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Frankly, this seems obsolete. Soon we will have 30,000 autonomous drones delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less. Starlink satellites wi

Frankly, this seems obsolete. Soon we will have 30,000 autonomous drones delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less. Starlink satellites will monitor the drones as they pick off soldiers one by one. The future of warfare is terrifying

jakeinspace 3y ago
What you’re suggesting sounds like an ICBM effectively. Launching one, even if it’s a falcon 9 launch vehicle, anyway close to a nuclear power is not reasonable.
maerF0x0 3y ago
> as they pick off soldiers one by one here let me fix that for you > as they pick off every human one by one
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Any real kill bot army is fully autonomous requiring no disrupt-able RF, and wars aren’t fought against soldiers. When your armies are drones the fight moves to who you’re really fighting - the citizens whom you’re trying to break to surrender. Welcome to the future!
- torginus 3y ago
  This isn't hard to achieve - I think a Starlink-guided drone army is pretty much unjammable - unless you have space based jammers, but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable.
  - farseer 3y ago
    So on a cloudy day, nothing would work right?
  - throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
    > but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable. OISL? How many of them do you expect each Sat to have?
    - torginus 3y ago
      I have no idea how any of this actually works in practice, but I imagine a series of MEMS mirrors could split a single physical laser beam into many-many recievers in a time-multiplexed manner. Probably you could control a good amount of drones with a single satellite transciever, and your typical drone would have LOS to many satellites. There could be multiplexer drones whose purpose would be to mediate between cheap disposable small drones and the satellites themselves. This is already a thing (not with lasers and sats) - the Russians have the Orlan drones with sophisticated(ish) surveillance equipment that act as spotters and guide the Lancet suicide drones and artillery
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    Thank Christ for EMPs
    - farseer 3y ago
      And anti satellite weaponry.
      - panarchy 3y ago
        And the Kessler Syndrome
  - sjducb 3y ago
    Why is it unjammable? It’s just radio. The satellite adds an extra vulnerability. You can see the satellite from 1000km away. Just build a big directional antenna well outside the war zone. Jamming signals in a war zone is hard because you give away your own position when you start jamming.
    - torginus 3y ago
      Highly directional antennas mean that the radiation source needs to be up in the sky to be even picked up by the drone. Ground based jammers are physically not capable of doing this. And I'm pretty sure they use frequency bands that do not reflect off the ionosphere otherwise they couldn't talk to satellites.
      - sjducb 3y ago
        Firstly, The signal would diffract around the drone to the antenna on top, so I think you can jam the drone. Secondly it’s probably easier to jam the satellite, because you know exactly where it is. If you’re on the ground near the drone you can definitely send noise at the satellite so it can’t receive anything from the drone. You’d have to do some testing to see if a jammer off to the side (1000km away) works. I think it will.
  - ponector 3y ago
    Earth to satellite connection is as jammable as other wireless connection. And don't forget that gps sygnals are also jammed and replaced with fake location.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Combat has been about controlling resources. When labor or attention is now considered a resource, how does combat change how it looks? You can’t necessarily conduct the same tactics to secure a rubber plantation like you might to secure a mindshare of a population. Maybe you lean more on propaganda instead of actions that might diminish the quality of the labor/attention pool from loss of life. You could gradually shift their labor pools to enrich your own companies, shift their public discourse to discuss products created by your own companies, and you’ve effectively captured the population without a shot fired or them realizing what has even happened.
BartjeD 3y ago
Stealth planes are great for taking out air defense. Good luck defending your airspace with just drones.
- lukan 3y ago
  With enough drones in the air, good luck keeping that plane in stealth mode.
  - foldr 3y ago
    You might catch a glimpse of it, but you won't be able to track it, which is what you need to do to shoot it down.
    - lukan 3y ago
      Depends what capabilities the drones have. And having a glimpse is already a confirmed sighting, then you can start a focused search with traditional groundbased radar - the stealth planes are not invisible, if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it. And when you have some other drones in the flightpath, you might get more than a glimpse and finally a lock. Or your own fighter jets. The idea of a stealth plane is, that you don't spot them at all, once spotted, their survival rate drops a lot.
      - foldr 3y ago
