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US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

• freedomben 4mo ago
  I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the release build hash, we had to go through a full acceptance test. As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. As a result there were a hole pile of bugs that we (and customers) ended up just living with. On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious.
  • hvb2 4mo ago
    Why would those fixes not be batched up? So fix 20% of those and do one round of testing?
    • bad_haircut72 4mo ago
      The obvious answer is that the more bugs you batch up, the higher the chances the next build fails - this is why CI became a thing, small iterative changes are safer and lead to greater throughput
      • dataflow 4mo ago
        CI doesn't mean doing all the tests all the time though. The expensive tests still wait until there's a major reason to run them. I had the same question as the parent and I still don't quite see why this can't work.
        • aidenn0 4mo ago
          I didn't work on this project, but I've been involved with similar ones. There is a process for getting a change into version control. Each change needs to have a (virtual) paper trail: motivation, risk analysis, sign-offs &c. If you can't get something into VC quickly, you can't really do CI. The obvious solution would be to have an integration branch that doesn't need the process to get in, do CI testing on that branch and then make the process for merging to the real branch. I've never seen this done personally, but I have been told some places do it, and then you end up with "Change X, which got approved had a dependency on Change Y that didn't get approved and we didn't realize it until now because Change Y was put in the integration branch before Change X"
          • dataflow 4mo ago
            Well, approval is a different beast from passing tests. But also, that's not how I was imagining this. I was imagining maintaining separate branches on top of each release, only combining them (merge or rebase or whatever) when you have a good reason to. That keeps things independent and makes it so you can always cut a release with solely the critical fixes (and test them in isolation, etc.) whenever needed, letting you integrate the noncritical ones opportunistically.
          • HeyLaughingBoy 4mo ago
            That sounds odd. The way it was done in every place I worked, is that a set of changes were approved for a release before they were planned and implemented. We organized the work as expected: each bug/feature on its own branch, with its own set of unit tests, etc., and automated testing applied on each commit. These branches are then merged to the integration branch once they are known good. Before the release process starts, QA would get a copy of the integration branch and test that. The dependency problem doesn't exist, because all the features were already approved to be in the release. The only way there would be a problem is if someone decided late in the game to pull a feature and that feature was a dependency to something else.
            • aidenn0 4mo ago
      • Manuel_D 4mo ago
        True, but if each run of CI takes 6 weeks then you're going to vastly hamper development.
  • tehjoker 4mo ago
    I don't really understand how any of this contributes to "defense". Sounds like "offense" to me. Just patrolling the skies over non-white countries and launching missiles at weddings. The reason the Pentagon invests so heavily in this kind of technology is our wars are so indefensible, they can't convince Americans to sacrifice blood in any quantity for other people's natural resources.
    • junofan 4mo ago
      They are white [1]. [1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisions-to-omb-statistical-policy-directive-no-15-race-and-ethnic-standards-for-federal-statistics-and-administrative-reporting/#document/p19/a2081999 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisi...
      • graemep 4mo ago
        They certainly look white to me. Are Spanish people white or Hispanic according to those definitions? 'Original peoples' is an interesting phrase. Neanderthals? Beaker people? A single category for everyone from Pakistanis to Japanese is weird.
        • ivell 4mo ago
          I think they meant Caucasian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
          • xorcist 4mo ago
            > Introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, the term denoted one of three purported major races of humans: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid Sounds totally legit.
          • graemep 4mo ago
            Caucasian includes South Asians and some East Africans according to that definition.
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work. If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family. By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
    • barrenko 4mo ago
      To add that Ukraine was also USSR's drone research center; not to detract from what you are saying.
    • NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
      [flagged]
    • rayiner 4mo ago
      Yeah, their tech development in drones is really impressive. An invading army has a way of focusing the mind and bureaucracy.
    • letitgo12345 4mo ago
      Well there's long term impact but yea that doesn't create enough political pressure to make process efficient
    • 27183 4mo ago
      > if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States It's even worse than that. Schedules slipping and cost overruns are good things for the manufacturer, because they can charge more on top of their initial contract. Cost-plus ftw.
      • Retric 4mo ago
        Cost plus isn’t nearly as common as it used to be. But you still run into similar issues regardless of the contract structure. Try and build a rail network without anyone in government wanting something changed from the initial design for 20 years.
  • pixl97 4mo ago
    Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue. I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.
    • matwood 4mo ago
      > visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • throwaway894345 4mo ago
        Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!" The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
        • ACCount37 4mo ago
          NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal". The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.
