It's impressive how much hardware they've been able to develop.
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
I don't think we as laypeople should even attempt to draw conclusions from Ukrainian battlefields ourselves, seeing how strong the survivorship bias is.
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
One of the advancements against EW is having on-device mapping systems (this goes back to the Tomahawk in the 70s) so that the projectile can adjust its flight in the absence of GPS. This is what one of the real advances of AI promises to be - a vehicle that can identify and change targets fully autonomously. Will especially apply to unmanned underwater vehicles which (as far as I know) haven't been deployed but will surely change the dynamic on the seas
We had pretty smart weapon systems for a while now! P-700 Granit and Brimstone missiles were doing cooperative engagement and target selection for decades. BONUS rounds fit target recognition into small pucks. If we squint just a bit, many naval mines, especially something like CAPTOR, are "vehicles that can identify and change targets fully autonomously".
AI is not the limiting factor as much as sensors, energy, datalinks, logistics, and costs are. Yes we can miniaturise TERCOM now, but then where would the vehicle get maps from (battlefields change!), how would it see the terrain (at night? on a foggy, rainy day? deliberately dazzled/blinded with a cheap laser?), how far can it travel, how much payload can it take, where does it launch from, and how does it get to the launch point? Working through those questions and anticipating cycles of adaptation, I think it's easy to end up with a $1m JASSM-ER or a $3k 155mm shell (neither of which Ukrainians have in sufficient numbers).
For example, if you know there's an enemy platoon in that forest, why would you fly a swarm of autonomous tree-avoiding hunter drones there if you can drop some 155mm instead? The enemy can't blind a 155mm shell, EW wouldn't work, shells don't care about fog or darkness, payload-to-weight ratio is ~100%, and they're cheap. Of course if you don't have shells you have to be creative, but that doesn't mean the creative solutions are better.
On the other hand, according to the episode I linked, humble unarmed non-AI DJI Mavics have a very persistent and systemic impact. They provide 24/7 eyes in the sky over the entire front line, which makes tactical surprise impossible. This is very much not "AI swarming slaughterbots" many seem to imagine and invisible to folks on the sidelines like us, but that's why I'd be cautious of making inferences from the media we get to see.
A 10% success chance seems incredibly effective. I would have estimated the chances quite a bit lower. Tanks are million dollar devices, which are expensive to replace and require significant training. If they can be effectively attacked by infantry without putting themselves in significant danger, that drastically lowers the value of a tank.
We had man-portable ATGMs for decades, they didn't "lower the value of a tank".
Less than 10% is not good when you consider how much does it cost in practice. Drone teams are often 2 pilots + technician + explosives technician (an incredibly risky job btw, those bastardised RPG warheads are live and sensitive) + infantry cover. At least double that if you want to strike beyond line of sight and need a retransmitter drone. Those teams can only move at night and on foot because they are actively hunted by the other side. They can only have one or two drones simultaneously in the air at best, and the drones need to get to their targets first without giving away the launch point. All of that for less than 10% success rate is not "incredibly effective".
Now compare to fire-and-forget Javelins that are way more lethal and are just something added to a normal infantry platoon.
>We had man-portable ATGMs for decades, they didn't "lower the value of a tank".
Of course they did, arguing anything else is complete lunacy, especially since you later advocate for the usage of Javelins, which, if effective and available, obviously reduce the value of tank. They also have the imense drawback of exposing the soldier to enemy fire.
I don't even get your other points. Why would drone operators be hunted more than Javelin operators? Why would Javelin operators not have to worry about giving away their position? Why don't Javelin operators need infantry cover?
ATGMs or drones don't "reduce the value of tank" because there is nothing better than tanks for when you need mobile protected firepower. If you think being vulnerable in a tank sucks, try storming through a field on foot.
Tanks' value doesn't come from their invulnerability. They weren't invulnerable since WW1, if ever. Their value comes from being better than alternatives.
As for Javelins, Javelins don't need operators that have to sit still and blind, guiding their slow drones to targets. Javelins don't need dedicated operator teams, US army more or less hands them to infantry platoons as needed. Javelins don't need "infantry cover", their operators are infantry. Javelins are fire and forget, so you can shoot and immediately leave, unlike drone teams. Javelins don't require extensive training and fine skill.
The only thing Javelins don't do is first person videos. See my original point about drawing wrong conclusions from footage we get to see.
> More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal".
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
They are only a thing for navies that can't afford anything better. We just call our battleships "destroyers" now, Burke Flight III and Type 45 are almost exactly the size of HMS Dreadnought and half the displacement (we don't do armour anymore).
The top end of course got much bigger, CVNs displace almost twice as much as Yamato.
Wait are you telling me that the only reason why we think Burke class ships are small is because 1) “Destroyer” and then 2) CVNs are just fucking massive?
quadcopter manufacturing has been dramatically increasing over the last year to the order of 10k+/mo on both sides with no sign of slowing down (i believe it's actually much higher than this but can't find the source i saw a few weeks ago); your argument seems to butt up against this reality
Both sides suffer from shell and ATGM shortage and inability to suppress/destroy air defences, which drives suboptimal adaptations. An FPV drone assembled in a garage from aliexpress components and a tesla battery [1] with a submunition extracted from a cluster shell [2] is more effective than a single old howitzer with 10 shells per 2km of frontline [3], but it's a pretty low bar.
The 10% estimate is not mine, it's from a legitimate expert who regularly goes to the frontline in Ukraine.
[1]: An amusing anecdote from that podcast: Tesla battery packs are a big source of batteries for FPV drones. The packs can be sourced for next to nothing from totaled Teslas, and individual cells are very reliable.
Basic FPV drones are rapidly getting countered/obsolete. The moment people start doing something smarter/custom the drones stop being cheap.
It's an unavoidable dilemma: commodity stuff is cheap, but easily countered; stuff that isn't easy to counter isn't commodity and isn't cheap. You probably heard "yes but you can JUST add a jamming-resistant radio, and a thermal camera, and autonomous recognition/coordination, and larger payload, and…", but that's just motte-and-bailey.
Plus the drones still need the payload. If they are used against armour, they need shaped charges, which aren't free. In practice they often get random RPG-7 HEAT warheads from Soviet stockpiles, but we can't compare that with newly manufactured western 155mm HE.
Adding context, before the war, according to internet sources, prices ranged from $3000-5000USD. Recently, they've been going for as much as $8600USD each.
A Howitzer itself ranges from $2m - 3.7m USD each.
Just remember that, unless your goal is just to kill everyone and scorch the earth, the aim of warfare is to occupy and control territory, which at some point necessitates humans to do the occupation. Nobody is yet trying to create permanent wastelands inhabited only by robots. It may become increasingly dangerous, but whether it's helicopters or some other means of transportation, you have to get humans into the land you're trying to take.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
>> Nobody is yet trying to create permanent wastelands inhabited only by robots.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
You don't have a historical or realistic understanding of warfare. The aim of warfare has always -- and will always be -- to break your enemy's will to fight. Sometimes that involves capturing and holding territory, but those are just "implementation details". In WW2 nuclear weapons were dropped on civilians and there was never any desire by the guys dropping those bombs to occupy territory.
This isn't really correct. Blue Force had already repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system and it was originally developed as a sparring partner for fighter jets (it was far more capable than just being a target).
Drones have changed warfare at a local tactical level. But your drones and smaller autonomous systems aren't helping if you have overwhelming firepower superiority, ie in Gaza drones haven't inflicted too much damage if you can just drop a couple thousand JDAMS and level out a territory.
Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
> We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
It's already being done. Check out these Russian improvised "Turtle Tanks"[1]. A big, light, metal canopy to keep drones from exploding next to the tank.
I mean it seems pretty likely that a smaller, lower range, kill drone could be developed that is designed for the express purpose of identifying other small flying objects and entangling them causing them to drop out of the sky.
The harder part I see is friend/foe identification, rather than just attacking anything else that's small and flying slowly.
They're using drones as killbots against individual infantrymen, actively chasing them down rather than taking a lucky grenade drop. That changes everything about force deployment on the ground.
While this does create dramatic videos, it does not represent much of an actual change. Most of these small drone operate well within the range of traditional infantry-killing weapons such as mortar shells. The tactics have changed, but the idea of an infantry unit killing another infantry unit at a couple miles distance isn't a revolution.
Firing traditional artillery makes you vulnerable to counter-battery radar. Since rockets, mortars, howitzers, etc all fire in a predictable ballistic trajectory, you have to quickly move or risk being shot at before your rounds even hit their target. An anti-personnel drone can move in any direction and can operate much lower to ground to avoid radar so no one will know exactly where it came from. You don't get as much of a bang but it's much more stealthy.
Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team. From what I have seen, the Ukrainian drone teams have to "shoot and scoot" in much the same way as the motor/artillery teams.
"Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team."
Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.
(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)
Part of the exposure is also due to the limited range of some smaller drone control systems, meaning those drone operators have needed to be much closer (a few km) to their targets than artillery crews (several dozen km).
This seems just completely wrong. The trend for drones is that features and capabilities are increasing and costs are decreasing because they're based on cheap software and cheap consumer hardware. The trend for unguided mortar rounds or artillery shells is that they're as cheap as they're ever likely to be at thousands of dollars a round, plus the cost of the gun and its replacement barrels and crew. (guided artillery shells or missiles are so expensive they're a separate conversation)
If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.
Capabilities are not the same thing as effects. A drone represents different capabilities at different price points, but the net result observed on the battlefield are not all that different that past infantry engagements. If enemy infantry knows your position, they can today reach out and kill you at similar ranges as they did in wars past. The how has changed, not the what.
There are also modified commercial drones that just drop explosives, and that is what is mentioned here. Those drones drop their payload and may return to reload if not shutdown. Those drones aren't "hundreds of thousands each", but around $500 each.
As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.
Even this is almost certainly an underestimate. Open source intelligence that just the bill of materials for a Shahed is more than the tens of thousands previously estimated. These are probably more on the order of ~$400k [0]
This comment thread is about cheap drones hunting down individuals. They are not using Shahed for that. You can easily build a small drone capable of carrying a grenade for under $300.
The impact on logistics is at least somewhat revolutionary. Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.
> Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.
Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?
Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.
Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.
Yes and no. Ammunition is important, but from a logistics standpoint it will be much less burdensome than the food/water/fuel that must be provided to men on the field. Even in a hot war, an infantry unit is not engaged in full combat 24/7. But it never stops eating.
> Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.
Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
Aren’t these drones regular cots drones with some modification? Wouldn’t taking the door off a microwave and pointing it at the drone cause it to fall to the ground? Surely it’s more complex than that and I’m missing something.
Frontline on both sides is saturated with electronic warfare system which are essentially microwaves with open doors. Both sides put them on trucks, armored vehicles, set up near trenches and even carry on their backpacks. There were absurd cases like this https://imgur.com/a/4LqgLED
Drones evolve under this pressure. Dynamic frequency changes, computer vision, maneuvering (like "go up when lost signal") and many more counter measures are adopted on both sides.
Consumer drones already deal with a hostile RF environment well. Finding the frequency with the least interference, using a wide bandwidth for control, and a different one for video, and programmable signal-loss behaviour.
Cities are hugely hostile to low power transmission, especially in the 2.4 and 5ghz frequencies.
The effective range of cheap DJI "mini" drones in cities is measured in kilometres. If you get away from the city, you can double and triple your effective range.
Obviously Russia is already doing massive amounts of radio interference, that has always been a problem, which Ukraine has partly overcome. Partly. Googling for it you can see that it is massively diminishing the usefulness of drones for Ukraine.
Jammer hunting drones already exist. In fact that was the idea behind the Shaheed predecessors in the first place. Set a course, then home in on strong em devices.
When you think about it, this is one area that Russia can't really compete in as well as western countries. Autonomous weapons will be the decider on any future battlefield minus nuclear weapons.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
> Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
The idea that everything would be small and with little momentum to overcome doesn't strike me as stable situation - someone might just start to throw (large) rocks from space, for example.
Is Anduril really that good? I am trying to figure out what is the potential of Anduril is. Their first phase product was in observability towers for border protection, then they made drone-ramming drones and now unmanned fighter jets.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development.
And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
There's definitely more than one problem with defense procurement, one of the biggest problems is simply having straightforward, acheivable goals in the first place and not fucking with them halfway through the process.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
— Kelly Johnson
Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.
> Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.
When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
Imho, the service branches are defined by and structured around the type of equipment required to complete their missions.
The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.
(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)
Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
Cost plus contracts are a mistake. If you get paid to do something, it should be for a fixed price not a variable number that encourages you to waste as much taxpayer money as you want. If you can’t do it for that price you need to increase your estimate until you can.
The new hotness is the Constellation-class frigate which chose a mature design to keep costs down. That was until feature creep completely consumed it in record time:
"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."
Depends on what you mean by “working.” DDG-1000 is still kicking around trying to figure out what to do with itself. DDG(X) is in a requirements development phase. FFG-62 is actually getting built. There are various autonomous surface and sub efforts that may turn into something.
Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all.
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.
The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.
I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
I also went to a/the top CS school. When I graduated I would have never considered working at a defense company. Now, after bouncing around big tech and startups for a few years, I am a few days away from accepting a position at one. What changed? Appreciation for how entirely insignificant to downright harmful the rest of the industry is, perhaps. I made changes that impacted tens of millions of users in... no significant way whatsoever. Certainly not anything they'd remember on their deathbed. And what else is out there? Finding better algorithms to keep people hooked on their phones watching ads for longer, making more bullshit "AI" products to strip communication of all personality, and hundreds and hundreds of healthcare startups begging me to help them "cut out the middleman" in X healthcare system and replace them with... themselves! Idk. If I can make one anti-drone system take down one more suicide drone than it'd be able to without me, I'm 100% sure whoever would have been on the other end of that kamikaze will appreciate my efforts a hell of a lot more than the 2^25 people I fed a slightly different arrangement of pixels than they'd have gotten without me.
That, and Poorly Targeted Revenge for 9/11 was not the most inspiring mission. Great Power Competition, however? I can get my blood pumping red, white, and blue for Great Power Competition.
> I made changes that impacted
> tens of millions of users in...
> no significant way whatsoever.
> Certainly not anything they'd
> remember on their deathbed [...]
Going into defense to directly contribute to someone's deathbed experience is certainly one way to guarantee that you'll make it memorable.
The defense industry isn't just "defense" against bad people. Is it better to optimize the colors of buttons, or work on projects that could potentially kill innocent civilians?
Wars suck. But sometimes the result of not fighting a war sucks more. Sure, military projects could POTENTIALLY kill innocent civilians. But that's not a guarantee, modern Western militaries go out of their way to minimize that, and again sometimes the result of not fighting a war would cause even more innocent people to suffer or die.
The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.
There are plenty of things that people can and do in private industry that are significantly more harmful than making some incremental improvement in a weapons platform.
I'd argue that working on the right projects reduces the likelihood of collateral damage.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
There are lots of things in the public sector that also kill people, unfortunately. While often less indirect or over time, companies simply trying to make a buck (be capitalist) have led to products, processes, trends, etc. that have killed a lot of people over time.
I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.
The catch with all those things that "actually save people from dying" is that they happen to be the same things that "could potentially kill innocent civilians". Any pharmaceutical researcher, surgeon, civil engineer, utility worker, and yes – defense contractor, has the ability to kill innocent civilians. But they by and large continue to do their work on a belief that by doing X job to the best of their ability, they will have a positive impact on the world that will leave it in a better place than if either nobody did the job, or someone with less experience than themselves executed it poorly.
Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.
That 'cut out the middleman' angle always makes me chuckle. I remember seeing an ad on the tube for Made.com offering to cut out the middleman in furniture purchasing - what are you if not a middleman I thought!
I still think the defense industry is the greater evil (since nearly everything that starts out as "defense" ends up being used for "offense"), but I 100% agree with your argument against the modern tech industry.
I think you’re probably right, and to those who share that anti-US government sentiment here, I’d like to say: “wake up”! If you think the US is bad, wait till you try Russia or China. I have three refugees in my house. They may never now return home.
Sure, I'm fine with that. What I object to is people using the US's flaws or past mistakes as a reason for isolationism or surrender to far worse actors.
"I'll make products that cause civil unrest, poison the political systems of entire countries, and give young girls mental issues, but I'll be damned if I work for that nasty military-industrial complex; I'm too moral for that!"
And it's frankly a childish sentiment. Go look at what's happening in Ukraine today. Why did that occur? Because a dictator woke up on the wrong side of the bed and said "you have, I want, I take." Military force and military innovation is the only thing stopping him from literally committing genocide against the Ukrainian people. Not "genocide" as in faculty lounge hyperbole . . . actual genocide.
It’s wrong and, frankly racist, to imply Americans are incapable of innovation. Immigrants are used to suppress wages, that innovation you describe is a key aspect of American culture and can be replicated in defense by Americans. One big problem is that the politics of the most innovative areas has been pretty anti-defense tech until very recently
I did not notice any implication of Americans being incapable of innovation. It is wrong and, frankly racist, to imply immigrants are used to suppress wages.
> I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
That seems misleading. The DOD was the reason inasmuch as the budget to pay contractors was slashed, and the alternative was letting the smaller companies go out of business and losing the knowledge and manufacturing capabilities altogether.
Post-USSR, the DoD literally met with defense companies and told them that (a) there was going to be less money so (b) they needed to consolidate to survive.
It was pretty explicit.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.
The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge.
After you retire from politics or government it's much easier to be a highly paid board member of one company than a badly paid member of five companies.
Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development.
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
As a minor point of no real consequence the Cessna T-41 Mescalero has been in service in the US airforce and army from 1964 until today, and I've been told the Diamond DA20 Katana is in indirect service via a through a civilian contract that screens prospective pilots.
Weird nitpick, I know.
There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston.
On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
There’s also stuff like the super tucano where it’s got a sorta warbird vibe but with a turbo prop (not technically a piston engine plane but performs a similar role to older types that did have piston engines)
The Battle of Beersheba ties two worlds together: on the one hand both sides were using aerial reconnaissance (akin to this 2024 thread), on the other the australian 12th channeled their inner Alexander and galloped through a gap directly to their victory condition (akin to Gaugamela 331 BC).
I'm getting strong PAC 750XL family vibes from that, we had a modified version hardened to fly 80 m drapes across all of Mali some years back .. locals were taking random potshots as it passed over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks
Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.
These are the "good stuff" .. for various data gathering activities you do not want a fast high flying jet, you want a slow close to ground platform travelling at sub 70 m/s speeds to maximise "dwell time" over each ground point (while not travelling so slow as to fall out of the bloody sky).
Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".
US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.
Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).
I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.
Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?
I think you misunderstood, 30 years from piston powered to jets that are still being flown today. The F15 was introduced 27 years after the end of WW2, where all the fighters of consequence were piston powered.
You’d have a point if you made this comment 15 years ago, but Russia invaded Ukraine 10 years ago. Around the same time, China started to make outlandish claims on the South China Sea.
You can make a lot of complaints about the defense industry like waste and corruption, but a lack of a clear objective is no longer an issue.
This is an absurdity. The US did counterinsurgency brush fires and that's it since major combat operations ended in Iraq. Go look at Ukraine. THAT is what "being at war" looks like, and you should be thankful we haven't been forced to do that for 30 years.
We pay a european level of taxes (and rising) in order to receive a "safety net" thinner than Cuba, mostly so we can drop bombs on brown people and shadowy "communists"/"terrorists"/"freedom haters"/"yellow cake enjoyers"/"nazis that arent Ukrainian". What's the metric for that?
It doesn't have to be good. What matters is that near peer adversaries see these developments and spend some of their resources on trying on R&D efforts to match ours. An arms race is a non-kinetic way to weaken your enemies before hostilities start. Unfortunately, AK-47s are cheap to produce at scale and our enemies have millions of people to give them to, so regardless of the fancy toys, the military still needs ammo, mines, grenades, rockets, bombs, and napalm to disable enemy soldiers at scale.
I worked there. Think: budget defense contractor and you'll be really accurate.
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Interesting perspective. Coming from the perspective of a non-US defence executive, I will have to say that failing demos are quite normal in defence applications. It happens, and you still win contracts, because the end client sees the value prop and trusts you to sort out the issues. Still nerve wrecking though.
Not to mention an unscheduled demo. How often do software engineers have a reliably working local state of a repository that they could just start up and demo whenever someone walks by their desk?
Was the system in operational readiness at this point in time? Sounds like it was in the middle of a sales process, based on the fact that you described it as part of the sales process.
