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French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar
- bell-cot 2y ago> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper. > However, the reality is complicated. > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said. If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat. It seems hard to imagine that this is the country which constructed the Maginot Line - in a decade, mostly during a grim economic depression, when their entire nation's population was only a bit over 40M.
- stefan_ 2y agoIt's getting hard to believe anything in this world anymore. A million shells fired by the Germans in Verdun in a mere 8 hours and now the entirety of Europe can't make that number in a year.
- ttoinou 2y agoThose aren't the same shells though
- bluGill 2y agoThey would work and be better than the nothing we have. Well some minor adustment for 155mm shells.
- simmerup 2y agoJust wait until we see what China can produce for a war
- throwaway9870 2y agoAdd about two zeros to what the West collectively can build.
- lm28469 2y agoI'm very curious actually, especially after seeing how the 2nd largest army in the world is performing in Ukraine
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoChina has been supplying the entire world with basically all of modern industrial goods. They have over 10x Russia's industry. Anyone who draws China into a prolonged conflict is too dumb to live.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Anyone who draws China into a prolonged conflict is too dumb to live On land. Attacking Taiwan necessitates combined-arms warfare.
- hibikir 2y agoDid you ever read on the early parts of the war, during the race to the sea? Both sides were extremely low on ammunition, as they realized that their ideas of how much ordinance would be used in a real war were completely wrong. It took a really long time to ramp up production capacity to get anywhere near Verdun, and for the biggest horrors of WWI's trench warfare to appear. Everyone kind of learned their lesson for WWII, as the real signal that war was coming wasn't actual invasion, but the ramping up of industry to actually supply combat. The US intervention in Europe couldn't have happened much earlier, because setting up the logistics to do any intervention whatsoever took years... and this was at a time where, while the US still claimed neutrality, the country was already changing their industrial production to be able to begin intervention. So even in the good old days, nobody could change their industrial capacity to supply a war on a dime. And if there is no war, the costs of dedicating so much production to unused equipment is prohibitive
- lm28469 2y agoI'll take 10 000 modern shells over 1m of whatever the fuck they were using back in ww1. The accuracy was "it's going to fall somewhere between us and were the canon is pointed" and up to 50% didn't detonate. We're talking about: https://nfknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2573.jpg https://nfknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2573.jpg vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors/Nexter_Bonus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors/Nexter_Bonus
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- LunaSea 2y agoFew reasons, one of them is that the Maginot line was built during a time where France was an industrial powerhouse. This has not been the case in a long time. The other point, is that you are comparing a public infrastructure project with a private company. Said private company behaves like one and does not want to take unnecessary risks by recruiting and training too much staff and later not having enough orders to keep them on the payroll.
- swores 2y agoMinor pedantic FYI - although your comment was clear (I think, or maybe I did misunderstand it), there's a linguistic difference between "Few reasons" (meaning "there aren't many reasons) and "A few reasons" (meaning "more than one", but implying that you're introducing the reasons, not that you're quantifying them as not many).
- ciscoriordan 2y agoA depression cuts both ways -- lower tax revenue, but lower labor costs too.
- Twirrim 2y agoUnsurprisingly enough, complicated technology requires complicated manufacturing capabilities and finite time to create, QA etc. These radar systems are many orders of magnitude more complicated than anything manufactured during WW2. It's not something easily scaled up.
- frozencell 2y agoCare to explain the components that take longer to manufacturate? Are there similar products manufactured in the US or Asia at higher scale
- boricj 2y agoIf France were to be at war with a nation knocking on our borders, our policy nowadays is to fire a nuclear-tipped ASMPA missile as a warning shot. We do not rely on our conventional forces or anyone else to safeguard our sovereignty should it escalate to that. Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what we call a modèle d'armée complet, or an army with a complete set of capabilities, alongside the arms industry to sustain it. Said arms industry after spending decades surviving on frugal orders is now in the process of scaling up production substantially. It takes time, but we've already tripled production of Caesar self-propelled artillery with another doubling in sight for example. If push comes to shove, we might take some time to wake up from our slumber, but we're French. Picking a fight with the Gallic rooster is usually a bad decision.
- tekla 2y agoFrench military doctrine: We will Nuke you as a warning. If that doesn't get the message across, we will empty our nuclear arsenal until all of your miserable cities are rubble and your farmlands are glass.
