps, hangars, hardened aircraft shelters, storage bunkers, and administrative buildings (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Huian Air Base⁵³

Given the breadth of potential targets on an air base, the authors consider three different targeting strategies: large attacks seeking to cause maximum damage, moderately sized attacks focused on high-value targets such as aircraft and key storage facilities, and “low-hanging fruit” strikes focused on damaging runways and exposed aircraft. For each target selection, the authors analyze homogeneous JASSM-ER and LUCAS-ER salvos, multiwave LUCAS-ER and JASSM-ER salvos, a single-wave salvo that distributes weapons by target type, and a multiwave salvo that distributes weapons by target type. The WQI assumptions used to calculate munitions requirements for different salvos are documented in each targeting strategy’s corresponding table (Tables 2, 3, and 4). Figure 5 shows how these WQI assumptions could vary and in turn alter the required number of weapons and associated cost.

Figure 5: Cost to Achieve 0.95 DE vs. WQI: Air Base Vignette (80 Aimpoints)⁵⁴

Table 2: Comparing Salvos Against Huian Air Base—80 Air Base Aimpoints⁵⁵

Despite being a relatively small air base with one runway and a parallel taxiway, Huian consists of roughly 80 distinct aimpoints, 59 of which are soft, 18 hardened, and 3 buried.⁵⁶ Although U.S. forces could target all 80 aimpoints, such a strike would require a very large attack and is not necessary to temporarily suppress operations. The following analysis suggests that more carefully tailored strikes around select aimpoints might impede Chinese air operations at lower costs and be more sustainable over time. Nevertheless, the authors include a maximal attack, which may be undertaken to render an air base inoperable for a longer period or to permanently destroy key equipment, as a bounding case.⁵⁷

To ensure that all 80 aimpoints on Huian are destroyed, the United States would need to fire large salvos that either penetrate or overwhelm air defenses. Unsurprisingly, as Table 2 shows, JASSM-ERs alone are ill-suited for saturation attacks given their high unit cost. Even when preceded by low-cost scout and decoy drones, a follow-on JASSM-ER salvo would still require nearly 300 missiles to successfully destroy or disable all of Huian’s aimpoints—a cost of more than $500 million. If jamming reduces JASSM’s accuracy and thus its WQI, roughly 350 JASSMs might be needed to execute a maximal strike. LUCAS-ERs by themselves do not necessarily provide a more efficient solution: In a homogeneous LUCAS-ER salvo, over 1,400 drones would be required. Moreover, LUCAS-ERs would not destroy hardened or buried targets and have little chance of even damaging them. For both homogeneous and multiwave salvos, the number of weapons needed to blanket a single air base is thus prohibitively expensive.

More promising are weapons-optimized targeting strategies that use LUCAS-ER to saturate defenses and destroy soft aimpoints while clearing the way for JASSM-ERs to follow and service hard and buried targets.⁵⁸ By conserving JASSM-ERs for the targets that only it can destroy and using LUCAS-ERs to absorb air defense interceptors and service soft targets at a quarter of the cost ($1.5 million to $6 million per aimpoint), U.S. forces can achieve notable savings (Table 2).⁵⁹ For about $184 million, roughly 580 cheap drones and 60 high-end missiles could execute a maximalist attack on Huian.⁶⁰ This approach services all aimpoints at Huian for roughly one-fifth of the cost of a homogeneous JASSM-ER strike.

Nevertheless, scaling maximalist strikes across the scores of PLAAF bases along China’s coastline would likely prove difficult to sustain over a long-term conflict, and planners would want more selective targeting strategies.

An alternative approach might focus on high-value targets, such as aircraft parked in the open or in hardened aircraft shelters, and buried bunkers. While this attack leaves 30 percent of the total possible targets untouched, it could achieve significant levels of disruption by damaging or destroying aircraft and targets important enough to warrant hardening. Although U.S. forces would aim to destroy Chinese aircraft on the ground, China would likely have ample warning of incoming slow-flying LUCAS-ER drones and disperse fighters from Huian to other locations. Dispersal, however, would also disrupt the PLAAF’s operational tempo and temporarily suppress its ability to undertake offensive or defensive missions.