I also worked at a new defense company that partnered with Anduril and other newer defense companies. It’s the same experience: unreliable software built week over week, thrashed by contract demands, and frankly mediocre engineers that make simple things complicated.
Drones are so cheap you can send a full constellation of drones waaaay cheaper than the cost of one sentry tower and it will defeat it. These systems have limited handling capacity. With enough drones you can get through anything.
The main problem is, there are more than enough drones. All I’m saying above is you probably just need 8 of them to get through Andurils system.
Also, the method to defeat such systems is not classified. It’s quite obvious and china can even easily overwhelm carrier defenses using this method.
My only disagreement with your position is that you seem to evaluate it in a void. Compared to other systems out there, is Anduril really that bad? I suspect if you're in a trench you'd much rather have a system that can down "just" 8 drones at a time than one that can down zero.
I think their biggest differentiator is the way they sell their products. They haven't made a habit of winning big research contracts, blowing past the budget, and then blowing past the original per-unit manufacturing price estimates.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
> I think their biggest differentiator is the way they sell their products.
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
No, the only mention of Oppenheimer in the article is this:
> Essentially, Luckey’s aim is to make the US and its allies almost impossible to harm — “a prickly porcupine” in his words — as well as to supply weapons powerful enough to put adversaries off attacking in the first place. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.
> The thesis is not original. It’s the same idea that led to Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb. America’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the second world war, killing more than 100,000 people, and nuclear weapons have not been deployed in conflict since.
Newspaper headlines are usually added by the copy editors, not the author of the article.
What achievements? Is productizing something we figured out in the 90s (you can do VR with a headset using some form of magnetic tracking) really comparable to splitting the goddamned atom?
Reading the comments here is giving me the disturbing realization that the war in Ukraine is extremely valuable to the US because the US gets to collect immense amounts of data to inform perspectives on how modern technology is revolutionizing warfare with minimal risk to American troops. And that's with technology in the hands of an extremely motivated ally against one of our top rivals. This opportunity doesn't come very often, and I can imagine there are a lot of parties interested in it persisting at least until the value in the observational data starts to tail off. Along with other concerns, this may be a reason to parcel out exactly what tech gets given to Ukraine at which times.
It's worth considering that while the equipment in use in the ukraine conflict is obviously relevant, the nature of the conflict is radically different from what the US would face. Ukraine is literally on Russia's doorstep, allowing Russia to send its units in and pull them back for repairs with relatively limited logistical strain. This allows it to use massive numbers of cold war surplus assets that would not be viable anywhere else on earth. Ukraine started the war with an extremely small air force and has received only very limited support in that regard, meaning it has spent the entire war without air control. This both limits Ukraine's capacity to use tactics which rely on air support and gives Russia the ability to operate its air forces in relative safety. US doctrine is completely based around air superiority. Ukraine had an extremely limited standing army and military industrial capacity prior to the war, and has relied heavily on non-professional troops who volunteered or were conscripted after the war started and received only moderate training, and it is dependent on foriegn support for advanced arms and munitions. The US has both the strongest standing army and the most advanced military industrial complex in human history. The issues Ukraine is struggling with now - pushing into areas Russian troops have spent months fortifying while having to conserve artillery shells, holding off an unending trickle of 60 year old soviet tanks, and having to jerry-rig long range drones to attack targets in Russia - are challenges that simply wouldn't exist if the US were fighting a war. If our goal was really to get useful data that would be applicable to US conflicts, we'd be giving the Ukrainians the means to fight the way we fight.
I agree Ukraine never had a chance against the far superior Russian military. The reason the US and NATO did not officially send ground troops, although many of their people are on the ground, is that it would trigger full war between NATO and Russia which would go thermonuclear. If that ever happened, Russia's larger and more advanced nuclear arsenal (ballistic missiles) would give it an advantage. Their large land mass, twice that of the US, would give them a better survival chance after the fallout.
The only thing the Russian military is superior in is numbers, and it's very clear that they care very little for the men who fight and die for their country, even less so than America discarding their veterans; at least America's army doesn't send them in to be actual cannon fodder.
You're mostly correct that the older tech is the bulk of what's been sent, but there have been lots of batches of newer tech that the US has delivered. [0]
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
Of course they are, but to me at least, it seems like their cost-benefit is very different from the US. I don't think the war is worth it to them just to learn more about warfare.
It was always going to be a terrible tragedy with Ukraine. Vlad committed something much worse than a crime, he committed a mistake (to paraphrase Talleyrand).
NATO+ countries aren't fighting him, they are using Ukraine as a proxy, while Vlad is fighting with his own army. NATO has been waiting nearly 80 years to attack Russia directly. They very motivated to make sure that Vlad continues making errors. As such, the longer this war takes, the better for NATO. And, unfortunately, the worse for Ukraine.
I think data collection is for sure one aspect, but I think Russian casualties is the largest motivator
The bloodshed would not end. The Russians are hell bent on ethnic cleansing, as can be evidenced by Bucha and several other places I’ve actually been to.
I have been watching the warfare via several Telegram channels and observe how important drone warfare now is. I watched 5 $10M Abrams tanks destroyed by $500 FPV drones. Close combat on troops is also conducted with drones with remarkable precision. We don't know how much of the targeting and execution by Russia is automated verses manual, but many experts in this field agree that Russia's technical capability is at parity and sometimes exceeds NATO's such as hypersonic missiles.
I thought Russia's hypersonic missiles were a failure, with the Ukrainians shooting them down with 30 year old Patriot missiles? There were a lot of articles about it last year, here's one:
Additionally, Iran claims that Israel did not intercept any of the hypersonic missiles they fired at Israel.
NATO does not possess any hypersonic missiles. Some people might say that NATO is keeping them secret, but that makes no sense. Nations exhibit their technologies as a deterrent.
What makes these sources not credible in your mind? I have not observed them reporting anything incorrectly. They are citing military experts who know the technical capabilities of these weapons and defense systems. If you want to refute what they say, show how a slower Patriot missile could target and intercept a much faster mach 5 missile. It is basic physics without getting deeply into rocket science.
And to a new-ish company like Anduril, too! Palmer Lucky and Co founded it in 2017 which is baby years for a lead defense contractor on a major project like this.
IIUC this is the Wingman program for the F22 and F35 so these aren't "slow" drones like predators, these are going to be high performance jets. This is a serious contract!
F22 rated load is 9g continuous (~13g burst) and it's made with mostly Ti64, thermoset composites, and aluminum [1].
It's much lower than it can be because there's no point in investing in a stronger airframe when the sustained acceleration would kill any pilot. These unmanned drones can easily be designed to withstand much more.
9G shouldn't be a problem at all, from a material standpoint. Missiles go to 100G, and F1 engine pistons withstand 8.600G (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force).
The F-16 avionics are limited to 9G, but the fuselage is able to handle much more when not carrying a full load of fuel. 9Gs is standard for a fighter.
I'm hearing that dogfighting is a thing of the past because weapons systems operate at large distances anymore. Drones should do (at least?) three things well: dog fight, since they can make decisions in an instant and tolerate higher g-forces than a human can; prevent a human death if they get shot down; and be smaller/lighter/carry more/have greater range because they're not designed around carrying a pilot.
Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
Dog fighting requires much more situational awareness from a sensor perspective. One reason the recent VISTA demonstration had the adversary feed its own position via data link to the autonomously flown plane.
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Unmanned fighters are a force multiplier, a single F-35 can coordinate its own squadron of drones (loyal wingman program). More ordnance, more coverage, more capabilities, more flexiblility, and less risk for lower relative costs.
I hate to be the downer here, but we said the exact same thing with the F4. And then the F4 got hosed over Vietnam. So we went back to having a gun onboard.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
I think the amount of space and weight a human and their required hardware need is pretty low on a jet. However the aerodynamics probably benefit a lot from not needing a high up bulbous cockpit with really good visibility
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
This consensus doesn't exist. Computers have been designating targets and commanding attacks since at least the 60s. The Phalanx CIWS for example is designed to be run in fully automatic mode, choosing which radar contacts to engage and when to open fire on them. There's even already been friendly fire incidents from the system.
Modern anti-ship missiles, torpedos, and BVR missiles also are designed with the ability to "go to this point in space and then find yourself a target and kill it"
We automated target selection and tasking in warships shortly after the second world war, to combat the fact that we expected the soviets to send 200 missiles at a task force at once, and didn't think humans could manage that kind of task load.
If you turn the right keys in an Arleigh Burke, every single human can leave the command part of the ship and it will still shoot planes out of the sky, all automated.
This is for the next phase of the project that involves building flying prototypes. Later stages include mass production which could go to a Boeing or Lockheed. I wonder how much of the decision to give this to a smaller player is based on a desire to maintain diversity among defense contractors and the competitive advantages that come with.
In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Probably overthinking. The Europeans signed deals with Helsing and Palantir recently for similar projects. That must have lit a fire under someones ass.
Go find any GUR operator in Ukraine and ask them what they think of Anduril
Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily
Why General Atomics? They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted. They make the Predator and other current UAVs, which are all expensive and uninteresting:
In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
Because that's how the government operates. Same with the initial COTS and Commercial Crew awards to SpaceX: it was paired with a similar contracts to Orbital and Boeing, to make sure that if the untested startup failed there would be a traditional contractor ready to take up the slack.
Hopefully this time the incumbent doesn't get paid twice as much for a worse outcome, as happened with Commercial Crew...
NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.
From what I recall from NASA Artemis contracts selection process, all bids are weighted with two parameters in addition to the proposed cost: technical merits of the proposal and the confidence score based on the company's management and previous performance.
DoD wants a high level of confidence that your company will still be around and delivering the exact same product to the exact same specs 20 years from now. It's why startups are basically never the primes on defense acquisitions.
I assume andruil is doing the controller and consults on design, while GA largely does the aircraft. Building big aircrafts takes huge facilities, so it's not unreasonable to have a big incumbent doing this.
No, Anduril and General Atomics will work separately on competing prototypes and at the end likely only one of them will win a final order for production aircraft.
>They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted.
The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.
If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.
Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.
Optionality, even for a monopsony like the Defense industry, is good for the consumer (Pentagon). They still want suppliers to compete.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
Diversifying the economy is a pathway to winning wars. Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future. Other countries make these things much more efficiently because they don’t have lazy governments captured by old companies.
Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.
>Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future.
You win wars by buying your equipment from the most capable suppliers. If that happens to be a centralized cabal of suppliers (this stuff is expensive, after all), then it is what it is. It's not the mission of the DoD to diversify the economy, its mission is to win wars as effectively as possible at any cost.