          • throwaway894345 4mo ago
            > lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.
  • general1465 4mo ago
    The bureaucratic development process sounds like Autosar in automotive. I am not surprised that newcomers from USA and Chinese auto companies are able to completely dominate in software because Autosar based development has been like giving a birth to a hedgehog. Slow and painful.
  • cm2012 4mo ago
    This is why Ukraine is making equivalent tech now for 1/10th the price. It's great to see.
    • yonaguska 4mo ago
      All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.
      • kilroy123 4mo ago
        I agree. Nightmare fuel.
      • meindnoch 4mo ago
        Depends on who's on the receiving end.
      • floatrock 4mo ago
        It's always been pretty horrific. We just didn't have bodycam livestreams invented during trench warfare times.
      • LgWoodenBadger 4mo ago
        Hopefully making the real horrors of war visible to the public/world will make war less frequent. Alas...
        • disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
          People have been saying this since Vietnam (and actually now that I think about a little more, this may actually have happened).
          • randcraw 4mo ago
            In the late 1960s daily TV news coverage revealed the horrors of war to the American public as never before (just as Brady's photos had done in the Civil War). That palpable gruesomeness was instrumental in the rising tide of unpopularity enjoyed by the war (and Johnson) by the elections of 1968.
  • varispeed 4mo ago
    If safety is extremely important, why there were bugs in the first place? Surely these should have been caught before code would get into main, no?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • mmooss 4mo ago
    > one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact Roll back the change? Also, fix the approval process - no way that should have been approved. Generally speaking that is risk management, an unavoidable engineering tradeoff. In lower stakes situations, for example a critical application or server for a small office, we let low-impact bugs accumulate: Imposing risks, and therefore eventual costs, to avoid minor workarounds and low-impact bugs is poor engineering and risk management. Engineering and all risk management includes tradeoffs. It's easy to criticize the downside of the tradeoff - the same people criticize the reverse decision when the server (or drone) crashes - when someone is not responsible for both sides of it, when they are not accountable for their words when the outcome occurs. That's speaking generally. It's also poor risk management to be overly safe. I don't know about the parents' situation. But drone crashes (risking humans), mission failure, $50 million losses, and associated downtime (including delays) and labor costs, seem like high costs that are worth some pain to avoid.
  • legitster 4mo ago
    This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion. It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.
    • throwaway894345 4mo ago
      Maybe if you're in a war that actually threatens your country. In the US, the Republican Party wages wars (such as the Iran War) pretty exclusively to facilitate borrowing public money and dumping it into the pockets of the rich. What looks like waste to the taxpayer is a feature to Republicans and their paymasters (including Israel, in the case of the Iran War).
  • Jtsummers 4mo ago
    > As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks between iterations (and possibly more after it leaves your shop) that takes a one year effort and turns it into about 1.5. So the program office decides you should do one big release each year, which also ups the risk because a lot of testing that would catch bugs isn't done until the end in that big 6-week test effort. Oops, now your 1 year + 6 week effort just got turned into 1 year + 6 week + (unknown rework time) + 6 weeks. Probably 2 years.
    • supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
      My last job was like this, a full round of QAs manually testing, along with writing up a grandiose release document, stakeholder approvals, and whatnot, for something that should just take two days of development work, and an insistence on putting configuration values into the database, supposedly because it's "safer" than deploying a new configuration file.
      • rixed 4mo ago
        If you are in an environment where deploying a new configuration file is easier than adding data in a pre-existing database, you are in a bad place already.
  • LgWoodenBadger 4mo ago
    Surely the dev wasn't able to merge that one-line code fix causing 6 weeks of testing without any other eyes on it and without someone else's PR-like approval...right?
  • stickfigure 4mo ago
    "Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an aircraft also adds weight."
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    In contrast I read that Ukraine is approving 4+ new weapons systems PER DAY !! Even when it comes to more expensive things like cruise missiles it seems the planning has to be that some high percentage of them may be shot down (and much higher for slower moving drones), so you really want them cheap and in high volume, with reliability somewhat of a secondary concern.
  • pc86 4mo ago
    This only makes sense if you have to test each fix in complete isolation which seems silly even for government employees and contractor body shops. You can't batch 80 real bug fixes and 20 "silly bug with no practical impact" fixes together?
  • ACCount37 4mo ago
    In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory. The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough. I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation. I'm not sure if "AI for red tape mitigation" is a thing, but "AI for killer drones" sure is. I suspect that "killer drones are insufficiently smart" is easier to fix with AI than "too much red tape". Because the amount of red tape, if unopposed, will expand to consume any capacity of dealing with it, AI or not.