- boricj 2y agoThere's a famous quote by De Gaulle from the early 1960s which basically states that France isn't worth the price of killing 80 million people over, even if you have the means of killing over 800 million French people. Also, we don't need American ballistic missiles to do so, unlike our friends on the other side of the English Channel.
- ptero 2y agoI suspect the doctrine of nuke as a warning shot is less effective today when a small group can launch, either for own purposes or as a proxy for another state, a large group of drones to strike with speed and precision the targets 1000+ km away. With that threat type nuking is not an option and we are back to traditional defense. My 2c.
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- hibikir 2y agoNot unlike with vaccines, massive production ramp ups are possible once the suppliers know that they aren't carrying any significant risk of losing a lot of money for overbuilding capacity. As some of us learned in the pandemic, increases in production capacity that are not going to be long term will get your company hobbled, if not downright bankrupted if you overproduce. See what happened to anyone that assumed the demand for exercise equipment for the home was going to be long lived. When looking at this kind of problems, it's always either regulation or incentives.. and here it isn't regulation, so it's all incentives.
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- cm2187 2y agoThe Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though. It's a combination of several things. First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise. Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger. That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even poland). And there will be little a country like France will be able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They have nothing in between.
- TMWNN 2y ago>The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though. ... which has absolutely nothing to do with bell-cot's point in invoking it as a counterexample to France's current production ability.
- cm2187 2y agoEven re production. It's only a massive piece of concrete. France is still good at pouring massive amonts of concrete, that's what all of its suburbs are made of. The line was not exactly a marvel of engineering even for the time (and neither forward looking).
- lm28469 2y agoPouring cement will always be easier/cheaper than maintaining an ever increasingly expensive army... Imagine the amount of wasted resources and man hours it would have required to keep France world war ready since 1945 If there is an actual threat the response will be nuclear, that's the whole point of having nuclear submarines deployed 24/7. For regular military operations we have quite good intel services and projection forces
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat. Yes, before this war I never realised that our (western) military production is a joke. I am very disturbed that we cannot outproduce Russia despite having 20x their military budget. People who say that the West could produce more if it was really pressed - well so could Russia, people are still driving BMWs and having parties, they have not mobilised the way the British have during WW2. I think it's dangerous to believe that we could magic capabilities out of thin air when it really counts. The way we do contracts is a clownshow - UK has ordered more NLAWS and they will take two years to deliver. Meanwhile in the Vietnam war, USA lost 10,000 combat aircraft, more than currently exist in all of western world combined. I cannot explain this in any way other than the system being rife with waste and abuse.
- fransje26 2y ago> If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat. That is correct. But you want to ramp up production without too much over-investment. It is not certain, at the moment, that this conflict will devolve to a full-blown world war. So if you invest in a factory to produce 1000 radars a year, what good is it if the conflict putters out? There is zero solidarity on a European level for common investments in armament, with most countries lining up for US-made equipment instead of investing in ramping-up their own production. So that also means that the financial burden of ramping-up arms production is also not shared.
- Ajay-p 2y agoWell, I mean, China has probably already stolen it. Given the nature of espionage it's highly likely the U.S. has the details and can build it on their own.
- Ajay-p 2y agoWait, this is a surprise that China steals technology??
- andrewstuart 2y agoThere must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones including sound, visual, radio. Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against? Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide in without radio communication once they spot their target. Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the world.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI suspect we're going to see a big resurgence in anti-aircraft guns, like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard.
- jazzyjackson 2y agowhy fire ammo when you have laser beams? https://bluehalo.com/c-uas-autonomous-systems/c-uas-directed-energy/ https://bluehalo.com/c-uas-autonomous-systems/c-uas-directed...
- dotnet00 2y agoDirected energy weapons are still in their early days, they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal hitting the target does.
- mopsi 2y agoCost, reliability and simplicity! A WWII-era 20-40mm cannon upgraded with automated targeting system doesn't even have to accurately hit the target if its shell explodes into a cloud of metal fragments that hits propellers and control surfaces or gets ingested into a jet engine.
- andrewstuart 2y agoOf all shapes and sizes. I can imagine a robot M16 attached to a drone spotter might be effective against the sort of small drones that are hitting tanks in Ukraine.
- CrzyLngPwd 2y agoWhen you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit. War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno. https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/butler_racket.pdf https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...