…and at the level of the DoD your goals include ensuring that there ARE as many capable suppliers as possible, using your commercial power, to increase your chances of “winning wars as effectively as possible”.
Wars are won on logistics; a corrupt, stagnant, or under-innovating market is a barrier to successful defence.
You aren't going to win wars by procuring from second and third rate suppliers just to keep the market diverse. You have to ask for proposals from across the market, but it's natural that suppliers will become centralized given how much money, time, and expertise is required.
The mission of keeping the economy healthy lies upon the Commerce and Justice Departments, whose missions are to manage the economy and keep industries within the confines of the law respectively.
I meant other countries make the plane portion (not Anduril’s unmanned controls) that General Atomics is responsible for. Predators and Reapers are very expensive.
Competitive procurement is intentional US military method expressly for military purposes. Saying the DoD shouldn't care about it because it needs to win wars is a meaningless statement. Part of how it wins wars is by having effective equipment and part of how it has effective equipment is that it has a competitive process. Cultivating supplier diversity is intentional.
Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.
The name Anduril means “Flame of the West”, which sounds cool as hell. But it feels a little icky to me given the ideological proclivities of Palmer Luckey and Thiel.
I like Anduril, but it seems that their stuff is overcomplicated and expensive compared to what we see on the battlefield in Ukraine where hundreds of drones are downed daily.
An unmanned fighter jet is a whole different ball game for them.
AFAIK Anduril capabilities go quite a bit further. From their marketing materials I understand that devices are networked sensor data is shared. All drones sees what any given drone sees and so do soldiers on the ground and the commanders. IMO this can be a massive advantage over the slow, fairly dumb drones in use in Ukraine.
That said, I agree, we also need lots of cheap drones.
>From their marketing materials I understand that devices are networked sensor data is shared.
This hasn't been innovative in a military context since at least Desert Storm.
Actually a shared battlespace run by computers managing contacts and sharing the data with tens of platforms including sending specific intercept data to specific in air interceptors and relaying data those interceptors get back to the rest of the fleet and managing tasking for tens of different surface combatants to intelligently and efficiently task hundreds of incoming threats was rolled out to American fleets in the 1960s
It's the difference between peacetime preparation and wartime expediency. If the Ukrainians were able to spend the time and money to move the drone supply chain home, improve sensors, implement electronic warfare workarounds, etc they absolutely would. But right now there are Ukrainians losing hands disassembling conventional warheads to mount on FPV drones because they are needed right now on the front in the fight for the nation.
I guess autonomous platforms are exciting to defense procurement and war planners because they can use them much more aggressively in theatre without risking expensive pilots. It's hard not to think of the recent reporting on the "Lavender" AI targeting system and how these two ideas combined will lead to more indiscriminate killing of civilians. What's the calculus for human American pilot lives to collateral civilian lives? 5:1 or 40:1?
Collateral damage should be at historic lows with an ai army. Fly a swarm like birds over a city, identify your target, and you can selectively eliminate that target with a single bullet from the drone.
Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.
The problem is how you define your “target”. In Israeli Lavender program it seems they are killing people for belonging to the same Whatsapp group as someone identified as a terrorist. And that's because Israel has a long time policy of “punishing” family members of “terrorists” (the term includes both legit terrorists but also people who are just political opponents).
Exactly. Simply "identify the target"! It's an incredibly broad handwave that ignores all the unsolved problems in computer vision and warfare fire control.
Well they tried to wait for the civilian population in the north to evacuate before they advanced, unlike the Americans to say the Japanese, Germans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and scores more who they bombed indiscriminately. I’d say that this conflict is a huge step in the right direction in terms of the treatment of civilians in war. War is ugly especially when the adversary embeds their infrastructure with their civilian population, in order to maximize collateral damage and shift international sentiment.
It’s the height of irony to respond to this comment with some techno-utopian BS, when the parent is describing how AI is actually being used, right now, to inflict mass casualties on a civilian population. At what point to people abandon their Panglossian hypotheticals and stare reality in its face?
You might disagree with the SJW fork attack on nix. But if you also disagree with the idea of Haskell powered death drones blowing up innocent little baby humans, then you might have incentive to support - or at least loudly ignore - the forking / sabotage / leftist troll op.
Me, I will take an Even More aggressive track: I honestly hope this turmoil leads to a better version of the nix syntax. Perhaps something much cleaner: A YAML based syntax that eliminates curly braces and the need for many nix functions.
Einstein was referring to the hydrogen bomb of course.
If high tech superpowers went at each other full bore with H bombs we’d probably be LARPing Mad Max, but so far that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely. All leaders in all these powers know that any such exchange would be mutual and thus suicidal (MAD) so the only way it happens is if you get someone truly insane in power.
What has happened since the bomb was developed and what’s likely to continue are skirmishes and proxy wars. Drones are the modern weapon of such conflicts with Ukraine and the Israel-Iran skirmish being heavily drone based.
This is ugly because it’s often not the soldiers of the superpower puppet masters dying but those of puppet states, and drones allow more technological powers to beat up on less technological people like it’s a video game.
If nukes are used in conflict in this century it will probably be just a few in one of these conflicts, followed by an overwhelming condemnation.
But the silver lining is that since the bomb was developed the overall per capita number of humans dying in war globally has fallen dramatically. As long as we continue to avoid huge scale conflict this number will probably stay low. Without the bomb it’s likely that a WWII style conflict between the US and USSR would have erupted and killed many millions more.
Some argue based on this that the bomb was a peacekeeping invention. So far that’s been true but we will see how the future goes.
It's been going on much longer in places like Yemen. Obama was the first to recognise that by switching to drones you basically don't have to face any domestic political opposition to combat.
He certainly ramped up from W Bush, but I think it was more due to timing in technological advancements and reduced overall cost of life (American primarily, others distant second), compared to deployments. This[0] passed just a week after 9/11 (7 years before Obama).
Autonomous drones going full berserk are not really far from H bomb. Of course each one is much less than a bomb, but firepower can be much larger in total
They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and an oldschool drone driven by a pilot in a trailer will be minimal.
And many old fighter jets retire as target drones, going on to fly unmanned for perhaps decades. New purpose-build designs might have lower operating costs but their purchase price will always be higher than slapping radio controls onto already-purchased jets.
> The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and an oldschool drone driven by a pilot in a trailer is minimal.
Well the whole point is not to reduce headcount totally but reduce the amount of people put directly in harms way, for example a pilot flying in a direct combat scenario.
An "unmanned" drone still has a pilot. That pilot is on the ground, flying the drone remotely. An "autonomous" drone is one that has no pilot anywhere. In neither case is anyone in harm's way.
Why do you think anyone else thinks that eliminating the job is the valuable thing bere? I have always heard the benefits to be things like less risk to life (vs piloted), quicker reaction (vs piloted and remote), can’t be jammed (vs remote). Literally never heard anyone mentioned salary saved ever, and indeed everyone expects it to be more expensive.
When it comes to fighter pilots, salary is irrelevant. The few pennies paid in salary is absolutely nothing compared to the millions of dollars a year it takes to train and maintain an active combat pilot. Those costs are at the center of nearly every discussion re military drone tech. An autonomous pilot, a computer program, doesn't need check rides. It doesn't need to re-qual its AAR ticket every month. And it doesn't retire or get promoted out after five years.
You’re not responding to my question. You’re listing reasons the elimination of the job valuable, which partially undermines your original comment (because some of these reasons do not apply to drone pilots) but does not answer why you think other people consider the eliminated job to be the key benefit.
Like is any of this mentioned in the article or this comment section? Or are you just complaining about bad arguments you heard elsewhere?
Getting the pilots out of the aircraft reduces the number of people killed in action, which has a significant effect on a war's support and popularity.
downing a drone doesn't require the kind of response that killing a pilot does. It's easier to deescalate from a bunch of drones being shot down vs coffins coming home to families.
A lot of the support staff on those airbases exist to support training flights by human pilots (both in the cockpit and remote). If training flight hours can be cut then that will tremendously reduce ground personnel requirements. The autonomous flight software only has to be "trained" once; new copies don't have to spend years in the pilot training pipeline.
(I am aware that current autonomous piloting technology is very limited and can only accomplish a small subset of Air Force missions.)
I don't know why people keep bringing that up. It's hardly relevant. Extreme maneuvers at high G forces are mostly only useful in very limited circumstances for evading a missile in the terminal phase of an engagement. In the real world it's far less important than low observability, data links, sensor fusion, EW, decoys, fuel fraction, and stand-off range.
Building an airframe strong enough to handle G forces beyond what a human can endure also comes at the price of greater weight and reduced range. It's not worth the trade-off.
I'd say it's a huge change. Yes, it still needs all the same support personnel, or maybe even more. However, those drones that are controlled from a container suffer huge latency that make them useless for most air combat.
Those aren't meant to fly high and send missiles at weddings on the ground, those are maneuverable wingmen for F-35s.
It's hard to believe, but the times of "If I won't do it, someone else will." are back and it seems people forgot the lesson. It is my honest opinion that anyone who works on such weapons is a monster.
3 years ago this topic would be full of people protesting this. Pointing out the inhumanity, the potential for abuse, the hypocrisy, the dangers of desensitizing war. Censorship changed the game entirely.
It wasn't censorship, it was the Invasion of Ukraine that woke up most of your fellow pacifists. They saw civilians being butchered in a pointless, egotistical invasion of a peaceful country. They saw protests in Russia being brutally and quickly crushed. So they realized that there are in fact threats in the world that aren't going to be defeated through self sacrifice and empathetic dialogue and instead needs to be subdued with firepower.
That is indeed a horrible excuse for any action. But having been here for well over 3 years I think there has always been a diversity of opinions on such things. This is very far from an echo chamber, which is a good thing! I just hope ycombinator never tries to monetize that diversity of thought the way /. did by feeding in tangentially techincal topics they knew would be controversial. Not everyone here thinks pacifism is a good idea, not everyone here thinks the MIC is just a jobs program, not everyone here is even on the human's side in the Butlerian jihad. I'm glad they post because I am never completely sure of any of my views and they may have good arguments. And if we talk to each other it moderates the polarization.
Yes, in a historic war of civilization versus the opposite, against a foe that uses your humanity as a weakness, it becomes very confusing who is right and who is wrong.
