4 ms·

It's not a matter of startups, or entrenched giants or any such thing, or the Innovator's Dilemma. It's a matter of communications, cost and performance. A Pre

by greedo 12y ago

It's not a matter of startups, or entrenched giants or any such thing, or the Innovator's Dilemma. It's a matter of communications, cost and performance. A Predator can't fly as high as an F-35 or F-22. It can't maneuver nearly as well either. Can't fly as fast. It can't be refueled in flight, so it's range is lower than the F-35. So you'd have to hope that the missile it carried could compensate for these deficiencies. However, missiles are very finicky, and have launch parameters that help them improve their odds. The military looks at it in terms of PoK (probability of kill). So to be cheap (so you can afford to have swarms) you have to give up performance. This will affect PoK. Next you have to have robust, un-jammable commlinks. So far, no one has those. That's going to be expensive to develop. Humans can make decisions when the comms are degraded, or non-existent. AI has a long ways to go, and AI is expensive. To remain cheap, you'll have to give that up. With you napkin/elevator calculations, you would be trading 22 Predators for each F-35. 22 Predators is $88M, and the F-35 will eventually drop close to $100m as it reaches IOC. Still, not a bad bargain if it works. But now, since you've gone cheap and off the shelf, you've got a slow, unmaneuverable aircraft that can't detect a target (no radar), can't communicate well with it's controllers, and can't climb very high, limiting the range of its missiles. Then, even if you outfit this Predator swarm with an UberMissile, you'll have blown your cost equation out of the water when this swarm comes up against SAMs, or a squadron of F-16s. The swarm won't even see the F-35s due to frontal aspect stealth, and they'll be able to target the Predators and kill them like baby seals. They'll be able to engage, kill, and disengage before the low performance Predators will be able to react.

RogerL 12y ago
I want to write to back you up on this. I've spent most of (not all of) my career in military avionics and aerospace. And this was at small companies. The big companies win the big contracts, but so much is contracted out, and there are plenty of other options. But I digress... This is a really hard, multi-dimensional optimization problem. The engineers at Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc., are not dumb. They are the opposite of dumb. They are rocket scientists, in both the colloquial and literal sense. The same holds true for us at the smaller companies. Heavy STEM educations, a lifetime of engineering and research. I've done a lot of work on next-gen battlefield stuff. It's not easy. It's not. It's control theory, filter theory, AI, computer vision, RF design, and so much more. If you can't play in at least 3-4 of those fields at a pretty high level you aren't invited to the party. I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley. You really aren't going to sit in an armchair and design up a system that'll work. OTOH, if you make something that does work, the military will beat a path to your door. Look into SBIRs, for example. I've worked on a lot of them. The door is not closed. The door is closed to half-baked schemes, but if you have an idea for putting some low cost hardware and software together, you can do something with it. I'm being more than a bit facile here; it isn't so hard to get through a Phase I and Phase II SBIR; getting your system deployed is quite a bit harder. Still, there are options. Just be prepared for the fact that they are going to take your product, stick it in a field, and shoot (literal) bullets at it. Ohh, failed the projectile test.... Yes, I take the point about swarms, but war is an extremely hostile environment (no pun intended). And as soon as you have tipped the equation towards "disposable", expect the enemy to change their systems to help you 'dispose' of them as soon as possible. Maybe your drone can operate in the theater today; what about 10 years from now? I honestly don't know, the calculus is anything but clear to me.
- ansible 12y ago
  There's no arguing that the major aerospace companies are files with smart people. But these companies have historically not been very good at optimizing total operational cost. For a recent example, look at SpaceX. Every design decision they've made is to optimize operational cost instead of performance. The majors have been busy optimizing for performance, and they've ended up with very expensive rocket systems. It is the same for military procurement. Something else... If the drones are cheap and "disposable", then maybe upgrades can occur more frequently to keep up with current events. I don't think that trying to design weapon systems to least 40 years is the way forward.
  - RogerL 12y ago
    I'm not at all against drones. They are clearly working for us and others; for me to try to claim otherwise would be trivially wrong. There will always be a tension between cheap-and-fast vs expensive-and-precise. I've spent my career doing this stuff. I'm telling you, it is not trivial. It is being worked on, but you can't just strap a missile onto a drone and call it good. A piece of context I left out. I don't want to kill people. Yes, despite working on war machines. I ain't tossing out cheap, disposable, optimized for operational cost out there, because that means you are, eventually, killing children and other innocents. No thanks. We aren't talking 'cool robotics here'. We are talking corpses, burned bodies, melted faces, families broken, futures destroyed, blood, pain, horror. There are no words for it. I worked on this stuff because I consider the alternative to be worse, but it's ambiguous. I'll spare you the "A Few Good Men" speech, as I'm sure you get what I mean. "Move fast and break things" is a great way to build a Facebook. Not so much for war machines, IMO. Feel free to chalk that up to trying to preserve a career, but it's not (you, ansible, didn't say that, someone else did). It's the realization that everyday, when you go to work, you are designing something to cause unbelievable misery, often for political rather than ethical reasons. It's hard to live with. I'm not denying that there is politics and all of that other stuff happening, it certainly does, but it is not the only thing going on. Sorry, I realize this is a downer for HN, where we are supposed to be chipper, enthusiastic, and supportive, but we are talking about killing people here. It's not a situation for being 'disruptive' or whatever SV meme you might think of (again, you didn't use that term, I'm responding more to the thread at large). Given all of that, is there room for innovation? Sure. And it is being worked on. I've worked on next-gen autonomous robots and UAVs for war. You may or may not read about it some day. But it ain't easy. Another poster brought up the IUD analogy. Sure, if you blanket the sky with fire you can take down a modern US jet. And kill everything else as 'collateral damage'. I don't want to fight war that way, and I don't think we ever should, except perhaps in extremis. Because at that point we have lost whatever it means to be human. Sorry, I think about this stuff. A lot. edit: a big reason for the expensive airframes and other weaponry is because we decided we don't want to carpet bomb and otherwise use non-precision weapons. Spend a million and hit the window where the target is sitting, vs 50K to drop a bunch of bombs that destroy a city block. Precision is often efficacious, to be sure, but we are doing this for moral reasons as well.