This high-value targeting strategy does not cost much less than a maximal approach and exposes a limitation of cheaper weapons. At first glance, hitting fewer targets might logically require fewer weapons and drive down cost. But because hardened and buried targets can only be destroyed by more capable missiles, these aimpoints remain major cost drivers. As a result, this targeting strategy services 23 fewer aimpoints but requires close to the same number of JASSM-ERs and only 120 fewer LUCAS-ER drones (Table 3) than an all-out attack. Even if JASSM-ER’s WQI is assumed to be significantly higher and defenses are exhausted, at least 45 missiles are needed. Likewise, making more optimistic performance assumptions for LUCAS-ER and assuming defenses are saturated would only lower the number of drones needed to slightly below 400.

Figure 6: Cost to achieve 0.95 DE vs. WQI: Air Base Vignette (57 Aimpoints)⁶¹

Table 3: Comparing Salvos to Destroy Aircraft, Hardened, and Buried Targets (57 Air Base Aimpoints)⁶²

Given that stockpiles of munitions would inevitably be strained in a high-end conflict with China, U.S. planners will need to develop targeting strategies that minimize munitions expenditures while still maximizing operational value. One potential approach would be to exclusively focus on cratering runways and hitting exposed aircraft, which would require fewer munitions and could temporarily halt Chinese fighter operations. Although Chinese forces can repair runways within hours, attacking operating surfaces may offer a more cost-effective approach to suppressing Chinese air bases repeatedly over time, and could be carefully timed to enable other offensive missions.⁶³

To execute this mission, U.S. forces would need to fire approximately 240 LUCAS-ER drones (with a 0.191 WQI) and 8 JASSM-ERs (with a 0.599 WQI)—see Table 4. The main purpose of the LUCAS-ER would be to consume defenses and hunt for any exposed aircraft, as the drone will not be able to significantly damage reinforced concrete runways. With optical sensors, LUCAS-ERs could potentially identify grounded aircraft and navigate through shelter doorways to hit any aircraft inside.⁶⁴ Meanwhile, JASSM-ER’s greater accuracy and payload would follow to precisely cut Huian’s runways, halting air operations.⁶⁵ By employing cheaper scout drones and optimizing the weapon-target pairings, this high-low package would cost roughly $40 million in munitions (Figure 7 and Table 4).

Figure 7: Cost to achieve 0.95 DE vs. WQI: Air Base Vignette (16 Aimpoints)⁶⁶

Table 4: Comparing Salvos to Cut Huian Air Base Runways and Destroy Aircraft (16 Air Base Aimpoints)⁶⁷

Figure 8: Salvo Cost Comparisons for Huian Air Base

Across all the above employment concepts for air base attacks, a clear role for lower-cost munitions ultimately emerges: achieving saturation, servicing soft targets, and enabling steady disruption. Given both the imperative to disrupt Chinese air operations in the initial days of a cross-Strait attack as well as the strong possibility of protraction, affordable mass appears to offer a more sustainable path to suppressing Chinese coastal air bases over the course of conflict.⁶⁸

Conclusion: Creating New Problems for the PLA

Tactical achievements, such as damaging or destroying certain targets, are necessary but not sufficient to produce operational or strategic outcomes. Operation Epic Fury has demonstrated that the most sophisticated weapons in the hands of skilled military personnel can result in impressive tactical victories but, detached from a strategic theory of victory, cannot bring conflict to an acceptable conclusion. As with any military capability, tactical employment of affordable mass must support attainable operational and strategic objectives.

A requirement for the American strategy of deterrence by denial is to have sufficient long-range weapons to defeat Chinese aggression. The 2026 Iran war has drained stores of sophisticated U.S. missiles that were insufficient even before the five-month conflict began.⁶⁹ In a war with China, U.S. forces may be ordered to strike well over 2,000 potential Chinese military targets, the overwhelming majority of which would require multiple weapons and would likely need to be attacked repeatedly. There is, therefore, a growing gap between the number of long-range PGMs that the United States needs for deterrence and existing stockpiles.⁷⁰

Recognizing the need for mass, Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg has sought to prioritize munitions production, establishing the Munitions Acceleration Council (MAC) and reaching multiyear procurement framework agreements with defense companies to expand manufacturing capacity and replenish the inventories of 14 critical munitions.⁷¹ This is an important step, but even in the best case scenario, it will be years before U.S. stockpiles of sophisticated weapons return to their pre–Epic Fury levels.⁷² The Pentagon needs new weapons that are simpler and cheaper so that they can be purchased and quickly produced in great numbers. The July 2026 Department of War framework agreement with multiple new entrants to accelerate the production of low-cost cruise missiles is another critical step.⁷³ But these nonbinding agreements need to be quickly turned into official contracts so that the real work of production can begin.