        >if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it. Fighter jets can maneuver. For a successful missile launch you need a good enough lock to track the plane precisely as it moves. Just knowing roughly where the plane was a few minutes ago doesn't help all that much when it comes to killing it.
        lukan 3y ago
        But your fighter jets can know where to look. Supported by all your drones you can send in the flight path. One drone close enough with a heat seeking missile and that was it. And advanced radar probably also can get a lock, if the operators know something is there.
worldsayshi 3y ago
It's surprising that weapons manufacturers seem to be quite slow at adopting this trend. I guess they don't want to speed up the obsolescence of their own supply chains.
- NickC25 3y ago
  Well, for one, slowness of adoption usually translates to "let's milk the crap out of the government's dollars for as long as we can without putting too much of our own money into it". LHM's stock (as well as other major contractors) seems to be a good indicator of that. I have a relative who recently (2 years ago) called it a career after roughly 40 years at Lockheed-Martin, and a good chunk of that time was within the Skunk Works division. What I was able to gleam from him is that LHM sees the future of aerial warfare as a hybrid of manned and unmanned vehicles. The idea is that a 6th or 7th gen fighter might be a "mothership" of sorts with much more powerful weapons such as bombs or heavier artillery , but also in control of a number of unmanned drones capable of significantly faster attack abilities but with lighter armaments or laser weapons, all to replace current dogfighting scenarios. Fascinating, but terrifying at the same time.
- jpk 3y ago
  Defense contractors make heaps of money on big, drawn out projects like the F35. They probably stand to make much less if they pivot to compete with COTS drones carrying IEDs. So it's not surprising to me that the military industrial complex is more interested in milking the government for cash than actually innovating towards superior combat efficiency and effectiveness.
- enaaem 3y ago
  Cheap drones aren’t that cheap and conventional weapons aren’t always that expensive. A JDAM is like 20k which is cheaper than a Shahed, but way more powerful. There aren’t many ways to beat a modern air force other than having your own expensive modern airforce and AA systems. So you initially spent a lot of resources to beat those systems, and the moment you have beaten those, you can carpet bomb the battle field with bombs that are more powerful and cheaper than “cheap” drones.
torginus 3y ago
I was just thinking that all these FPV drones we saw dominate in Ukraine would've been possible to make 2 decades ago with similarly rudimentary tools of the day - no advanced tech required.
- lukan 3y ago
  Nope, battery tech was not advanced enough.
- farseer 3y ago
  No they weren't as effective due to reduced lithium ion battery capacity as well as less efficient small electric motors. Otherwise the 70's and 80's would have had quadcopters too in every house.
chx 3y ago
> autonomous drones yes, yes, we only need to use a few more GPUs to turn automated plagiarism machines into full blown AGI, am I right? I thought at least Apple getting off the horse because they realized it's just a carnival carousel was a hint. But apparently people are so high on the LLM supply they can't think straight any more.
- lettergram 3y ago
  What are you talking about? lol we have this today, swarms are next (and have been being worked on for years). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-conflict-prompted-u-s-to-develop-autonomous-drone-swarms-1-000-mile-cannon/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-co... All a drone needs to do in what I just described is target something that looks like a target (ie person with gun). We have that tech today, and it’s not hard.
  - lazide 3y ago
    And frankly, few are going to limit it to 'person with a gun', when 'person in a warzone' is already usually sufficient.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    How about (future) drones that can put handcuffs (or other hand restraints) on any male roughly 15-45 ? Good enough for initial pacification.
- loneboat 3y ago
  You don't need AGI for drone swarms to be feasible.
- panarchy 3y ago
  Autonomous drones are literally decades old technology at this point
TulliusCicero 3y ago
Tiny drones are having a moment right now, but anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.
- pydry 3y ago
  >anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down. It's not a popular fact but Russia is excelling at this area right now. Having a live war to test in and a tight feedback loop between the front lines and the industrial backbone has sped up their weapons development quite a lot.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    Do you have any URLs to read more about Russian anti-drone technology and the latest news of drone warfare?
    - pydry 3y ago
      nope. i've been trying to figure out what's going on by piecing together western-leaning and russian-leaning sources together like a jigsaw. my assumption is that both sides generally tell truths that suit them while ignoring truths that don't suit them, and both will admit that something has gone wrong once it becomes difficult to hide. here's an example of a western admission that Russia is currently ahead in electronic warfare: https://archive.is/fxdjy https://archive.is/fxdjy