- gwervc 2y agoEspecially with Macron under which the national debt skyrocketed. We are supposed to find a lot of money really quickly but he always spends billions on outside issues without public consultation. Heck, there's a promise for 3 new billions just this year! That's insane. All that money is going to waste in a war that isn't ours, and that is lost for Ukraine from day 1. Of course in the end of the day it will be citizens like me would have to pay for that through new and higher taxes. As if we weren't already in the top 2 in that matter... https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-milliards-deuros-daide-militaire https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-m...
- adaml_623 2y agoPhew so glad we've fixed that war problem. Sadly defence spending is a bit like vaccinations.
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- mrighele 2y agoIdeally you want to prepare for war _before_ the war actually starts. The perception doesn't come from a paranoid nation, but the fact that a neighbor is actually at war and the invader keep telling that after that it will be your turn.
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- fjfaase 2y agoFrom what I heard about the SMART-L [1] radar around 1990, it could spot reflective objects the size of tennis balls at a distance of about 100Km. I guess with modern electronics and DSP, a much smaller system must be able to detect drones with ease. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L
- AlexanderTheGr8 2y agoWhat if you cover the drone with non-reflective material? Or does it care about the reflective nature of the core of the object rather than just the surface?
- instagib 2y agoFrequency is relative to the size of the object you want to detect and the size of the wave. Higher frequencies detect smaller things and can discern between them. Go too far and you detect bugs. Too low and you only see barn doors. Spinning blades are a dead giveaway for radars. Certain things reduce radar signature but the interesting part now is electronic countermeasures. A radar can produce a fuzzball graphic to the viewer of the data, speed, distance, direction of movement, etc.
- AYBABTME 2y agoThe problem isn't detecting small objects, it's that at this scale, there's a ton of noise. Distinguishing between noise, foliage, birds, and a tiny FPV drone, is really finding a needle in a haystack. Radar systems have been simply ignoring that level of noise at low altitude, sticking to fast moving small objects (artillery shells, rockets) or generally bigger objects (planes).
- AlexanderTheGr8 2y agoI read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command & control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it? Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do? I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.
- lm28469 2y agoYou're making a lot of wrong assumptions, drones can be any size, nobody's talking about missiles to shoot them down, not all drones are kamikaze, &c. If they're already being produced they do work for their intended purpose, Thales doesn't fuck around
- AlexanderTheGr8 2y agoI understand I am making assumptions bec of lack of information in the article. Re shooting them down, if you can't shoot them down, whats the point of detecting them? And a drone being kamikaze only matters IF you can shoot them down. Because then it's a race between the drone rushing to kamikaze vs you shooting it down. I will admit that I am just speculating here because I have a strange interest in militarized drones and little technical knowledge. PS : Defending your position by saying that a company doesn't fuck around is not a very good argument.
- lm28469 2y agoYou don't handle a dji dropping mortar rounds the same way you handle a fpv drone with a rpg warhead strapped under it nor the same way you handle a fleet of bayraktar pounding you from 5km above. I'm just saying you're mix and matching things which shouldn't be mixed and matched, the premise is wrong, no one is going to shoot down a $50 dji with a missile and no one will try to shoot a bayraktar with a shotgun. Just like you don't shoot a tank with a rifle or a moving plane with an unguided rocket launcher, you need the right tool for the right job You can scramble them, shoot them with bullets, catch the drone/projectile with nets, shoot them with missiles, &c. Again it's one of the main military company in France and it is partially owned by the state, I can assure you the fact that these things are being made is proof that they fulfil their role
- gumby 2y agoAustralia's cardboard drones have entered the field: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-vendor-retools-software-based-on-ukraine-war-hacks/ https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-v...
- ed_mercer 2y ago> Security is tight: An officer checks phones and pictures taken by visitors before they leave to make sure no industrial secrets are taken out of the facility. What a joke. What if have cloud backup? This level of half-assed checking gives me great doubt about their competency. The only way to prevent leakage is to have people leave their stuff at the entrance and go through a metal detector.
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoAnd in 20 years brain chips will mean anything anyone so much as glimpses is as good as public.
- genmud 2y agoThe US has had this capability for quite a while with the LCMR (AN/TPQ 48/49/50), which has been produced in large quantities (1k+, per mfg) and at least a few were in Ukraine.
- TheCleric 2y agoPossibly unrelated, but I read a separate article this week on how France is leading the way on drone defense in other areas: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a60311450/navy-helicopters-have-morphed-into-drone-killers-right-before-our-eyes/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a60311450.... (Archived version: https://archive.is/xSz8x https://archive.is/xSz8x)