    • deleted 4mo ago
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    • lokar 4mo ago
      I don’t know the details of that situation, but I have been on the other side of that debate. People say “it’s a one line change” (once they argued it was a 1 bit change!). But lacking a fully controlled and hermetic build system with its own exhaustive test suite you can’t be sure about the relationship between the source and the binary. And that continues to every step to get the binary into production (updating existing devices, etc).
      • ACCount37 4mo ago
        Welcome to Tradeoff Town. Sure, your ultra paranoid checking of everything might catch an extremely rare bug caused by something like interactions between a benign code change and a build system. But is it worth slowing down the development process by that much? Is it worth missing out on an entire generation of technology, like what happened with US and the shift from 00s drone warfare and 20s drone warfare? Usually not.
        • lokar 4mo ago
          It depends. For a JS web front end? Go crazy. For the consensus algorithm in your distributed database? slow down there buddy... You have to ask: how bad could this get? How hard will it be to fix? Could we loose or corrupt user data?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • giardini 4mo ago
    a "hole pile" of ...?! I'm surprised that someone who uses such a phrase was working on classified hardware in the "mid and late 00s".
    • freedomben 4mo ago
      for sure, no way even an intelligent person could possibly make a text-to-speech typo when writing a comment on an informal internet forum. Definitely a lying liar who lies
  • giantg2 4mo ago
    This just seems like poor planning. If it were planned better, you could group a bunch of smaller bug fixes under the same acceptance test. The full acceptance test is a good practice for safety critical systems. Project management just has to get better at doing smaller unit/int testing on each bug and then grouping those changes under the full acceptance test.
  • FireBeyond 4mo ago
    > Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Not to bring Tesla into this, but the contrast here is stunning. From a component manufacturer about the mindset of Tesla: "Hey, we sent you over the new firmware for the component, check it out." (The test suite for this component takes approximately 36 hours to execute.) Three hours later: "This is working so much better, thanks a lot!" "???" "Oh, we just flashed a car we have here and took it out for a drive." "?!?" Oof.
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • YeGoblynQueenne 4mo ago
    >> On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious. tl;dr, not in practice. Far as I can tell this is still the SOTA in FPOV drone autonomy: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-drone-racing https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-drone-racing Basically, those guys trained a drone to beat human FPOV racers but they had access to the race course layout before the race and trained extensively on it. Can't do that on a battlefield. Also: no shooting at enemy drones during FPOV races. Makes surviving to the end of the race simpler.
• exabrial 4mo ago
  The defense industry has spent the last 40+ years grooming the DoD into thinking it costs $30mil/unit to produce missiles and drones. They should have rejected any of the bids, but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA, they don't have to answer to any sort of efficiency or profitability. These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
  • piva00 4mo ago
    > but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
    • scns 4mo ago
      > since the budget is never balanced When the Republicans rule.
      • strictnein 4mo ago
        The last balanced budget was in 2001 and it was passed by a Republican controlled House and Senate [0]. Clinton somehow gets complete credit for it, even though the executive branch doesn't directly control the budget and congress controls the power of the purse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/106th_United_States_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/106th_United_States_Congress
    • wafflemaker 4mo ago
      It's kind of funded by the demand for dollars due to whole world needing dollars to trade with them. So that it's not the USA and Americans paying all that interest in inflation due to money printing
  • hvb2 4mo ago
    > but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense. And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked: "Don't you support our troops?" And that'll be the end of that
• ck2 4mo ago
  there's a better way for 100% savings just completely exit like Afghanistan and remember all this military hardware eventually ends up in the hands of police departments domestically, next decade is going to be wild $21 TRILLION spent on militarization 2001-2021 * https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militarization-since-9-11/ https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz... imagine how much by 2031, at least double ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off Venezuela at a million dollars a pop
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    > ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off Oh. You should have started with this.
    • newaccount670 4mo ago
      The fact that this person thinks the Afghanistan exit was a success should have let you know he is a crackpot well before the last sentence.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • delecti 4mo ago
        The Afghanistan exit was a completely predictable colossal failure, but it did mean we stopped lighting money on fire in Afghanistan.
        • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
          Ignore that we funded the taliban and warlords for the next 50 years with 1.9 billion in vehicles, machine guns, small arms, night vision, and explosives?
