8 ms·

Neros has raised $121M to build military drones

45 points by asix66 11mo ago

https://archive.li/8HrcO https://archive.li/8HrcO

dazhengca 11mo ago
I just can’t read AI articles anymore
- perihelions 11mo ago
  Good eye. It's plagiarized, too: the source they copied (without attribution) is this New York Times story[0], and you can diff the two texts yourselves, to see what AI did to it. (It's gross). I've emailed the mods to ask them to replace the post's URL. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-drones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-d... ("The 20-Somethings Who Raised $121 Million to Build Military Drones" by Farah Stockman)
  - kragen 11mo ago
    It's not paywalled, though, which makes it far better than the NYT link!
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - patricklorio 11mo ago
      IMO bad take. We want quality journalism to be sustainable, having AI launder stolen content and make it free with ads is not better.
      - nocoiner 11mo ago
        Fortunately or unfortunately, the New York Times is now a gaming/recipes company with a newspaper attached to it. Probably mostly a good thing now that I think about it - it moves the paper closer to the model of 20th century journalism (a local quasi-monopoly on news gathering and distribution funded by advertising) that was, for all its faults, pretty fucking good in retrospect.
      - kragen 11mo ago
        Sure, I'd love for quality journalism to be sustainable, but that's no reason to keep ourselves ignorant while it isn't sustainable, a situation which may or may not end in our lifetimes. Also, this is the NYT we're talking about here, the outfit that promoted the fiction about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and doxxed Scott Alexander while insinuating he was a Nazi. It's not a good choice for a poster child for "quality journalism".
  - tomhow 11mo ago
    We've updated the URL, thanks!
BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
This was particularly interesting in regards to the US military not being at the bleeding edge: The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000. It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities). Related: Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.
- bethekidyouwant 11mo ago
  Russia gets all their drone parts from China same as Ukraine not sure as assembling them is “making them”
- gonzo41 11mo ago
  Counterpoint, the US has better other systems. Such as the 1st,2nd,3rd largest air forces in the world. Lots of Ukrainian commanders would happily trade FPV drones with grenades attached for mortar teams with lots of ammo and effective aircover. Modern militaries need drones, but the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play.
  - defrost 11mo ago
    A swarm of dirt cheap drones flying through the jet engines of a 10,000,000 dollar gorilla is an asymmetric answer.
    - brandensilva 11mo ago
      Yeah I think people are underestimating drones here. There is a reason this administration is fast tracking drone production and easing up on procurement. Some stuff doesn't need super sophisticated systems with traditional processes to get off the ground quickly with a cheap swarm approach. It's probably the only thing I can agree with this administration on. With that said America would be doing both drone swarms and advanced missile systems where they are most effective.
danielodievich 11mo ago
I pay attention to what my former country is doing to Ukraine and it is really bad. America's warfighting with drones is very clearly unprepared to what's currently on the cutting edge. Ukraine's strike on strategic aviation with drones transported via trucks to the edge of airports can very easily happen here, given the size of the country, relative ease of access to air force bases and ubiquitous trucks everywhere. I worry that only when that happens will there be meaningful impetus to do something. Until then the current idiots will continue to occupy themselves with owning the libs and beard size regulations.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
  We don't want them hiding drones in their beards!
kragen 11mo ago
> The Archer Strike platforms integrate with Kraken Kinetics Terminus strike payloads No relation!
binarymax 11mo ago
I think about where this is going to end up in 20 years and it terrifies me.
- Mistletoe 11mo ago
  I just watched Oblivion again. Oddly prescient for 2013.
  - h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 11mo ago
    Good morning, mistletoe. How are you feeling today? Are you an effective team?
    - Mistletoe 11mo ago
      I’m not feeling like an effective team today, Sally.
mrguyorama 11mo ago
A reminder that both Ukraine and Russia in the war use drones because they do not have the actual tools they want to use for that job An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness. Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets. No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer. By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction. Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars. Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare. And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think. There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming. Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there.