Marketing. Trust me... it's not that cool. They hire artists to design this stuff. Not kidding. The exterior is made by an industrial designer more so then an actual engineer. I would know, I worked at the company previously.
Umm... this product was acquired into the company via Blue Force. It was pretty much fully designed prior to Anduril getting its hands on it. It sounds like you don't know what you're talking about despite having "worked at the company," which could mean anything.
I left before this was “acquired”. So I won’t know specifically for this product.
I do know that Anduril has done this for many of their products including the single rotor drone. Additionally it has all the hallmarks of industrial design. That shell looks way too over the top with those lines.
So I was exaggerating a bit. My mistake. I should say “very incredibly likely an industrial designer was involved to the point of obviousness due to my previous experience with the company”
How does a company like Anduril come out of nowhere to scale so fast, get so much money, and so many contracts in a very entrenched field of government defense contracts? Yes, they're bringing modern industry experience to these things, but I don't see that as enough to break through all the barriers that are there. How have they done it?
Man, Anduril must be spending a fortune on advertising right now. They've been on top of HN a few times recently and I've seen a bunch of advertorials about them popping up on FB.
I find it remarkable how the readers of this site are at the same time “worried about LLMs”, and totally enthusiastic towards what will inevitably become a no-human-in-the-loop Skynet. Sure, we’ll all get smashed with drones if we stop paying taxes or otherwise disobey, but at least our LLMs won’t accidentally praise Hitler or something.
We are on a venture capital website. Don't be surprised that when people read an article about killer drones, they just salivate at the sweet pentagon money.
You’re missing a couple use cases there. Particularly the ones when these weapons, which can’t refuse an order like a meat sack soldier would, shoot at _you_. I’m not saying “don’t build weapons”, btw. By all means do. I’m saying as far as risk is concerned, this is by far the riskiest direction imaginable
If we’re making them smart enough to decide whether to shoot on their own, why wouldn’t we make them smart enough to refuse an unethical order (e.g. there’s like 80% civilians there, I’m not shooting a rocket at the target)?
Obviously they won’t, but because the problem here is that the humans do not want the machine to question them, it’s only a matter of time before the bad guys have them anyway. I’m inclined to say that it’s better the good guys (at least from my perspective) have them first.
IMO with defense the prisoner dilemma is out in full force. Ideally nobody would build autonomous weapon platforms like this. I'm under the impression though that out opponents are already working on these as well. Building these ourselves turns the situation from a lose/lose (we lose because our enemy has these weapons and we don't or we lose because the weapons kill us) to a potential win/lose (we win or avoid way because we have solid weapons or we may lose because the weapons turn against us)
Any rogue AI, if it proves to be a danger, will still need to maintain its servers somehow. So to be a danger it either needs to get humans to do what it wants, in which case it can bomb things just as well with manned fighters, or develop its own robots and manufacturing, in which case it can build its own fighters.
We ought to worry that these will let General Ripper go rogue more easily or an adversary hack them, but I don't think this moves the needle at all one whether advanced AIs could be dangerous.
If the movie "the Cube" has taught us anything (and I guess it hasn't) it is that it's possible work on something without knowing what it's actually for. With some misdirection, an AI could probably run in a data center that is on paper doing something completely different. Do most people maintaining cloud servers today even know what they are running?
You can argue for changes while still recognizing that the current rules make it more optimal to do the things you argue against. There is no contradiction.
Libertarians aren't anarchists. They don't generally believe that there should be no government (although you can find people who believe just about anything). I don't think there's anything hypocritical about libertarians taking government contracts for defense. If they were taking government contracts or jobs around regulating markets or building public housing, then that would be closer to hypocritical, but I'm not sure that even qualifies. Hypocrisy isn't benefiting from something you disapprove of, it's engaging in it, so arguably, they'd have to be the ones issuing the laws they disapprove of for it to be hypocrisy.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It really depends on what they actually believe (or say they believe) specifically. If their belief is "societies work better when governments don't interfere with markets", then their beliefs say nothing about what individual people should do in situations where a government does interfere with markets. They may also believe that if you can't fix something, taking advantage of it is justified, in which case they are not being hypocritical. That's not to say you can't regard such a position as unethical. However, I think many if not most people use systems they are in favor of dismantling. For example, people who believe housing is a human right don't typically donate their houses when they move, they sell them on the open market.
Defense/military is one of the few government functions that libertarians endorse as totally necessary. To many, it's the only legitimate government function.
I don't think you've thought about this very hard.
If you haven't read Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez, it's quite good (especially the audio book) and is related to unmanned killing drones. Near future sci-fi.
Efficient supersonic capability is only one minor aspect of 5th generation fighters, and not even particularly useful for most missions. It's less important than low observability, data links, and sensor fusion.
Anduril was supposed to be a sponsor for a Nix conference; it was then dropped after community reacted negatively to having a weapons manufacturer being a sponsor.
"Outraged community" were about 30 people with few to no project contributions but a lot of political slogans and of likely questionable state of mind.
It doesn't take being a chef to know when something is shit :)
(on the off chance that some HN audience members have reading comprehension issues - this is aimed at politically driven non-contributing participants behind the anti-anduril outrage, Nix and its creator are absolutely fine)
Signatories to the letter against Anduril sponsorship of NixCon include contributors with thousands of Nixpkgs PRs each, like Infinisil, wegank, and Ma27, plus many other recognizable names with PR counts in the hundreds. Some of those people are also committers who have helped many, many contributors get their code in.
If you can't tell that from a glance at the signatories list, you shouldn't be commenting on 'non-contributing participants'.
yet when I posted a verbatim profile page screenshot of the author while saying absolutely nothing about them myself, it was downvoted as "arrant bigotry" lol.
Some of the more leftwing NixOS contributors hate that Anduril is using their technology and are trying to keep them from contributing/sponsoring/etc. via code of conduct changes.
Nobody is trying to stop them from using Nix or contributing code. The only objection is to their use of Nix community events for advertising through sponsorship of those events.
Only if their warhawk counterparts hold their next shindig somewhere in Gaza (So they can see first-hand what the consequences of their work and advocacy look like).
If you don’t want to build weapons because you don’t like the variety of ways they may be wielded, that’s a valid and reasonable ethical stance.
If you don’t want to build anything that could ever potentially be used in the manufacture of those weapons, you probably shouldn’t be building open source software or contributing anything to do with any programming language at all.
When the defense industry funds things they tend to go for architectures without a single point of failure and have the resources to create new things if the existing things are insufficient or adversarial. DARPA funding created the internet etc.
Meanwhile if you were to get the defense industry to not use your product, they're not going to go out of business or do less of whatever you didn't like. They're going to bring the same money to someone like Oracle or Microsoft with no qualms about taking it -- or bring even more money to them, which is your tax money, as those companies charge quite a lot.
This makes me suspicious that the people agitating for "don't take their money" are being subtly or not so subtly encouraged to do so by the people who want to take their money instead. After all, the historical norm is the opposite. Not just TCP/IP but Tor and SELinux and microprocessors and, considering that AT&T has long been a major defense contractor, transistors and lasers and solar panels and C and all the rest of it. Are the same people who want to refuse their money also inclined to refuse all of the other things it paid for?
Would we be better off if the University of California never took a Unix license or created BSD because of where it came from?
I will point out that I am well aware of, and respect the stance that bad things done multiple-degrees-removed-from-you are not, like, entirely your responsibility. Or even necessarily your responsibility at all.
I did, however, have to expand on the concept that it's very easy to have strong opinions about war when you yourself are sheltered from the consequences of it.
This comparison is irrelevant to the conversation. But even otherwise it is misleading and leaves out lots of history. The modern state of Israel has existed for that long - but if anything, it’s a war for Jewish people’s existence in land that was historically Jewish. And it wouldn’t be a “war” if Israel could exist peacefully and not constantly be threatened by terrorists. Most people don’t see a problem with a war of self defense in response to October 7, so I’m not sure what you think would happen if “warhawks” saw the “consequences” of their work. If anything, this is a low casualty conflict compared to most.
I'm referring to the settlement land grabs and displacements that happened after 1967, not to its existence of either 1947 or 1967 borders. (Which have their own humanitarian problems, but that's something else.)
I don’t think it’s right to make comparisons like this. But if you really want to go there, have you tried comparing the death toll? In Ukraine, it’s likely around three quarters of a million dead in two years.
Honestly I think military is just a scapegoat for these people, their real mission (like many before them) seems to be using the lack of CoC acceptance as their own weapon to justify bullying them for having opinions they don't like. That has always been the MO.
They want the CoC to be able to silence undesired speech in the first place, and if they refuse, it becomes their strawman to allow them to keep arguing the same thing all over again.
To me this reeks of the "paradox of intolerance" e.g. "you cannot be inclusive without allowing people to say things you don't like".
I think it’s entirely valid for a community to decide they don’t want participation and funding from a defence contractor. That isn’t a scapegoat - it’s the actual goal.
You may or may not agree with this stance and that is totally fine. You’re still free to use the software for whatever you want; you can also go ahead and fork it, or create a new community endorsing this use. If enough people agree then it will thrive. That’s the beauty of it!
A specific community has the freedom—within the bounds of legality—to decide who is welcome to participate.
The problem is, there is not a community that is in agreement about this. There is a subset of the community, that like to pretend they are and speak for "the community", and when they get pushback from those that disagree they call it concern-trolling.
While the phenomenon you describe certainly exists, it is vital to separate it from the phenomenon of not wanting to support the US "defense" sector.
I do not identify as a leftist, and would not be considered one, but as an aerospace engineer I would never work for something that aids the US war machine.
Those weapons are never used in "defense". Do they defend an unsustainable way of life ? Sure.
The last time I saw one of these weapons in use was when I was standing in my kitchen in Ukraine and through the window I could see a missile take down a russian suicide drone.
As you might be aware, which I cannot be certain of given your insubstantial reply, international geopolitics are usually a bit more nuanced than an aggressive "land grabbing tyrant".
Ukraine is a strategically important region to Russia. They don't have to invade as long as they can threaten to invade, and thereby get concessions without armed conflict.
If Ukraine joins NATO then Russia could no longer credibly threaten to invade because it would put Russia at war with NATO. Ukraine about to join NATO is thereby destabilizing, because then Russia has to choose between invading immediately before they join, or doing nothing and permanently losing their leverage. This does not make the invasion justified but it makes it expected. US diplomats knew this perfectly well and pushed for Ukraine to join NATO anyway.