This analysis highlights that lower-cost, higher-volume weapons can help U.S. forces execute key missions, create new problems for Chinese forces, and ultimately support a U.S. strategy of denial. Integrating affordable mass into the U.S. arsenal could alter the balance of a U.S.-China conflict in at least three major ways: improving the U.S. ability to deny an amphibious landing, imposing consistent disruption and steady degradation of Chinese air base operations, and creating more favorable conditions for the use of high-end weapons across missions by saturating Chinese air defenses. In this respect, affordable mass can be employed in ways that directly contribute to the U.S. theory of victory in a U.S.-China conflict.

In particular, the successful procurement, delivery, and fielding of thousands of long-range antiship weapons would provide much-needed depth in the U.S. inventory and create a significant new operational problem for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.⁷⁴ Munitions and cost-savings per salvo scale dramatically when considering the hundreds of surface combatants that would constitute the Chinese invasion fleet, not to mention an even larger number of expected maritime militia ships and decoys. Equally important, if the United States can surge production of cheap maritime strike weapons for replenishment during a war, the United States will be better equipped to interdict Chinese resupply should the PLA establish a lodgment, thus decreasing the chances that China could sustain its forces and prevail in a protracted fight.

Lower-cost weapons would also help to consistently disrupt PLAAF fighter operations, thus complicating China’s ability to provide critical aerial support for its landing. While affordable mass could contribute to several different types of air base attacks, its greatest value is likely in making air bases consistently inhospitable and attacking unsheltered aircraft. Because air base attacks will only temporarily suppress PLAAF operations, U.S. forces must be able to repeat these strikes frequently. Although the United States might be able to achieve these effects with today’s existing high-end missiles, affordable missiles and drones can enable U.S. forces to impose these costs repeatedly over the course of a conflict, draining Chinese resources while preserving the inventory depth of the United States’ highest quality weapons for harder and higher-value targets.

In both vignettes, affordable mass could saturate Chinese air defenses and, in doing so, set more favorable conditions for both follow-on strikes and more effective use of high-end missiles. Although sophisticated weapons are more lethal and survivable, their smaller salvo sizes will draw fewer defensive engagements by design than cheaper missiles and drones that can pose credible threats by the hundreds and must be interdicted.⁷⁵ Facing several waves of larger incoming salvos instead of smaller, less frequent attacks, Chinese defenders could quickly empty their SAM launchers, creating gaps in their air defenses until they are reloaded. While mainland defenses can be reloaded relatively quickly, ships cannot reload at sea, under fire, and amid an ongoing Strait crossing. Depleting these defensive capabilities around high-value targets like amphibious ships should allow U.S. forces to more effectively target them with high-end and low-cost systems alike.

China will inevitably adapt if the United States acquires large numbers of cheap drones or missiles by, for example, fielding more counter-UAS systems, but that does not undermine the rationale for affordable mass weapons. With robust stockpiles of high-end missiles and affordable mass weapons, the United States would create costly dilemmas for Chinese defenders. For instance, PLAAF fighters might be diverted from offensive missions to defensive patrols to shoot down cheap U.S. drones, thus potentially increasing the freedom of maneuver of U.S. aircraft elsewhere in the theater. Forcing China to allocate resources to defense will reduce the resources it can devote to offensive operations.

The effects of low-cost missiles and drones are ultimately greater than the sum of their parts. In isolation, affordable mass is far less capable of penetrating sophisticated air defenses and delivering enough firepower to destroy hard targets. However, one-for-one comparisons do not capture the broader effects that hundreds or thousands of lower-cost weapons could achieve when tailored to specific operational challenges like antiship strikes and air base attacks, nor do they consider how different capability mixes can play off each other over the course of a conflict. In a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan that is likely to become protracted, the inventory depth and disruption that lower-cost systems can provide will be invaluable to reversing U.S. disadvantages and stopping China from achieving its operational objectives.

Recommendations

To maximize the operational potential of lower-cost munitions and drones, bolster deterrence, and prepare U.S. forces to succeed should conflict occur, this report offers the following recommendations.