45 points by asix66 11mo ago

https://archive.li/8HrcO https://archive.li/8HrcO

dazhengca 11mo ago

I just can’t read AI articles anymore

perihelions 11mo ago
Good eye. It's plagiarized, too: the source they copied (without attribution) is this New York Times story[0], and you can diff the two texts yourselves, to see what AI did to it. (It's gross). I've emailed the mods to ask them to replace the post's URL. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-drones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-d... ("The 20-Somethings Who Raised $121 Million to Build Military Drones" by Farah Stockman)
- kragen 11mo ago
  It's not paywalled, though, which makes it far better than the NYT link!
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - patricklorio 11mo ago
    IMO bad take. We want quality journalism to be sustainable, having AI launder stolen content and make it free with ads is not better.
    - nocoiner 11mo ago
      Fortunately or unfortunately, the New York Times is now a gaming/recipes company with a newspaper attached to it. Probably mostly a good thing now that I think about it - it moves the paper closer to the model of 20th century journalism (a local quasi-monopoly on news gathering and distribution funded by advertising) that was, for all its faults, pretty fucking good in retrospect.
    - kragen 11mo ago
      Sure, I'd love for quality journalism to be sustainable, but that's no reason to keep ourselves ignorant while it isn't sustainable, a situation which may or may not end in our lifetimes. Also, this is the NYT we're talking about here, the outfit that promoted the fiction about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and doxxed Scott Alexander while insinuating he was a Nazi. It's not a good choice for a poster child for "quality journalism".
- tomhow 11mo ago
  We've updated the URL, thanks!

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago

This was particularly interesting in regards to the US military not being at the bleeding edge: The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000. It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities). Related: Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.

bethekidyouwant 11mo ago
Russia gets all their drone parts from China same as Ukraine not sure as assembling them is “making them”
gonzo41 11mo ago
Counterpoint, the US has better other systems. Such as the 1st,2nd,3rd largest air forces in the world. Lots of Ukrainian commanders would happily trade FPV drones with grenades attached for mortar teams with lots of ammo and effective aircover. Modern militaries need drones, but the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play.
- defrost 11mo ago
  A swarm of dirt cheap drones flying through the jet engines of a 10,000,000 dollar gorilla is an asymmetric answer.
  - brandensilva 11mo ago
    Yeah I think people are underestimating drones here. There is a reason this administration is fast tracking drone production and easing up on procurement. Some stuff doesn't need super sophisticated systems with traditional processes to get off the ground quickly with a cheap swarm approach. It's probably the only thing I can agree with this administration on. With that said America would be doing both drone swarms and advanced missile systems where they are most effective.

danielodievich 11mo ago

I pay attention to what my former country is doing to Ukraine and it is really bad. America's warfighting with drones is very clearly unprepared to what's currently on the cutting edge. Ukraine's strike on strategic aviation with drones transported via trucks to the edge of airports can very easily happen here, given the size of the country, relative ease of access to air force bases and ubiquitous trucks everywhere. I worry that only when that happens will there be meaningful impetus to do something. Until then the current idiots will continue to occupy themselves with owning the libs and beard size regulations.

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
We don't want them hiding drones in their beards!

kragen 11mo ago

> The Archer Strike platforms integrate with Kraken Kinetics Terminus strike payloads No relation!

binarymax 11mo ago

I think about where this is going to end up in 20 years and it terrifies me.

Mistletoe 11mo ago
I just watched Oblivion again. Oddly prescient for 2013.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 11mo ago
  Good morning, mistletoe. How are you feeling today? Are you an effective team?
  - Mistletoe 11mo ago
    I’m not feeling like an effective team today, Sally.

mrguyorama 11mo ago

A reminder that both Ukraine and Russia in the war use drones because they do not have the actual tools they want to use for that job An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness. Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets. No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer. By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction. Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars. Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare. And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think. There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming. Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there.