          • wafflemaker 4mo ago
• hunmernop 4mo ago
  Drones are only one piece of the puzzle. Once again ars is on the wrong side.
• swiftcoder 4mo ago
  > The Defense Innovation Unit notice called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapons payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying with a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles—or 8,000 nautical miles on a one-way strike mission—while executing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the US military I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius. The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.
  • matwood 4mo ago
    Yeah, it's about requirements. The Ukraine war has shown that fast-iterating MVPs are better in many battlefield situations. The saying that militaries end up preparing for the prior war instead of the next, comes to mind.
    • davrosthedalek 4mo ago
      True, but I think the US requirements are indeed different. Ukraine must repel invading forces in their own country -> lowish range, mass produced, not necessarily precision strike. US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
  • tclancy 4mo ago
    Always fighting the last war. But wait until you see how the next generation of our drones fails in a future war! Being less flip, the pull quote suggests (per my bias) our drone design is as much influenced by how much shit contractors can sell to put on a drone as it is by tactical needs. The kinds of targets that would require one ton of explosive are fixed sites that have been specifically hardened against attack. You'd hope some modern McArthur would look at the situation and say, "Screw it, we will just go around those sites and bomb the hell out of their supply lines with tiny drones", but what the hell do I know? In short: War is sell.
  • 4mo ago
• dataviz1000 4mo ago
  There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for. What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal. I guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheaper alternatives also. My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them? There is a group in South Florida who stand watch over turtle nests on the beach to ensure the hatchlings make it to the ocean instead of instinctively moving towards the street lamps or the bright hotels. I would use drones to hover over the nests to detect if the turtles hatch so people don't have to stand there. What would you do?
  • ImPostingOnHN 4mo ago
    Or we can go even further with the fun thought exercise, by spreading the cost even more: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the usa.
  • FatherOfCurses 4mo ago
    $3 is still too much and I would rather it go towards paying the debt down.
  • jschveibinz 4mo ago
    Side note: The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion. So $1 billion is about equal to 4 hour hours of government spending.
    • ImPostingOnHN 4mo ago
      Yikes, that is a lot.
    • mmooss 4mo ago
      > The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion. $7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.
• mrtksn 4mo ago
  I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsessed with destroying some super important target to win, like they did with killing Iran leaders only to find out that new leader replace the perished. The same with the other stuff, they have super important radar and super important ships that need to be defended and a failure creates irreplaceable loses. Iran on the other hand, just like with their super important leaders lost all its “super weapons” like destroyers and the drone ships and yet again brought USA to its knees. Maybe USA has more fundamental problems, not just drones. Maybe the problem is the obsession of wonderweapons for destroying wondertargets. It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him. Maybe the desire for concentration of power and seeing everything through that lens is the issue?
  • delecti 4mo ago
    The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country. If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
    • tclancy 4mo ago
      >Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board The fact they unironically used Star Wars in their war memes was an amazing self-own.
      • postsantum 4mo ago
        Yes, literally scrawny underdog rebels against the hecking iranian islamic death-star
    • ivell 4mo ago
• NDlurker 4mo ago
  Our country is a joke
  • jgerrish 4mo ago
    No, it's not a joke. When I see an article like this, I first think about the horrible lives lost in all of these wars. Many of them wonderful people who want to live their own lives. But I also think of unofficial channels of information sharing among nations, like Iran and others. And I think it's an ironic answer to the information sharing push we saw after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. Except I'm not laughing or thinking it's funny we got one over on a libertarian, or a conservative, or a liberal with an ironic story. I understand irony sucks when you're not writing the story. And I'm thinking I fucking loved my Apple IIe growing up. And I hope the aerospace engineers and families in Seattle and Southern California and elsewhere who may see increased budgets for this spend it wisely on themselves and theie families but also how they want. Maybe they can more easily afford houses and that makes them feel more a part of the community.
• ApolloFortyNine 4mo ago
  Makes sense, drone technology has come an insane distance since these were developed. Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
  • CapricornNoble 4mo ago
    >>Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet. Some of us were paying attention as early as the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS was using DJI drones to drop grenades into the turret hatches of Iraqi uparmored Humvees. Others started to notice during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Azeri UAV superiority dominated Armenian ground forces. But all of these professionals were like the military officers who observed the Boer Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War, and then wrote in the military journals of their day about how machineguns were gonna change warfare in a very bad way. Flag officers still slept-walked into the carnage of WW1 trench warfare....shrug. "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes."