Recommendations for the Department of War

• Replenish stockpiles of high-end missiles and build them up to the levels that would be needed for a war with China. The Pentagon has never had enough high-end weapons to prevail in a high-intensity conflict with China. Recent operations have reduced the already insufficient stockpiles. These must be rebuilt and expanded in concert with lower-cost standoff weapons. Multiyear procurement agreements must be rapidly turned into contracts to enable this process.
• Continue to fund, develop, and field extended-range, low-cost expendable munitions as a near-term priority. Although the United States must also replenish and expand its high-end munitions inventories, it will take years to do so at scale. Rapidly building and fielding thousands of low-cost antiship and land-attack munitions in the near term is necessary to close off perceived windows of opportunity for Chinese aggression following major U.S. conventional munitions expenditures during Operation Epic Fury. The U.S. Department of War should continue to fund and expand low-cost, extended-range munitions programs like FAMM and the Low-Cost Containerized Missile program.
• Continue to invest in modular designs for low-cost airframes and munitions. Modular designs where many different variants of a weapon share common parts make it easier to scale production, achieve cost savings, and maintain surge production capacity. They also facilitate the process of upgrading the weapon, while reducing the complexity and cost of maintenance. Multiple variants of a weapon also enable creative mission planning that can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of attacks.
• Develop new operational concepts that pair cheap and high-end weapons into effective mixed attacks. Using low-cost drones in the opening wave to identify air defenses, consume interceptors, and relay targeting data to follow-on missiles offers a promising and sustainable way to create repeated air base disruption. High-end weapons should be preserved for more challenging targets, while affordable mass should be integrated into strike plans to service soft targets and to saturate air defenses.
• Emphasize producibility when developing new affordable mass weapons. In a great power conflict, producibility and time to field is of the essence. However, the range required in the Indo-Pacific drives up cost. To build affordable mass, the Department of War should prioritize highly producible, minimally viable capabilities and refrain from turning these into bespoke, sophisticated weapons that are time-consuming and difficult to produce.

Recommendations for Congress

• Appropriate funds for multiyear procurement contracts so that industry can expand its weapons production capacity. The annual budgeting process introduces considerable volatility and uncertainty into munitions buys that is not eliminated by the multiyear procurement framework agreements. Congress needs to recognize the strategic importance of building up weapons’ inventories and consistently fund development and production of key high-end and affordable mass weapons.
• Require Department of War leadership to provide regular reports on the progress of its low-cost munitions programs as well as high-end missile stockpiles. The Department of War’s goal to field over 10,000 low-cost munitions in three years carries major implications for deterring a U.S.-China conflict. Congress should require regular updates from the Department of War to ensure it is properly informed on key performance and progress indicators and can best react to potential challenges or opportunities that arise in the coming years.
• Require Department of War leadership to brief congressional leadership on the tactical and operational effects of LUCAS in Operation Epic Fury. LUCAS’s operational debut provides valuable data for Congress to consider as it oversees and funds low-cost munitions programs. Congressional leaders should ensure they receive a full lessons-learned brief to identify the challenges and opportunities that may present themselves in future operations and to inform resourcing of ongoing development and procurement programs.

Appendix: Determining Weapon Quality Indexes

This appendix documents the rationale for assigning certain weapon quality indexes (WQIs) for the weapons used in the two vignettes. Readers may hold differing views on the performance characteristics the authors ascribe to different weapons. They can, therefore, use the parametric results displayed in the body of the report to assign their own WQIs and see their impact on the number of weapons needed for each scenario.

Antiship Strikes

Range: Perhaps the most consequential operational challenge at play in the Indo-Pacific is the tyranny of distance and its implications for the rest of the kill chain. The geography of the theater and the intensity of Chinese air defenses—namely its airborne early warning, fighter aircraft, and ship-based surface-to-air missiles—prevent American aircraft from rapidly flying over the Strait and thus require U.S. forces to conduct standoff strikes from several hundred kilometers away.⁷⁶ In the antiship vignette, the authors posit palletized or surface-launched salvos from well over 500 kilometers away and farther—no closer than the Philippine Sea, East China Sea, or Ryukyu Islands. This operational constraint poses significant challenges for U.S. sortie tempo, undermines munitions accuracy against moving targets, and increases warning time for Chinese units to defend themselves, each of which are discussed below.

Accuracy (A): Range has clear implications for accuracy. At long distances, an antiship strike will need to account for the significant movement of its target over the course of its flight as well as natural flight path deviations.⁷⁷ U.S. antiship missiles are designed to receive in-flight target updates (IFTU) to account for target mobility and course correct accordingly. However, unlike the permissive environments from which U.S. airpower has recently operated, airspace near the Taiwan Strait will not easily lend itself to loitering intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms maintaining consistent tracks on moving targets, nor to consistent communications links enabling IFTU.⁷⁸ As a result, the authors assume a communications-degraded environment in which tenuous command and control links are sporadically established to allow for long-range kill chain execution.