ww520 3y ago
F-35 is needed for its sensors, stealth, range, and weapons.
dgfitz 3y ago
The future of warfare is misinformation. Apparently it’s working.
- lazide 3y ago
  The past too.
- thewinnie 3y ago
  Watching closely Ukrainian - Russia war I can see @lettergram has a point. Cheap commercial drone with granade showing just astonishing funds/effectiveness ratio. Think about firing $150 000 rocket (javelin) or $1 000 drone. Plus drone does not require any special military training and you can manuver during the fly and choose angle of attack.
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    Edit: forgot to add GPS denied areas. Dead reckoning is really fucking hard when you’re blown about like a leaf in the wind. What about the datalink? Max distance? Is there a video feed? Does each drone have an operator? If not, how do you know who is being targeted? War is ugly and messy, everything looks like the same shit on the battlefield. Have you considered weather? Temperature can play a nasty role in drone mobility, not to mention wind. Oh, and they’re not quiet, at all. Drones are as much of a pain as they can be effective. Everyone just assumes they “just work” and they really don’t.
hollerith 3y ago
>delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less Which rocket are you imagining as the delivery platform? I hope it is not any of SpaceX's rockets, which probably need 30 min just to fuel them up -- and once they're fueled, they have to be launched in a few days or undergo an expensive disassembly process to prevent corrosion caused by fuel residue. The US Air Force used liquid-fueled ICBMs for about 10 years, then in the 1960s switched to solid fueled because of the disadvantages described above.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  > SpaceX has projected that it will launch 148 rockets in 2024, which would be once every two and a half days And that’s before Starship comes into play. If successful, they want to be able to fly them much more frequently than Falcon 9s. They’re not really at risk of having nothing to do with a rocket
  - hollerith 3y ago
    OK. But then you have to unload whatever payload was scheduled to launch next and load the drones, which again probably takes more than 30 min all by itself even after we modify the system to make unloading and loading payloads as fast as possible. (For one thing, I bet the way they do it now, SpaceX loads the payload and only then fuels the rocket, and if they were to reverse the order, They would need to make modifications that are expensive in engineering time to prevent the jostling of loading the payload from causing leaks or explosions of the fuel.) What matters for a weapon is the delay between the decision to use the weapon and when the weapon arrives at the target; it would be a mistake to look just at flight time. For an ICBM or a sub-launched ballistic missile, the delay really is about 40 min all in. Liquid-fueled rocket engines are not used by the US military and haven't been used since about 1970 and that is unlikely to change in my estimation because of this new capability that SpaceX has developed of rockets that can land gently enough that a payload of drones survives the landing. I don't want to guess as to the feasibility of developing a solid-fuel rocket that can land gently. (Also I think 30 min is unrealistic: a SpaceX rocket would need about an hour IMO to travel to some destination on the other side of Earth from where it launched: an ICBM can do it in about 40 min only because it is still going at about 8 times the speed of sound when it hits.) If anyone actually in the industry contradicts anything I wrote here, they are probably right and I'm probably wrong.
photochemsyn 3y ago
The F-35 does seem like a colossal waste of money, but it's also one a government jobs program and a cash cow for MIC investors with a budget of $1.7 trillion, which is how the government makes these decisions: https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jets-troubled-history https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jet... Lockheed Martin is moving towards drone fighter jets under "Project Carrera" although their ideal is to have a F-35 controlling a swarm of fighter drones that travel with it, which seems like a convenient excuse to keep producing and selling the F-35. Eventually the human fighter pilot will be removed from the system and it'll all be run by an AI called SkyNet. https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-into-f-35-controlled-combat-drones-under-project-carrera/ https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-...
maxglute 3y ago
>The future of warfare is terrifying Maybe against asymmetric opponents who can't hit back in space domain. Peer powers with ASAT capability will just launch a "cheap" kill vehicle to blowup starship + payload worth 100s of million because US put eggs in one platform basket like aircraft carriers where ROI depends on reusability which is ultimately predicated on survivability. Meanwhile resulting kessler syndrome degrades space enviroment for everyone, but US the most because they have the most hardware in space.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
These craft are capable of controlling a local swarm of drones themselves. Its hardly obsolete to bake in redundancy in control especially one capable of running independently at the edge.

