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How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35? The next big war is going to be won with a lot of small, disposable

How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35? The next big war is going to be won with a lot of small, disposable vehicles rather than a couple of “can’t fail” elite machines. Kinda like Taranto, where a handful of British biplanes took down three Italian battleships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto

stanley 7y ago
Yet it took another year, with the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, for the British Navy to finally acknowledge that aircraft carriers, not destroyers, are the future. The F-35 program isn't going anywhere, but the Pentagon and the CIA have been quietly building out drone bases across the world for years.
greedo 7y ago
Drones might be able to replace modern fighters in 25-50 years. But that assumes robust, uninterruptible communication links, or incredible advances in AI. But the reasonable future is more of what we use them for now; flying in safe environments with minimal jamming, controlled by an operator at Creech AFB. Yet as with all the hype surrounding self-driving cars on HN, the clarion call for drones as the be all and end all of future aviation is evergreen.
jdsully 7y ago
A real adversary would have the comm links jammed immediately and these drones would all be paperweights. Autonomous drones are more interesting and perhaps possible in the next generation. But we’re not quite there yet - especially with kill/no kill decisions.
- wstrange 7y ago
  We have $300 cell phones that can work with offline maps and run basic ML code. Betting against autonomous drones seems short sighted. It's almost certain to happen in the near future.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    We don’t have any smart weapon system with kill authority that doesn’t have a human in the loop. Perhaps we should solve it for stationary sentry guns or missiles before complicating it with a flight platform. Thats not to say we will never get there (as horrible as that future is), but you have to stage things.
rmah 7y ago
How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35 You can buy five MQ-9 Reaper drones ($16mil each), or three MC-C Gray Eagles ($31mil each). These things have flight performance similar to early ww-2 era bombers but with tiny munitions payloads. That is, they are very slow, high-altitude, high-endurance and non-maneuverable. Their only real plus is that they are small and thus have a small radar cross section. They are sitting ducks for any sort of half-way decent air defense. I suspect that any fighter jet or SAM built in the last half century would swat such drones out of the sky without breaking a sweat.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Those are still built by dedicated defense contractors with a military purchasing process. It's like comparing Graf Spee with Vittoria Veneto, not comparing a Swordfish biplane with Vittoria Veneto. I haven't really seen anyone analyze the threat model of attaching a shaped charge & microchip to a balsa model airplane or plastic DJI drone. The cost of those is in the $1000 range (including the chip and warhead), and they're virtually invisible to radar, or to the naked eye for that matter. Hell, for the cost of a single AMRAAM missile you could field > 1000 drones. You lose on range (~20 miles max) and performance (~200 mph), but for close air support, you probably don't need it: just blanket the whole airspace with tens of thousands of tiny drones so that the whole battlefield becomes a giant no-fly zone.
  - RugnirViking 7y ago
    If you want to hear a decent long form podcast on the issue I can reccomend ep 31 of popular front podcast. The guy interviews a Bellingcat researcher about the use of commercial camera drones in insurgencies around the world, both for intelligence gathering and literally strapping hand grenades to drones (which occurs surprisingly often - there are production lines for these things out there)
  - imtringued 7y ago
    You've just described the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb. It's a GPS guided glide bomb with a 93kg warhead and a range of 110km which costs $40000 per unit. However, the successor is the SDB2 which is far more expensive because it contains a radar and can hit moving targets. It was developed in 2006 so your idea has been done a long time ago. Sure the army could build much smaller ones but how would it use those effectively? Would they have to use face recognition to lock on to individual humans?
jariel 7y ago
You need air superiority and excellent AA suppression before those drones can take to the skies. Most of today's drones are basically fodder targets for any, even basic AA regime. The F22 and F35 are great pieces of gear. Though obviously flawed, the problems are in many ways overstated.
imtringued 7y ago
What happens once the enemy jams the communication link?
Brave-Steak 7y ago
How close are we to making drones that can take on a modern fighter? We still need planes that are capable of establishing air superiority.
- greedo 7y ago
  You would need an autonomous drone, and a society willing to take the man out of the middle in the decision loop for a lethal event. We all love tech on HN, but consider the hype around AI and self-driving cars that were all the rage the last decade. Reality proved far more difficult than the advocates promised.