Accuracy is further challenged by Chinese decoys and deception, which will attempt to draw U.S. weapons toward ships or false signatures with little or no value. Ideally, U.S. weapons would be able to communicate and deconflict targets so that they are employed efficiently and do not erroneously home in on a decoy. However, without more sophisticated discrimination and precision guidance capabilities, such as electro-optical or infrared sensors, automated target recognition, and mesh networking, these munitions will likely be forced to compensate with volume.⁷⁹

Taking these considerations into account, this model heavily penalizes accuracy for low-cost weapons, providing unassisted HERONs with only a 0.5 chance of hitting their target. The long-range antiship missile (LRASM), while posited as much more effective at 0.8, is also affected by the operational constraints that are likely to emerge from a degraded communications environment and the ensuing difficulties with passing IFTU to and from different systems.

Survivability (S): Should a given munition arrive on target, it will then need to pass through Chinese air defenses, which will likely have had ample warning time from Chinese airborne early warning aircraft and ship-based radars actively searching for signs of an incoming long-range strike.⁸⁰ Upon detection, available People’s Liberation Army Air Force combat air patrols would likely attempt a first round of aerial interceptions via jamming or kinetic interception, followed by surface-based interceptors from destroyers and cruisers.⁸¹ These defensive layers significantly increase the chance that munitions are intercepted before reaching their intended target and require U.S. salvos to either overwhelm or otherwise penetrate each defensive screen.

The authors posit the probability of interception as especially high—0.95—for the notional HERON because low-cost drones and cruise missiles generally lack the low observability, speed, and rapid maneuverability that would allow them to minimize their radar cross sections and evade interceptors.⁸² These assumptions also conform to observed intercept rates of low-cost drones in Ukraine and in the Middle East.⁸³ For the LRASM, interception is considerably more difficult given the munition’s low-observability attributes. However, the authors expect the depth of China’s defensive interceptors to still pose formidable challenges, leading to an estimated 0.55 survivability rate.⁸⁴

In the event air defense saturation is achieved by exhausting inventory stockpiles—a point estimated at 300 strike munitions on a single target for the antiship scenario—this model factors an increase in the survivability of all subsequent munitions. This mechanism creates a step-change in munitions efficiency, as HERON’s and LRASM’s S values increase to 0.75 and 0.90, respectively. These changes reflect the reduced probability of interception from heavily depleted point defenses and tactical aircraft.⁸⁵

Lethality (L): If successfully delivered to the desired aimpoint, a weapon’s ultimate effects will depend on the interaction between the warhead and the aimpoint. Like virtually all modern surface combatants, People’s Liberation Army Navy cruisers rely on exposed electronic systems such as radar arrays or aerials. In this vignette, the authors posit these critical exposed systems as the munitions’ desired aimpoints. A successful hit on just one of those exposed systems could render even China’s most advanced cruiser unable to defend itself or the amphibious ships it escorts.⁸⁶ Similarly, successful hits on an amphibious ship’s control bridge or stern gate could slow the ship down, impede its ability to exercise command and control, and force it to sacrifice precious time for repairs. Given these systems’ fragility and the authors’ calculations of blast effects for a 100-pound HERON warhead and a 1,000-pound LRASM warhead using industry-standard textbooks and data on weapons effects, the authors provide HERON and LRASM L values at 0.85 and 1.0, respectively.⁸⁷

Air Base Attacks

Range: Mainland Chinese air bases are located even farther from U.S. operating locations than ships in the Taiwan Strait, usually within 350 kilometers of China’s waterline. As a result, the tyranny of distance is amplified for air base attacks. The range requirements for U.S. standoff weapons fired from either palletized launchers over the Philippine Sea and East China Sea or from ground positions on Okinawa or Northern Luzon exceed 900 kilometers.

Accuracy (A): An air base is a fixed target comprising several different types of tightly clustered aimpoints. These attributes improve accuracy, namely by minimizing target movement and reducing the need for IFTU.⁸⁸ As a result, the authors posit that munitions can deliver effects against air bases with a degree of baseline accuracy that they cannot achieve against mobile ships. Both exquisite and low-cost systems in the report’s analysis benefit from this, though low-cost munitions experience a disproportionate benefit given their particular vulnerabilities to disruption in the antiship context. As a result, the authors provide the extended-range variant of the joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM-ER) with an A value of 0.9 (up from LRASM’s 0.8) and provide the extended-range variant of the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS-ER) with an A value of 0.85 (a significant increase from HERON’s 0.5).