• jmyeet 4mo ago
  In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of establishing the military-industrial complex [1]. We are seeing the fruits of that now that despite an annual budget over $1T the US has been militarily defeated by Iran (and Afghanistan). We build $13B aircraft carriers that don't work [2]. Defense contracting is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. This is what unfettered cost plus contracts looks like. We ridicule the Russian military for their insane levels of corruption (eg paying for tanks that never get built and the generals pocketing the money) but really the same thing has happened here. The things get built but they don't work and the entire industry is built around hiring former Pentagon people who specialize in procurement. It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the US military's past equipment was legendary. The M1 rifle and M4/M16 family were cheap, reliable and effective. The Jeep was legendary for its reliability. The original M1 Abrams tank is widely considered the best tank the military ever built. If you listen to anyone in the military they'll tell you the vehicles are constantly broken down, hard to repair, expensive to maintain and outright dangerous. Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on roads, schools, bridges, hospitals and trains, things that would actually benefit people. We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly? And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase. This is also why I laugh whenever anyone pushes the idea that China is the Big Bad [tm], for two reasons. First, they don't have to be. We just want their to be a scary enemy to justify all this. Second, if they were, they would destroy us because it would ultimately come down to military industrial capability and we would lose. Orders of magnitude lose. [1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh... [2]: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-the-aircraft-carrier-you-think-it-is-we-should-call-it-a-13-billion-laboratory/ https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-th...
  • runako 4mo ago
    > And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase Yeah, this is mind-boggling. The requested increase is roughly the size of the entire 2004 military budget. 2004, when we were fighting two separate ground wars. There were close to 200k US troops on the ground in combat theaters in 2004. We're proposing to add a "2004 US military" to our military. The unnecessary wars we will start with this capacity[1] will cause havoc in unpredictable places.
• Noaidi 4mo ago
  I know a few people who could have used some of that $1 Billion. I mean what is Musk and Altman going to do when they need to be bailed out?
• megous 4mo ago
  US should be split up so it can't do any more damage to the world. Americans can't be trusted with putting that much power in the hands of a few people anyway.
  • Nicholas_C 4mo ago
    China and Russia would love that. It would also be very bad for European security that is mostly guaranteed by U.S. strength and willingness to fight wars.
    • surgical_fire 4mo ago
      > European security that is mostly guaranteed by U.S. strength. That time is gone. At this point the US is likely the biggest threat to EU.
    • pjc50 4mo ago
      President threatened (emptily) to cut off all trade from Spain the other day.
      • Nicholas_C 4mo ago
        I wasn’t aware of that but it looks like he is upset that Spain won’t meet its defense spending commitments for NATO. Which goes back to my point about how the EU is totally reliant on the US for security. Europe’s biggest threat is itself, they won’t even do the bare minimum to ensure their security.
        • Hikikomori 4mo ago
          US would spend that money regardless of what Europe spent as they want to continue to use it to oppress and destroy the world. And the real reason they want us to spend more is to buy more weapons from them.
        • megous 4mo ago
          Some arbitrary threshold set by a completely demented US president (25% of government budget or whatever nonsense that idiot asked NATO peers to spend, probably on american mil. tech) has nothing to do with how european countries would/are able to defend themselves.
• thatmf 4mo ago
  Another novel approach to saving money: stop fighting Israel's wars
• RetroTechie 4mo ago
  It's disappointing how often the public gives a silent thumbs up on military spend. Okay I'll grant most US citizens would have preferred Trump hadn't gotten into this war. But most talk is about the $$ cost of this war, how little Trump has to show for it, and price of gasoline & groceries. Instead (for US citizens), the talk should be about what else could have benefitted from those $$, and now isn't because it'll be used to re-stock weaponry. Think healthcare, infrastructure, education, research, etc etc. That's the real cost of wars like this.
  • convolvatron 4mo ago
    that's still comes up far short of the total bill. the US never talks about the destruction to civilian infrastructure, the number of innocents killed, the loss of any ability to claim to be on the 'right side'. these are seeds that will ensure that the US is treated like Russia, or WWII Germany, or Iran. A rabid aggressor that will need to be isolated and eventually contained.
• trkarlb 4mo ago
  The Defense Innovation Unit was founded in 2015 and is full of SV interest groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Innovation_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Innovation_Unit They could obviously have foreseen the current failures in 2015. It is irrelevant, since the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Generals who routinely give theatrical performances for the cameras want the big toys for their districts. The goal in Iran is also not to win but to keep the Gulf monarchies, the EU, Japan and China down by means of a low intensity forever war.