stanley 7y ago

Yet it took another year, with the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, for the British Navy to finally acknowledge that aircraft carriers, not destroyers, are the future. The F-35 program isn't going anywhere, but the Pentagon and the CIA have been quietly building out drone bases across the world for years.

greedo 7y ago

Drones might be able to replace modern fighters in 25-50 years. But that assumes robust, uninterruptible communication links, or incredible advances in AI. But the reasonable future is more of what we use them for now; flying in safe environments with minimal jamming, controlled by an operator at Creech AFB. Yet as with all the hype surrounding self-driving cars on HN, the clarion call for drones as the be all and end all of future aviation is evergreen.

jdsully 7y ago

A real adversary would have the comm links jammed immediately and these drones would all be paperweights. Autonomous drones are more interesting and perhaps possible in the next generation. But we’re not quite there yet - especially with kill/no kill decisions.

wstrange 7y ago
We have $300 cell phones that can work with offline maps and run basic ML code. Betting against autonomous drones seems short sighted. It's almost certain to happen in the near future.
- jdsully 7y ago
  We don’t have any smart weapon system with kill authority that doesn’t have a human in the loop. Perhaps we should solve it for stationary sentry guns or missiles before complicating it with a flight platform. Thats not to say we will never get there (as horrible as that future is), but you have to stage things.

rmah 7y ago

How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35 You can buy five MQ-9 Reaper drones ($16mil each), or three MC-C Gray Eagles ($31mil each). These things have flight performance similar to early ww-2 era bombers but with tiny munitions payloads. That is, they are very slow, high-altitude, high-endurance and non-maneuverable. Their only real plus is that they are small and thus have a small radar cross section. They are sitting ducks for any sort of half-way decent air defense. I suspect that any fighter jet or SAM built in the last half century would swat such drones out of the sky without breaking a sweat.

nostrademons 7y ago
Those are still built by dedicated defense contractors with a military purchasing process. It's like comparing Graf Spee with Vittoria Veneto, not comparing a Swordfish biplane with Vittoria Veneto. I haven't really seen anyone analyze the threat model of attaching a shaped charge & microchip to a balsa model airplane or plastic DJI drone. The cost of those is in the $1000 range (including the chip and warhead), and they're virtually invisible to radar, or to the naked eye for that matter. Hell, for the cost of a single AMRAAM missile you could field > 1000 drones. You lose on range (~20 miles max) and performance (~200 mph), but for close air support, you probably don't need it: just blanket the whole airspace with tens of thousands of tiny drones so that the whole battlefield becomes a giant no-fly zone.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  If you want to hear a decent long form podcast on the issue I can reccomend ep 31 of popular front podcast. The guy interviews a Bellingcat researcher about the use of commercial camera drones in insurgencies around the world, both for intelligence gathering and literally strapping hand grenades to drones (which occurs surprisingly often - there are production lines for these things out there)
- imtringued 7y ago
  You've just described the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb. It's a GPS guided glide bomb with a 93kg warhead and a range of 110km which costs $40000 per unit. However, the successor is the SDB2 which is far more expensive because it contains a radar and can hit moving targets. It was developed in 2006 so your idea has been done a long time ago. Sure the army could build much smaller ones but how would it use those effectively? Would they have to use face recognition to lock on to individual humans?

jariel 7y ago

You need air superiority and excellent AA suppression before those drones can take to the skies. Most of today's drones are basically fodder targets for any, even basic AA regime. The F22 and F35 are great pieces of gear. Though obviously flawed, the problems are in many ways overstated.

imtringued 7y ago

What happens once the enemy jams the communication link?

Brave-Steak 7y ago

How close are we to making drones that can take on a modern fighter? We still need planes that are capable of establishing air superiority.

greedo 7y ago
You would need an autonomous drone, and a society willing to take the man out of the middle in the decision loop for a lethal event. We all love tech on HN, but consider the hype around AI and self-driving cars that were all the rage the last decade. Reality proved far more difficult than the advocates promised.