jakeinspace 3y ago

What you’re suggesting sounds like an ICBM effectively. Launching one, even if it’s a falcon 9 launch vehicle, anyway close to a nuclear power is not reasonable.

maerF0x0 3y ago

> as they pick off soldiers one by one here let me fix that for you > as they pick off every human one by one

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Any real kill bot army is fully autonomous requiring no disrupt-able RF, and wars aren’t fought against soldiers. When your armies are drones the fight moves to who you’re really fighting - the citizens whom you’re trying to break to surrender. Welcome to the future!

torginus 3y ago
This isn't hard to achieve - I think a Starlink-guided drone army is pretty much unjammable - unless you have space based jammers, but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable.
- farseer 3y ago
  So on a cloudy day, nothing would work right?
- throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
  > but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable. OISL? How many of them do you expect each Sat to have?
  - torginus 3y ago
    I have no idea how any of this actually works in practice, but I imagine a series of MEMS mirrors could split a single physical laser beam into many-many recievers in a time-multiplexed manner. Probably you could control a good amount of drones with a single satellite transciever, and your typical drone would have LOS to many satellites. There could be multiplexer drones whose purpose would be to mediate between cheap disposable small drones and the satellites themselves. This is already a thing (not with lasers and sats) - the Russians have the Orlan drones with sophisticated(ish) surveillance equipment that act as spotters and guide the Lancet suicide drones and artillery
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Thank Christ for EMPs
  - farseer 3y ago
    And anti satellite weaponry.
    - panarchy 3y ago
      And the Kessler Syndrome
- sjducb 3y ago
  Why is it unjammable? It’s just radio. The satellite adds an extra vulnerability. You can see the satellite from 1000km away. Just build a big directional antenna well outside the war zone. Jamming signals in a war zone is hard because you give away your own position when you start jamming.
  - torginus 3y ago
    Highly directional antennas mean that the radiation source needs to be up in the sky to be even picked up by the drone. Ground based jammers are physically not capable of doing this. And I'm pretty sure they use frequency bands that do not reflect off the ionosphere otherwise they couldn't talk to satellites.
    - sjducb 3y ago
      Firstly, The signal would diffract around the drone to the antenna on top, so I think you can jam the drone. Secondly it’s probably easier to jam the satellite, because you know exactly where it is. If you’re on the ground near the drone you can definitely send noise at the satellite so it can’t receive anything from the drone. You’d have to do some testing to see if a jammer off to the side (1000km away) works. I think it will.
- ponector 3y ago
  Earth to satellite connection is as jammable as other wireless connection. And don't forget that gps sygnals are also jammed and replaced with fake location.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Combat has been about controlling resources. When labor or attention is now considered a resource, how does combat change how it looks? You can’t necessarily conduct the same tactics to secure a rubber plantation like you might to secure a mindshare of a population. Maybe you lean more on propaganda instead of actions that might diminish the quality of the labor/attention pool from loss of life. You could gradually shift their labor pools to enrich your own companies, shift their public discourse to discuss products created by your own companies, and you’ve effectively captured the population without a shot fired or them realizing what has even happened.

BartjeD 3y ago

Stealth planes are great for taking out air defense. Good luck defending your airspace with just drones.

lukan 3y ago
With enough drones in the air, good luck keeping that plane in stealth mode.
- foldr 3y ago
  You might catch a glimpse of it, but you won't be able to track it, which is what you need to do to shoot it down.
  - lukan 3y ago
    Depends what capabilities the drones have. And having a glimpse is already a confirmed sighting, then you can start a focused search with traditional groundbased radar - the stealth planes are not invisible, if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it. And when you have some other drones in the flightpath, you might get more than a glimpse and finally a lock. Or your own fighter jets. The idea of a stealth plane is, that you don't spot them at all, once spotted, their survival rate drops a lot.
    - foldr 3y ago
      >if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it. Fighter jets can maneuver. For a successful missile launch you need a good enough lock to track the plane precisely as it moves. Just knowing roughly where the plane was a few minutes ago doesn't help all that much when it comes to killing it.
      - lukan 3y ago
        But your fighter jets can know where to look. Supported by all your drones you can send in the flight path. One drone close enough with a heat seeking missile and that was it. And advanced radar probably also can get a lock, if the operators know something is there.

worldsayshi 3y ago

It's surprising that weapons manufacturers seem to be quite slow at adopting this trend. I guess they don't want to speed up the obsolescence of their own supply chains.