It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
> US diplomats knew this perfectly well and pushed for Ukraine to join NATO anyway.
The initiative for joining NATO came from Ukraine and not the US diplomats. Prior to 2014 the public support was too weak for it to happen. Popular support first shifted almost overnight from the majority opposing NATO membership to supporting it after Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and shifted even more towards support after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
Neither invasion had anything to do with NATO. In 2014, Russia correctly judged that the international response would be too weak and made a successful land grab. After the spectacular American retreat from Afghanistan that mirrored the last days of Saigon, Russians again sensed weakness and thought Biden was too weak to intervene in Ukraine and decided that the climate was suitable for taking the next step in restoring their former empire in 2022. Planning for the 2022 invasion began around the time of US retreat from Afghanistan.
> It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
This is a narrative propagated by Russians, and sounds convicing on the surface, but has little actual substance. Nobody's cornered. Russia's threats are bluffs, intended to paralyze you with fear and guide you into inaction, which Russia will then exploit, as they have done in Ukraine.
To continue your dog analogy, they are a dog that barks and barks, and bites only if they sense fear and weakness and see an opportunity to bite. Show strength and they'll back down. (And this is how you deal with actual dogs too; they smell fear from sweat.)
It doesn’t make one an intellectual to shroud their own tenuous grasp on reality with a cover of “ooohh!!! Nuaaannce!!!”
The international geopolitics here are very simple.
The russian federation aims to rebuild the former russian empire. They’re prosecuting this by first trying to exterminate Ukraine as a population, as a nation, as a culture, and as an identity.
It has nothing to do with NATO expansion, or sob stories russia has published about them needing to defend themselves.
There is not any meaningful nuance to apply here. In February 2022 Russia launced a full scale military attack on a soverign neighbouring country. Ukraine defends itself with western military weapons. That is clear use of defense and no "nuance" changes that.
I will never say that the NATO is an innocent organisation; however, to say that the US/NATO is indirectly responsible is a stretch. It would imply that the US invading Mexico would be justified if they were to become allies with Russia. I would as strongly oppose that as well.
Why do you feel that you are able to see things objectively?
To me, it looks like you are repeating kremlin propaganda. It looks like you’re another victim of the Chomsky school of propaganda.
The USA isn’t responsible for russia’s invasion of Ukraine (or Georgia, earlier). If they are, it’s only responsible insofar as allowing useful idiots to apply political pressure to their governments and force them into pacifism, thereby enabling russian aggression.
If you want to have a discussion about this, could you start by not being so patronising?
In case you haven't noticed, there's a pretty serious drone war going on right now and Anduril makes drones. With the new US defense package they stand to get some business, among other reasons for them to be in the news.
I mean, it's not some secret company. It's been featured here plenty and the founder was the guy behind the Oculus VR stuff which was sold to Facebook.
The problem you have, dear Americans is called MIC.
Just quoting one of your presidents:
>“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
So many wars for profit. History knows best that there is no free lunch.
But I suppose consuming propaganda without a critical thinking and effort for facts is good for the business.
By the way Zala Aero is the current leader in this space.
That's why Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure.
Other Kremlin propagandists: Judge Napolitano. Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. Larry Johnson. Ray McGovern. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski.
Go arrest them, kid. It is democracy or freedom. According to the always great Joe Biden. So everyone who follows facts is a "vatnik"?
Ukrainians cannot renew their passports when abroad. This is winning, I suppose. PEACE IS WINING. PEACE. War is always a loss. And when you have no chance is the only way forward.
I'm not following the war but thanks to your comment just read about them.
They are a subunit of Kalashnikov and the latest drone uses PET bottles for fuel tank and a plywood fuselage and a banal model airplane engine found at hobby shops.
It's almost like some 90s game designer is writing the plot for this.
Yep, you can check a thousand videos of those bottles with AI burning tanks, BMP’s, m777, etc. Or you can continue living in the Hollywood Metaverse.
My country is part of NATO. Nobody asked us. No referendum. No voting. Nothing. The political class is filling their pockets with money, while propaganda is beyond the level of USSR and Nazi Germany.
Some of us have military service behind our backs. Some of us lived under a communist dictatorship, and we know the smell of leftist bullshit.
Live in your tech bubble, but know that East Europeans see clearly who is the reason for this bloodbath. And when the time comes, we will not die for your corporations as Ukrainians.:)
Each of the propagandists I mentioned in this comment[0] made assertions that are demonstrably false, e.g., russia isn't going to invade Ukraine; this is just a western conspiracy theory.
They each insisted that Ukraine has no chance, like you do. They each insisted repeatedly that Ukraine was just about to collapse. They said that several times in 2022. They said that several times in 2023. They're saying that now in 2024, like you are.
I have a thick skin, kid. I have seen things and done things in my life to know something about the military. Aside of stupidity of the Rada to prohibit any form of negotiation. Aside of almost perfect peace negotiations with Russia, ruined by MIC and Boris Johnson.
This is the historical reality of war. There is no technology who will remove the need of a soldier on foot to put a flag on a territory. War is logistic. War is human resource intensive. Those who have more well-trained, organized and supplied soldiers win. Currently, there is no meaningful air-defense in Ukraine.
The Russian army has a calculated approach in which they bomb with FAB's, FPV's and artillery before ground operation. There is no adequate way to replenish the lost soldiers for Ukraine. Russians are plenty.
War must be stopped by Ukraine suing for peace. "Suing for", in this older sense of the phrase, means "pleading or petitioning for".
> General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of European Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 10 that the severity of the situation in Ukraine “can’t be overstated” as troops on the battlefield run short of ammunition and as the country’s air-defense capabilities are depleted.
Ukrainian troops have been rationing ammunition as Russian forces outfire them at a rate of about 5-to-1, he told the committee.
“That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks. We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically…. We are talking about weeks,”
He obviously forgot the most important part. WELL TRAINED SOLDIERS. Money and weapons will not change the outcome.
Let these Westerners drive directly into a ditch, they deserve it. It's like they've learned nothing from the current war in Ukraine. Some people are even mentioning dog-fights, like this is a freaking Top Gun movie or some such (there's no dog-fight against a S-300, I can tell them that).
The best thing that they could do would be to "import" a few dozen Ukrainian drone operators and engineers, people who have actively and directly fought against a near-peer US adversary, and let them design whatever they think will win the next war. But that won't make the current ghouls in the US the buttloads of money they are betting on, so that will never happen.
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-w...
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
[1]: https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/mike-kofman-and-rob-lee-on...
AI is not the limiting factor as much as sensors, energy, datalinks, logistics, and costs are. Yes we can miniaturise TERCOM now, but then where would the vehicle get maps from (battlefields change!), how would it see the terrain (at night? on a foggy, rainy day? deliberately dazzled/blinded with a cheap laser?), how far can it travel, how much payload can it take, where does it launch from, and how does it get to the launch point? Working through those questions and anticipating cycles of adaptation, I think it's easy to end up with a $1m JASSM-ER or a $3k 155mm shell (neither of which Ukrainians have in sufficient numbers).
For example, if you know there's an enemy platoon in that forest, why would you fly a swarm of autonomous tree-avoiding hunter drones there if you can drop some 155mm instead? The enemy can't blind a 155mm shell, EW wouldn't work, shells don't care about fog or darkness, payload-to-weight ratio is ~100%, and they're cheap. Of course if you don't have shells you have to be creative, but that doesn't mean the creative solutions are better.
On the other hand, according to the episode I linked, humble unarmed non-AI DJI Mavics have a very persistent and systemic impact. They provide 24/7 eyes in the sky over the entire front line, which makes tactical surprise impossible. This is very much not "AI swarming slaughterbots" many seem to imagine and invisible to folks on the sidelines like us, but that's why I'd be cautious of making inferences from the media we get to see.
Less than 10% is not good when you consider how much does it cost in practice. Drone teams are often 2 pilots + technician + explosives technician (an incredibly risky job btw, those bastardised RPG warheads are live and sensitive) + infantry cover. At least double that if you want to strike beyond line of sight and need a retransmitter drone. Those teams can only move at night and on foot because they are actively hunted by the other side. They can only have one or two drones simultaneously in the air at best, and the drones need to get to their targets first without giving away the launch point. All of that for less than 10% success rate is not "incredibly effective".
Now compare to fire-and-forget Javelins that are way more lethal and are just something added to a normal infantry platoon.
Of course they did, arguing anything else is complete lunacy, especially since you later advocate for the usage of Javelins, which, if effective and available, obviously reduce the value of tank. They also have the imense drawback of exposing the soldier to enemy fire.
I don't even get your other points. Why would drone operators be hunted more than Javelin operators? Why would Javelin operators not have to worry about giving away their position? Why don't Javelin operators need infantry cover?
Tanks' value doesn't come from their invulnerability. They weren't invulnerable since WW1, if ever. Their value comes from being better than alternatives.
As for Javelins, Javelins don't need operators that have to sit still and blind, guiding their slow drones to targets. Javelins don't need dedicated operator teams, US army more or less hands them to infantry platoons as needed. Javelins don't need "infantry cover", their operators are infantry. Javelins are fire and forget, so you can shoot and immediately leave, unlike drone teams. Javelins don't require extensive training and fine skill.
The only thing Javelins don't do is first person videos. See my original point about drawing wrong conclusions from footage we get to see.
ATGMs did lower the value of tanks, but not to 0. Anything that can knock out a weapons system decreases the value of that weapons system.
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
The top end of course got much bigger, CVNs displace almost twice as much as Yamato.
HMS Dreadnought: Length: 160m / Beam: 25m / Displacement: 18410t
Acorn-class destroyer (contemporary with Dreadnought): Length: 75m / Beam: 8m / Displacement: 780t
Burke Flight III: Length: 155m / Beam: 20m / Displacement: 9900t
The 10% estimate is not mine, it's from a legitimate expert who regularly goes to the frontline in Ukraine.
[1]: An amusing anecdote from that podcast: Tesla battery packs are a big source of batteries for FPV drones. The packs can be sourced for next to nothing from totaled Teslas, and individual cells are very reliable.
[2]: https://www.twz.com/ukrainians-are-cutting-open-u-s-cluster-...
[3]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/17/ukraine-frontline-ammo-...