  • marcosdumay 4mo ago
    > The goal in Iran is also not to win but to keep the Gulf monarchies, the EU, Japan and China down by means of a low intensity forever war. Eh... The US can not survive an economical war against the entire world. But anyway, somebody forgot to warn whoever created this strategy that the US society is constructed in a way that doesn't allow barriers against they exporting all their oil. They will either run out, or they will see some societal changes.
• littlecranky67 4mo ago
  While I am critical of Ukraine being in talks to join the EU (which IMHO it shouldn't), I am quite happy that we in EU kind of have built good relationships with Ukraine - military drone construction knowledge and expierience will become a key technology field, as cooperations between Ukraine and Europe after the war (however that will look like) will probably strengthen europes defense capabilities.
  • amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    I'm curious, why do you think Ukraine shouldn't want to join the EU? Or do you think the EU shouldn't want them to join?
    • littlecranky67 4mo ago
      Because given the current state it is in, it will receive net-payments from the other EU states for decades and we are already on a descending path economically in the EU. No more foreign subsidies and helps until we got our own ship back on course.
• Lomlioto 4mo ago
  Will be quite interesting what the end evolution of this will be. I think high direct movability (like droping a few meters or shifting left/right) might be the next bigger thing for these. Easy enough to add, will make it even harder for air defence missiles catching them. Besides, the air defence missiles are a lot more expensive than what a drone does. And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else? How much payload do you need anyway? Like imagine oil refinery: how much kilo of c4 do you need? I don't think that much. Or imagine a formation of drones with small payloads and starting to crash in one house wall like into putins palace or the white house.
  • moi2388 4mo ago
    > And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else? More drones.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• zmmmmm 4mo ago
  > It envisions delivery of “20 mission-ready aircraft” by 2031. Hmm, I'm not sure they fully address the problem if that is what is being proposed. The world will be an entirely different place by 2031 and 20 drones is .... meaningless? Surely they should be talking in the thousands or tens of thousands.
• raymond_goo 4mo ago
  Anduril will fix it
• danhodgins 4mo ago
  In a metaphorical sense, Ukraine is the scrappy 'startup' aka highly maneuverable speed boat that can turn on a dime, and the US Department of Defence is a cargo ship that takes years to execute a single turn. The drone playbook is out there, plain for all to see but there are too many entrenched stakeholder interests and incentives for the US to emulate the Ukraine drone playbook. You think the US would establish underground 3D printing drone factories? That would be an insult to its military industrial complex, and a tarnish on its sterling prestige, n'est ce pas?
• carabiner 4mo ago
  Drones killing drones in the sky. Each side is just burning piles of money until one runs out. Imagine if that could be put towards something useful.
• maerF0x0 4mo ago
  Ok, all the negatives aside, focused on silver linings. I am musing how it's good that the US is finding this out now, and not in a really big conflict on it's own home territory in which it cannot get out of (ie an invasion). Yes, the world seeing her weakness could increase the chances of someone trying (or wanting to). But I think this will help spur on a defense startup and spending spree.
  • padjo 4mo ago
    Who do you imagine is going to invade the USA?
    • maerF0x0 4mo ago
      Personally? China. Is it rational, IDK. It's just the largest more capable power at this moment. (particularly their industrial base and ability to out produce weapons / soldiers)
      • toephu2 4mo ago
        Why would they want to? China’s entire economic model relies on the US remaining a stable, wealthy consumer base for their industrial output. Physically invading your largest customer is a form of economic suicide. They don't want to govern California; they want to ensure that the global infrastructure, shipping lanes, and institutions run on Chinese technology and standards. From Beijing's perspective, a kinetic war on the US mainland destroys the exact global economy they are trying to lead.
        • maerF0x0 4mo ago
          You're assuming economics is the ultimate goal and not just a tool in service of a greater goal.
      • padjo 4mo ago
        It's not rational. China has even less interest in invading the USA than the USA has in invading China. And I think the USA's interest is effectively zero.
• thot_experiment 4mo ago
  I imagine it's cheaper not to support Israeli aggression or to fuck with Iran over oil. Lessons we should have learned in 1973 and 1953.
• dzonga 4mo ago
  in as much what I'm about to say might be unconstitutional - but free speech anyways - the U.S military i.e West Point folks & officers from drawn from the army & other branches need to take over. they're smart & get things done. politicians and corruption from the military industrial complex have taken over. it's no longer pragmatism, problem solving but about who greases who.