NickC25 3y ago
Well, for one, slowness of adoption usually translates to "let's milk the crap out of the government's dollars for as long as we can without putting too much of our own money into it". LHM's stock (as well as other major contractors) seems to be a good indicator of that. I have a relative who recently (2 years ago) called it a career after roughly 40 years at Lockheed-Martin, and a good chunk of that time was within the Skunk Works division. What I was able to gleam from him is that LHM sees the future of aerial warfare as a hybrid of manned and unmanned vehicles. The idea is that a 6th or 7th gen fighter might be a "mothership" of sorts with much more powerful weapons such as bombs or heavier artillery , but also in control of a number of unmanned drones capable of significantly faster attack abilities but with lighter armaments or laser weapons, all to replace current dogfighting scenarios. Fascinating, but terrifying at the same time.
jpk 3y ago
Defense contractors make heaps of money on big, drawn out projects like the F35. They probably stand to make much less if they pivot to compete with COTS drones carrying IEDs. So it's not surprising to me that the military industrial complex is more interested in milking the government for cash than actually innovating towards superior combat efficiency and effectiveness.
enaaem 3y ago
Cheap drones aren’t that cheap and conventional weapons aren’t always that expensive. A JDAM is like 20k which is cheaper than a Shahed, but way more powerful. There aren’t many ways to beat a modern air force other than having your own expensive modern airforce and AA systems. So you initially spent a lot of resources to beat those systems, and the moment you have beaten those, you can carpet bomb the battle field with bombs that are more powerful and cheaper than “cheap” drones.

torginus 3y ago

I was just thinking that all these FPV drones we saw dominate in Ukraine would've been possible to make 2 decades ago with similarly rudimentary tools of the day - no advanced tech required.

lukan 3y ago
Nope, battery tech was not advanced enough.
farseer 3y ago
No they weren't as effective due to reduced lithium ion battery capacity as well as less efficient small electric motors. Otherwise the 70's and 80's would have had quadcopters too in every house.

chx 3y ago

> autonomous drones yes, yes, we only need to use a few more GPUs to turn automated plagiarism machines into full blown AGI, am I right? I thought at least Apple getting off the horse because they realized it's just a carnival carousel was a hint. But apparently people are so high on the LLM supply they can't think straight any more.

lettergram 3y ago
What are you talking about? lol we have this today, swarms are next (and have been being worked on for years). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-conflict-prompted-u-s-to-develop-autonomous-drone-swarms-1-000-mile-cannon/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-co... All a drone needs to do in what I just described is target something that looks like a target (ie person with gun). We have that tech today, and it’s not hard.
- lazide 3y ago
  And frankly, few are going to limit it to 'person with a gun', when 'person in a warzone' is already usually sufficient.
- euroderf 3y ago
  How about (future) drones that can put handcuffs (or other hand restraints) on any male roughly 15-45 ? Good enough for initial pacification.
loneboat 3y ago
You don't need AGI for drone swarms to be feasible.
panarchy 3y ago
Autonomous drones are literally decades old technology at this point

TulliusCicero 3y ago

Tiny drones are having a moment right now, but anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.

pydry 3y ago
>anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down. It's not a popular fact but Russia is excelling at this area right now. Having a live war to test in and a tight feedback loop between the front lines and the industrial backbone has sped up their weapons development quite a lot.
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  Do you have any URLs to read more about Russian anti-drone technology and the latest news of drone warfare?
  - pydry 3y ago
    nope. i've been trying to figure out what's going on by piecing together western-leaning and russian-leaning sources together like a jigsaw. my assumption is that both sides generally tell truths that suit them while ignoring truths that don't suit them, and both will admit that something has gone wrong once it becomes difficult to hide. here's an example of a western admission that Russia is currently ahead in electronic warfare: https://archive.is/fxdjy https://archive.is/fxdjy

ww520 3y ago

F-35 is needed for its sensors, stealth, range, and weapons.