It's an unavoidable dilemma: commodity stuff is cheap, but easily countered; stuff that isn't easy to counter isn't commodity and isn't cheap. You probably heard "yes but you can JUST add a jamming-resistant radio, and a thermal camera, and autonomous recognition/coordination, and larger payload, and…", but that's just motte-and-bailey.
Plus the drones still need the payload. If they are used against armour, they need shaped charges, which aren't free. In practice they often get random RPG-7 HEAT warheads from Soviet stockpiles, but we can't compare that with newly manufactured western 155mm HE.
A Howitzer itself ranges from $2m - 3.7m USD each.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/unmanned-flying-te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfkwlMaK7g
Ukraine hunted that tank down and destroyed it by drone, btw.
I could see microwave-based APS (probably powered by a high energy consumable?) proliferating.
The harder part I see is friend/foe identification, rather than just attacking anything else that's small and flying slowly.
Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.
(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)
This is very different to artillery which is too expensive to lose to return fire and even more expensive if you try and make it operable remotely.
If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...
the economist: https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... https://archive.is/nJYJ0
Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?
Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.
Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.
Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.
And when you remove the need for even a single human, you also remove their logistics footprint.
Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
Recently they have been using them to drop spikes to slow vehicles which are then hit by a second set of drones.
At some point soon these drones will have specialised capabilities and will go out in swarms to autonomously figure out how to take down objects.
Drones evolve under this pressure. Dynamic frequency changes, computer vision, maneuvering (like "go up when lost signal") and many more counter measures are adopted on both sides.
Cities are hugely hostile to low power transmission, especially in the 2.4 and 5ghz frequencies.
The effective range of cheap DJI "mini" drones in cities is measured in kilometres. If you get away from the city, you can double and triple your effective range.
Flying your drone around in a city is not the same as flying it against an opponent skilled in electronic warfare.
You can jam the signal, but you can work around signal jamming in software by having it back off or gain altitude.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
The Army is somewhere in the middle.
— Kelly Johnson
Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.
When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.
(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)
Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.
"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."
https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.
The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.
I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.
Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.
If nobody stands up for our rights and freedoms at home they could easily be eroded, or lost entirely.
Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.
Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
It was pretty explicit.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.
The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
Weird nitpick, I know.
There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston.
On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden
It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it.
Because that's exactly what it is
I'm getting strong PAC 750XL family vibes from that, we had a modified version hardened to fly 80 m drapes across all of Mali some years back .. locals were taking random potshots as it passed over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks
Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.
Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".
US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.
Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).
I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.
Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?
How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned?
We have a private war apparatus.
We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.
You can make a lot of complaints about the defense industry like waste and corruption, but a lack of a clear objective is no longer an issue.
This is just looting.
Germany's in one piece.
The Balkans aren't on fire.
Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Oh, never change Hacker News. Got to love the casual breach of classified information.
The main problem is, there are more than enough drones. All I’m saying above is you probably just need 8 of them to get through Andurils system.
Also, the method to defeat such systems is not classified. It’s quite obvious and china can even easily overwhelm carrier defenses using this method.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
Is this article really equating Palmer Lucky to Oppenheimer?
> Essentially, Luckey’s aim is to make the US and its allies almost impossible to harm — “a prickly porcupine” in his words — as well as to supply weapons powerful enough to put adversaries off attacking in the first place. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.
> The thesis is not original. It’s the same idea that led to Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb. America’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the second world war, killing more than 100,000 people, and nuclear weapons have not been deployed in conflict since.
Newspaper headlines are usually added by the copy editors, not the author of the article.
The implication is that Palmer is Silcon Valley's Oppenheimer.
EDIT: Although, now that you mention it, Oppenheimer is in quotes. I guess it's possible that the FT is being sarcastic.
Having interacted with Luckey in a number of unpleasant ways, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And if so, you are saying his achievements are nullified by his behavior?
The dude's a hacker, not a god.
As near as I can tell, he is successful for advocating for VR headsets.
I do not believe that's equivalent to splitting the atom. But hey, I guess we all see things our own way.
A very weird thing to say, given Russia's humiliating defeat (in terms of the objectives it believed it would surely and painlessly achieve) in 2022.
I suspect you are parroting whatever NATO media told you.
Yeah, yeah.
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2024-01-08...
NATO+ countries aren't fighting him, they are using Ukraine as a proxy, while Vlad is fighting with his own army. NATO has been waiting nearly 80 years to attack Russia directly. They very motivated to make sure that Vlad continues making errors. As such, the longer this war takes, the better for NATO. And, unfortunately, the worse for Ukraine.
I think data collection is for sure one aspect, but I think Russian casualties is the largest motivator
In what way would having the whole of Ukraine annexed like Crimea be better for Ukraine?
It was not said that Ukraine would be better off it it stopped fighting. Only that Ukraine will be worse off the longer the war takes.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/09/what-ukraines-...
Additionally, Iran claims that Israel did not intercept any of the hypersonic missiles they fired at Israel.
NATO does not possess any hypersonic missiles. Some people might say that NATO is keeping them secret, but that makes no sense. Nations exhibit their technologies as a deterrent.
From the theinteldrop link: "several sources within the Russian military and defense industry told the newspaper Izvestia on Saturday"
From the sputnikglobe link: "Moscow-based military expert Alexey Leonkov told Sputnik"
IIUC this is the Wingman program for the F22 and F35 so these aren't "slow" drones like predators, these are going to be high performance jets. This is a serious contract!
It's much lower than it can be because there's no point in investing in a stronger airframe when the sustained acceleration would kill any pilot. These unmanned drones can easily be designed to withstand much more.
[1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-2...
Also in that table: Acceleration of a nematocyst: the fastest recorded acceleration from any biological entity. 5,410,000 g!
Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
[0] Clausewitz, drink!
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
Modern anti-ship missiles, torpedos, and BVR missiles also are designed with the ability to "go to this point in space and then find yourself a target and kill it"
We automated target selection and tasking in warships shortly after the second world war, to combat the fact that we expected the soviets to send 200 missiles at a task force at once, and didn't think humans could manage that kind of task load.
If you turn the right keys in an Arleigh Burke, every single human can leave the command part of the ship and it will still shoot planes out of the sky, all automated.
In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily
Unusable in actual war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...
In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.
The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.
If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.
Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
[0] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...
Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.
Diversity, or "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements"[1], in this case a wide variety of suppliers.
I assume most of us are speaking English here.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diversity
>Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future.
You win wars by buying your equipment from the most capable suppliers. If that happens to be a centralized cabal of suppliers (this stuff is expensive, after all), then it is what it is. It's not the mission of the DoD to diversify the economy, its mission is to win wars as effectively as possible at any cost.
Wars are won on logistics; a corrupt, stagnant, or under-innovating market is a barrier to successful defence.
The mission of keeping the economy healthy lies upon the Commerce and Justice Departments, whose missions are to manage the economy and keep industries within the confines of the law respectively.
This contract is for cutting edge unmanned fighter jets. Other countries don't make them at all!
These unmanned Wingman jets will be the first in the world to do that too.
If they could make an F16 equivalent combat drone, they’d jump at the chance.
Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.
An unmanned fighter jet is a whole different ball game for them.
That said, I agree, we also need lots of cheap drones.
This hasn't been innovative in a military context since at least Desert Storm.
Actually a shared battlespace run by computers managing contacts and sharing the data with tens of platforms including sending specific intercept data to specific in air interceptors and relaying data those interceptors get back to the rest of the fleet and managing tasking for tens of different surface combatants to intelligently and efficiently task hundreds of incoming threats was rolled out to American fleets in the 1960s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Tactical_Data_System
Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.
It's not as simple as you say and it doesn't work currently as you say.
You might disagree with the SJW fork attack on nix. But if you also disagree with the idea of Haskell powered death drones blowing up innocent little baby humans, then you might have incentive to support - or at least loudly ignore - the forking / sabotage / leftist troll op.
Me, I will take an Even More aggressive track: I honestly hope this turmoil leads to a better version of the nix syntax. Perhaps something much cleaner: A YAML based syntax that eliminates curly braces and the need for many nix functions.
Yes, I'm being a little evil >:]
If high tech superpowers went at each other full bore with H bombs we’d probably be LARPing Mad Max, but so far that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely. All leaders in all these powers know that any such exchange would be mutual and thus suicidal (MAD) so the only way it happens is if you get someone truly insane in power.
What has happened since the bomb was developed and what’s likely to continue are skirmishes and proxy wars. Drones are the modern weapon of such conflicts with Ukraine and the Israel-Iran skirmish being heavily drone based.
This is ugly because it’s often not the soldiers of the superpower puppet masters dying but those of puppet states, and drones allow more technological powers to beat up on less technological people like it’s a video game.
If nukes are used in conflict in this century it will probably be just a few in one of these conflicts, followed by an overwhelming condemnation.
But the silver lining is that since the bomb was developed the overall per capita number of humans dying in war globally has fallen dramatically. As long as we continue to avoid huge scale conflict this number will probably stay low. Without the bomb it’s likely that a WWII style conflict between the US and USSR would have erupted and killed many millions more.
Some argue based on this that the bomb was a peacekeeping invention. So far that’s been true but we will see how the future goes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
Sticks and drones?
And many old fighter jets retire as target drones, going on to fly unmanned for perhaps decades. New purpose-build designs might have lower operating costs but their purchase price will always be higher than slapping radio controls onto already-purchased jets.
Well the whole point is not to reduce headcount totally but reduce the amount of people put directly in harms way, for example a pilot flying in a direct combat scenario.
When it comes to fighter pilots, salary is irrelevant. The few pennies paid in salary is absolutely nothing compared to the millions of dollars a year it takes to train and maintain an active combat pilot. Those costs are at the center of nearly every discussion re military drone tech. An autonomous pilot, a computer program, doesn't need check rides. It doesn't need to re-qual its AAR ticket every month. And it doesn't retire or get promoted out after five years.
Like is any of this mentioned in the article or this comment section? Or are you just complaining about bad arguments you heard elsewhere?
(I am aware that current autonomous piloting technology is very limited and can only accomplish a small subset of Air Force missions.)
Building an airframe strong enough to handle G forces beyond what a human can endure also comes at the price of greater weight and reduced range. It's not worth the trade-off.
Those aren't meant to fly high and send missiles at weddings on the ground, those are maneuverable wingmen for F-35s.
3 years ago this topic would be full of people protesting this. Pointing out the inhumanity, the potential for abuse, the hypocrisy, the dangers of desensitizing war. Censorship changed the game entirely.
