The British Ministry of Defence has set a design-to-cost target of about £400,000 for a ground-launched strike weapon able to carry a warhead of at least 225kg to a range of at least 500km at more than 600km/h, and has required the surviving designs to be producible at a rate of at least twenty a month within months of a production order. Two magnitudes drawn from the same public record give that figure its meaning. The PAC-3 MSE, the interceptor whose production the United States has contracted to triple towards roughly 2,000 rounds a year by the end of 2030, carries a headline round price of roughly $4 million. Fire Point’s target for the FP-7.X ballistic interceptor is less than €1 million, and remains a production ambition rather than a qualified recurring cost. Between one-way attack drones costing tens of thousands and complex missiles costing millions, European arsenals contain an economic discontinuity that no single system closes, and the eligibility rule governing the €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan — under which the cost of components originating outside the Union, the EEA EFTA States and Ukraine may not exceed 35% of the estimated component cost of a defence product — determines who is permitted to close it. The structural constraint is that qualified capacity in propulsion, energetics, seekers and radar, rather than budget, sets the rate at which any of these layers can be filled. What the public record does not settle is whether adding layers lowers the cost of defence or simply multiplies the number of production lines that must be sustained.
This report proceeds in six passes. The first reconstructs the torpedo-boat episode from Chris Madsen’s study of French torpedo development for the British Journal for Military History, from the 1914 and 1944 Proceedings articles on torpedo tactics and night defence, and from the Australian technical record of HMS Lightning, in order to establish what a documented case of cheap-system displacement actually looks like. The second tests the contemporary claim against RUSI’s studies of the third year of the war and of Russia’s move to mass precision, against CSIS on autonomy, Shahed economics and interception value, and against the Black Sea record. The third examines the affordable-mass programmes on their founding documents: the Ministry of Defence release on Project Brakestop, Fire Point’s own specification sheet for the FP-5, the Hensoldt memorandum on Freyja. The fourth reads European force design against NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defence Policy, OCCAR’s Aster, SAMP/T NG and HYDIS contracting record, and Regulation (EU) 2026/467 on the Ukraine Support Loan. The fifth locates the industrial constraint, drawing on the European Court of Auditors’ opinions on the defence industry programmes and on the published accounts of the suppliers concerned. The sixth states what the evidence supports and what would falsify it. The report does not forecast quantities, value companies or make recommendations about securities; it establishes which state of the demand chain each claim in the public record actually occupies.