dgfitz 3y ago

The future of warfare is misinformation. Apparently it’s working.

lazide 3y ago
The past too.
thewinnie 3y ago
Watching closely Ukrainian - Russia war I can see @lettergram has a point. Cheap commercial drone with granade showing just astonishing funds/effectiveness ratio. Think about firing $150 000 rocket (javelin) or $1 000 drone. Plus drone does not require any special military training and you can manuver during the fly and choose angle of attack.
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Edit: forgot to add GPS denied areas. Dead reckoning is really fucking hard when you’re blown about like a leaf in the wind. What about the datalink? Max distance? Is there a video feed? Does each drone have an operator? If not, how do you know who is being targeted? War is ugly and messy, everything looks like the same shit on the battlefield. Have you considered weather? Temperature can play a nasty role in drone mobility, not to mention wind. Oh, and they’re not quiet, at all. Drones are as much of a pain as they can be effective. Everyone just assumes they “just work” and they really don’t.

hollerith 3y ago

>delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less Which rocket are you imagining as the delivery platform? I hope it is not any of SpaceX's rockets, which probably need 30 min just to fuel them up -- and once they're fueled, they have to be launched in a few days or undergo an expensive disassembly process to prevent corrosion caused by fuel residue. The US Air Force used liquid-fueled ICBMs for about 10 years, then in the 1960s switched to solid fueled because of the disadvantages described above.

iknowstuff 3y ago
> SpaceX has projected that it will launch 148 rockets in 2024, which would be once every two and a half days And that’s before Starship comes into play. If successful, they want to be able to fly them much more frequently than Falcon 9s. They’re not really at risk of having nothing to do with a rocket
- hollerith 3y ago
  OK. But then you have to unload whatever payload was scheduled to launch next and load the drones, which again probably takes more than 30 min all by itself even after we modify the system to make unloading and loading payloads as fast as possible. (For one thing, I bet the way they do it now, SpaceX loads the payload and only then fuels the rocket, and if they were to reverse the order, They would need to make modifications that are expensive in engineering time to prevent the jostling of loading the payload from causing leaks or explosions of the fuel.) What matters for a weapon is the delay between the decision to use the weapon and when the weapon arrives at the target; it would be a mistake to look just at flight time. For an ICBM or a sub-launched ballistic missile, the delay really is about 40 min all in. Liquid-fueled rocket engines are not used by the US military and haven't been used since about 1970 and that is unlikely to change in my estimation because of this new capability that SpaceX has developed of rockets that can land gently enough that a payload of drones survives the landing. I don't want to guess as to the feasibility of developing a solid-fuel rocket that can land gently. (Also I think 30 min is unrealistic: a SpaceX rocket would need about an hour IMO to travel to some destination on the other side of Earth from where it launched: an ICBM can do it in about 40 min only because it is still going at about 8 times the speed of sound when it hits.) If anyone actually in the industry contradicts anything I wrote here, they are probably right and I'm probably wrong.

photochemsyn 3y ago

The F-35 does seem like a colossal waste of money, but it's also one a government jobs program and a cash cow for MIC investors with a budget of $1.7 trillion, which is how the government makes these decisions: https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jets-troubled-history https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jet... Lockheed Martin is moving towards drone fighter jets under "Project Carrera" although their ideal is to have a F-35 controlling a swarm of fighter drones that travel with it, which seems like a convenient excuse to keep producing and selling the F-35. Eventually the human fighter pilot will be removed from the system and it'll all be run by an AI called SkyNet. https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-into-f-35-controlled-combat-drones-under-project-carrera/ https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-...

maxglute 3y ago

>The future of warfare is terrifying Maybe against asymmetric opponents who can't hit back in space domain. Peer powers with ASAT capability will just launch a "cheap" kill vehicle to blowup starship + payload worth 100s of million because US put eggs in one platform basket like aircraft carriers where ROI depends on reusability which is ultimately predicated on survivability. Meanwhile resulting kessler syndrome degrades space enviroment for everyone, but US the most because they have the most hardware in space.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

These craft are capable of controlling a local swarm of drones themselves. Its hardly obsolete to bake in redundancy in control especially one capable of running independently at the edge.