I do know that Anduril has done this for many of their products including the single rotor drone. Additionally it has all the hallmarks of industrial design. That shell looks way too over the top with those lines.
So I was exaggerating a bit. My mistake. I should say “very incredibly likely an industrial designer was involved to the point of obviousness due to my previous experience with the company”
https://twitter.com/anduriltech/status/1730451908794720388/v...
https://youtu.be/gwrH4EpUxvE?si=5yyu86OEDb5JGU3L
This fucking golf cart with a laptop welded to the dashboard is next generation stuff. Holy holy shit. Look at it take out those Chinese subs.
See what I mean about the marketing?
As for if it does what it says on the tin I have no idea, maybe the commenter that suggests they have insider knowledge can clarify.
Obviously they won’t, but because the problem here is that the humans do not want the machine to question them, it’s only a matter of time before the bad guys have them anyway. I’m inclined to say that it’s better the good guys (at least from my perspective) have them first.
We ought to worry that these will let General Ripper go rogue more easily or an adversary hack them, but I don't think this moves the needle at all one whether advanced AIs could be dangerous.
Both are by right wing Silicon Valley libertarians sucking on the government teat.
But when you're a libertarian doing it - I just have to laugh.
Ditto Tesla. It's not a coincidence that all these guys are suffering the same hypocrisy.
But they almost certainly don't just take this work. They advocate for more work. They lobby for more funds.
I'm not a libertarian, so I don't know the details, but I believe advocated for larger government must be contrary to their beliefs, no?
Yes, but you're ignoring my central point. They aren't merely taking advantage of something, they are pushing to expand and enlarge it.
I don't think you've thought about this very hard.
Palmer Luckey got kicked out of Meta for funding Trump ads, I don't think you can classify him as a libertarian lol
(though there are many other self-described libertarians who are even more right-wing-authoritarian, so maybe nitpicking isn't worthwhile)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418351
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-event-sponsor...
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/major-nixpkgs-contributor-leav...
https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1767602500461375721
(on the off chance that some HN audience members have reading comprehension issues - this is aimed at politically driven non-contributing participants behind the anti-anduril outrage, Nix and its creator are absolutely fine)
If you can't tell that from a glance at the signatories list, you shouldn't be commenting on 'non-contributing participants'.
If you don’t want to build anything that could ever potentially be used in the manufacture of those weapons, you probably shouldn’t be building open source software or contributing anything to do with any programming language at all.
Open Source means you can't really prohibit Anduril from using your projects; but _welcoming_ them and their money is a different matter altogether.
Meanwhile if you were to get the defense industry to not use your product, they're not going to go out of business or do less of whatever you didn't like. They're going to bring the same money to someone like Oracle or Microsoft with no qualms about taking it -- or bring even more money to them, which is your tax money, as those companies charge quite a lot.
This makes me suspicious that the people agitating for "don't take their money" are being subtly or not so subtly encouraged to do so by the people who want to take their money instead. After all, the historical norm is the opposite. Not just TCP/IP but Tor and SELinux and microprocessors and, considering that AT&T has long been a major defense contractor, transistors and lasers and solar panels and C and all the rest of it. Are the same people who want to refuse their money also inclined to refuse all of the other things it paid for?
Would we be better off if the University of California never took a Unix license or created BSD because of where it came from?
I did, however, have to expand on the concept that it's very easy to have strong opinions about war when you yourself are sheltered from the consequences of it.
They want the CoC to be able to silence undesired speech in the first place, and if they refuse, it becomes their strawman to allow them to keep arguing the same thing all over again.
To me this reeks of the "paradox of intolerance" e.g. "you cannot be inclusive without allowing people to say things you don't like".
You may or may not agree with this stance and that is totally fine. You’re still free to use the software for whatever you want; you can also go ahead and fork it, or create a new community endorsing this use. If enough people agree then it will thrive. That’s the beauty of it!
A specific community has the freedom—within the bounds of legality—to decide who is welcome to participate.
Be that as it may, we wouldn't have computers or the internet if everyone acted like that.
I do not identify as a leftist, and would not be considered one, but as an aerospace engineer I would never work for something that aids the US war machine.
Those weapons are never used in "defense". Do they defend an unsustainable way of life ? Sure.
How is that not defence?
Ukraine is the only case. And let's not forget that the US is indirectly responsible for the Russian invasion.
I know that it is very hard for you to see things objectively, and I am sorry for what you and your country is experiencing.
Ukraine is a strategically important region to Russia. They don't have to invade as long as they can threaten to invade, and thereby get concessions without armed conflict.
If Ukraine joins NATO then Russia could no longer credibly threaten to invade because it would put Russia at war with NATO. Ukraine about to join NATO is thereby destabilizing, because then Russia has to choose between invading immediately before they join, or doing nothing and permanently losing their leverage. This does not make the invasion justified but it makes it expected. US diplomats knew this perfectly well and pushed for Ukraine to join NATO anyway.
It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
Yep, better deal with this damn dog once and for all.
Can't live in uncertainty like this, never knowing when the dog will break in to the back yard and bite the kids
Ukraine is stuck between a rock and hard place, but they also have agency.
The initiative for joining NATO came from Ukraine and not the US diplomats. Prior to 2014 the public support was too weak for it to happen. Popular support first shifted almost overnight from the majority opposing NATO membership to supporting it after Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and shifted even more towards support after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
Neither invasion had anything to do with NATO. In 2014, Russia correctly judged that the international response would be too weak and made a successful land grab. After the spectacular American retreat from Afghanistan that mirrored the last days of Saigon, Russians again sensed weakness and thought Biden was too weak to intervene in Ukraine and decided that the climate was suitable for taking the next step in restoring their former empire in 2022. Planning for the 2022 invasion began around the time of US retreat from Afghanistan.
> It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
This is a narrative propagated by Russians, and sounds convicing on the surface, but has little actual substance. Nobody's cornered. Russia's threats are bluffs, intended to paralyze you with fear and guide you into inaction, which Russia will then exploit, as they have done in Ukraine.
To continue your dog analogy, they are a dog that barks and barks, and bites only if they sense fear and weakness and see an opportunity to bite. Show strength and they'll back down. (And this is how you deal with actual dogs too; they smell fear from sweat.)
It doesn’t make one an intellectual to shroud their own tenuous grasp on reality with a cover of “ooohh!!! Nuaaannce!!!”
The international geopolitics here are very simple.
The russian federation aims to rebuild the former russian empire. They’re prosecuting this by first trying to exterminate Ukraine as a population, as a nation, as a culture, and as an identity.
It has nothing to do with NATO expansion, or sob stories russia has published about them needing to defend themselves.
To me, it looks like you are repeating kremlin propaganda. It looks like you’re another victim of the Chomsky school of propaganda.
The USA isn’t responsible for russia’s invasion of Ukraine (or Georgia, earlier). If they are, it’s only responsible insofar as allowing useful idiots to apply political pressure to their governments and force them into pacifism, thereby enabling russian aggression.
If you want to have a discussion about this, could you start by not being so patronising?
Better stop using computers and the internet then.
The first time was a post about the latest Mark Rober video 'promoting' Anduril/military technology to a child/teen audience.
https://lemmy.ca/post/19761360
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
Do you mean with drone war, the usage of drones in a war (like they do in Ukraine and middle east) or a 'war' between manufacturers?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=anduril
So many wars for profit. History knows best that there is no free lunch. But I suppose consuming propaganda without a critical thinking and effort for facts is good for the business. By the way Zala Aero is the current leader in this space. That's why Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure.
He's a vatnik, of the same ilk as [thankfully deceased] Gonzalo Lira, convicted sex offender Scott Ritter, or the disgraced Douglas Macgregor.
Why are you promoting a kremlin propagandist on this website?
Yet, even that "failure" (I do agree that it failed) was still more successful than Russia's post-summer-2022 offensives.
I'm not following the war but thanks to your comment just read about them.
They are a subunit of Kalashnikov and the latest drone uses PET bottles for fuel tank and a plywood fuselage and a banal model airplane engine found at hobby shops.
It's almost like some 90s game designer is writing the plot for this.
My country is part of NATO. Nobody asked us. No referendum. No voting. Nothing. The political class is filling their pockets with money, while propaganda is beyond the level of USSR and Nazi Germany.
Some of us have military service behind our backs. Some of us lived under a communist dictatorship, and we know the smell of leftist bullshit.
Live in your tech bubble, but know that East Europeans see clearly who is the reason for this bloodbath. And when the time comes, we will not die for your corporations as Ukrainians.:)
Eastern European here.
The putin regime is the reason for this bloodbath.
Each of the propagandists I mentioned in this comment[0] made assertions that are demonstrably false, e.g., russia isn't going to invade Ukraine; this is just a western conspiracy theory.
They each insisted that Ukraine has no chance, like you do. They each insisted repeatedly that Ukraine was just about to collapse. They said that several times in 2022. They said that several times in 2023. They're saying that now in 2024, like you are.
Tell us vatnik, how did the Moskva sink?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158660
This is the historical reality of war. There is no technology who will remove the need of a soldier on foot to put a flag on a territory. War is logistic. War is human resource intensive. Those who have more well-trained, organized and supplied soldiers win. Currently, there is no meaningful air-defense in Ukraine.
The Russian army has a calculated approach in which they bomb with FAB's, FPV's and artillery before ground operation. There is no adequate way to replenish the lost soldiers for Ukraine. Russians are plenty.
War must be stopped by Ukraine suing for peace. "Suing for", in this older sense of the phrase, means "pleading or petitioning for".
> General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of European Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 10 that the severity of the situation in Ukraine “can’t be overstated” as troops on the battlefield run short of ammunition and as the country’s air-defense capabilities are depleted.
Ukrainian troops have been rationing ammunition as Russian forces outfire them at a rate of about 5-to-1, he told the committee.
“That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks. We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically…. We are talking about weeks,”
He obviously forgot the most important part. WELL TRAINED SOLDIERS. Money and weapons will not change the outcome.
Since when, reality is bullshit? Dude?
That’s an amusing mistranslation of a word that is immediately recognisable to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
The mask has slipped.
The best thing that they could do would be to "import" a few dozen Ukrainian drone operators and engineers, people who have actively and directly fought against a near-peer US adversary, and let them design whatever they think will win the next war. But that won't make the current ghouls in the US the buttloads of money they are betting on, so that will never happen.
Weapons and bases aren't just about winning conflicts, they are about jobs (see Perun)