Survivability (S): Chinese air bases will be well protected by an integrated air defense network composed of hundreds of coastal radars, defensive combat air patrols, long-range surface-to-air missiles and short-range defenses.⁸⁹ As a result, the People’s Liberation Army will likely have considerable warning time for an inbound drone and cruise missile attack. These defenses will also be more difficult to exhaust, as interceptor inventories will be deeper and more quickly replenished on the mainland than at sea.⁹⁰ Though these improved defensive systems will not be impenetrable, planners should expect deeper inventories and higher interception rates of inbound weapons on coastal land targets relative to ships at sea.⁹¹

Based on open-source reporting and analysis of Chinese air defense orders of battle, this vignette posits a deeper air defense inventory (K) of up to 350 effectors across disparate systems and locations to protect a single air base.⁹² The authors therefore accord a challenging survivability rate to both low-cost and exquisite munitions: 0.05 for LUCAS-ER (equal to HERON), and 0.5 for JASSM-ER (down 0.05 from LRASM).⁹³ When saturation is achieved, the authors again increase both low-cost and exquisite S values to 0.75 and 0.90, respectively.

Lethality (L): An anti–air base strike has significant implications for lethality due to variations in aimpoint type. Most air bases comprise soft, hardened, and buried aimpoints, with the overwhelming share being soft aircraft and unhardened buildings, and a smaller share comprising hardened or buried structures such as storage bunkers. While exquisite munitions like JASSM-ER can address all three aimpoint types, hardened and buried targets typically preclude the use of lower-cost munitions due to the requirement of a penetrating warhead capability for access.

The construction of L values for both JASSM-ER and LUCAS-ER rely on blast effect calculations using Michael M. Swisdak’s simplifications of Kingery blast functions to determine pounds per square inch overpressure at an estimated impact distance from the aimpoint.⁹⁴ For soft and hard targets, the calculations for a notional LUCAS-ER 100-pound warhead estimate a 0.85 probability of destroying a soft aimpoint and a 0.10 probability of destroying a hardened structure. For JASSM-ER’s more capable warhead, the calculations determine a 1.0 probability of destroying or disabling a soft aimpoint, a 0.90 probability of destroying a hardened aimpoint, and a 0.80 probability of destroying a buried aimpoint.

About the Authors

Philip Sheers is an associate fellow with the Defense Program and colead of the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). His research covers escalation management and nuclear deterrence, airpower and great power conflict, and defense industrial base (DIB) and defense budget issues. While at CNAS, Sheers has published reports on nuclear issues in the Indo-Pacific, air battle management, the U.S. defense budget, and the U.S. DIB. With Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn, he supports a long-term research effort on the future of U.S. airpower. Outside of CNAS, Sheers is a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Nuclear Scholars Initiative. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Sheers holds an MA in security studies from Georgetown University and a BA in international studies from Kenyon College.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program and colead of the Gaming Lab at CNAS. She is a recognized expert in U.S. defense strategy, force planning, military posture, airpower, and wargaming. Prior to joining CNAS, Pettyjohn spent over a decade as a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where she led critical studies on airpower, force posture, multidomain operations, and strategic planning. From 2019 to 2021, she directed the Strategy and Doctrine Program within Project Air Force, and from 2014 to 2020, she coled RAND’s Center for Gaming, spearheading high-level defense wargames. Pettyjohn holds a PhD and an MA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and a BA in history and political science from The Ohio State University.

About the CNAS Defense Program

Over the past 19 years, CNAS has defined the future of U.S. defense strategy. Building on this legacy, the CNAS Defense Program team continues to develop high-level concepts and concrete recommendations to ensure U.S. military preeminence into the future and to reverse the erosion of U.S. military advantages vis-à-vis China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Specific areas of study include concentrating on great power competition, developing a force structure and innovative operational concepts adapted for this more challenging era, and making hard choices to effect necessary change.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many experts and colleagues who agreed to be interviewed and helped inform this project. We extend a special thanks to Mike Kofman, Dave Shlapak, and Becca Wasser for their detailed feedback and suggestions on how to improve this report. At CNAS, we thank Maura McCarthy, Melody Cook, and Caroline Steel for their steadfast publications support. We also thank Celeste Wetmore for her formatting and citation support. Any errors are the responsibility of the authors alone. This report was made possible with general support to the Defense Program and a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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