by greedo 12y ago

RogerL 12y ago

I want to write to back you up on this. I've spent most of (not all of) my career in military avionics and aerospace. And this was at small companies. The big companies win the big contracts, but so much is contracted out, and there are plenty of other options. But I digress... This is a really hard, multi-dimensional optimization problem. The engineers at Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc., are not dumb. They are the opposite of dumb. They are rocket scientists, in both the colloquial and literal sense. The same holds true for us at the smaller companies. Heavy STEM educations, a lifetime of engineering and research. I've done a lot of work on next-gen battlefield stuff. It's not easy. It's not. It's control theory, filter theory, AI, computer vision, RF design, and so much more. If you can't play in at least 3-4 of those fields at a pretty high level you aren't invited to the party. I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley. You really aren't going to sit in an armchair and design up a system that'll work. OTOH, if you make something that does work, the military will beat a path to your door. Look into SBIRs, for example. I've worked on a lot of them. The door is not closed. The door is closed to half-baked schemes, but if you have an idea for putting some low cost hardware and software together, you can do something with it. I'm being more than a bit facile here; it isn't so hard to get through a Phase I and Phase II SBIR; getting your system deployed is quite a bit harder. Still, there are options. Just be prepared for the fact that they are going to take your product, stick it in a field, and shoot (literal) bullets at it. Ohh, failed the projectile test.... Yes, I take the point about swarms, but war is an extremely hostile environment (no pun intended). And as soon as you have tipped the equation towards "disposable", expect the enemy to change their systems to help you 'dispose' of them as soon as possible. Maybe your drone can operate in the theater today; what about 10 years from now? I honestly don't know, the calculus is anything but clear to me.

ansible 12y ago
There's no arguing that the major aerospace companies are files with smart people. But these companies have historically not been very good at optimizing total operational cost. For a recent example, look at SpaceX. Every design decision they've made is to optimize operational cost instead of performance. The majors have been busy optimizing for performance, and they've ended up with very expensive rocket systems. It is the same for military procurement. Something else... If the drones are cheap and "disposable", then maybe upgrades can occur more frequently to keep up with current events. I don't think that trying to design weapon systems to least 40 years is the way forward.
- RogerL 12y ago
  I'm not at all against drones. They are clearly working for us and others; for me to try to claim otherwise would be trivially wrong. There will always be a tension between cheap-and-fast vs expensive-and-precise. I've spent my career doing this stuff. I'm telling you, it is not trivial. It is being worked on, but you can't just strap a missile onto a drone and call it good. A piece of context I left out. I don't want to kill people. Yes, despite working on war machines. I ain't tossing out cheap, disposable, optimized for operational cost out there, because that means you are, eventually, killing children and other innocents. No thanks. We aren't talking 'cool robotics here'. We are talking corpses, burned bodies, melted faces, families broken, futures destroyed, blood, pain, horror. There are no words for it. I worked on this stuff because I consider the alternative to be worse, but it's ambiguous. I'll spare you the "A Few Good Men" speech, as I'm sure you get what I mean. "Move fast and break things" is a great way to build a Facebook. Not so much for war machines, IMO. Feel free to chalk that up to trying to preserve a career, but it's not (you, ansible, didn't say that, someone else did). It's the realization that everyday, when you go to work, you are designing something to cause unbelievable misery, often for political rather than ethical reasons. It's hard to live with. I'm not denying that there is politics and all of that other stuff happening, it certainly does, but it is not the only thing going on. Sorry, I realize this is a downer for HN, where we are supposed to be chipper, enthusiastic, and supportive, but we are talking about killing people here. It's not a situation for being 'disruptive' or whatever SV meme you might think of (again, you didn't use that term, I'm responding more to the thread at large). Given all of that, is there room for innovation? Sure. And it is being worked on. I've worked on next-gen autonomous robots and UAVs for war. You may or may not read about it some day. But it ain't easy. Another poster brought up the IUD analogy. Sure, if you blanket the sky with fire you can take down a modern US jet. And kill everything else as 'collateral damage'. I don't want to fight war that way, and I don't think we ever should, except perhaps in extremis. Because at that point we have lost whatever it means to be human. Sorry, I think about this stuff. A lot. edit: a big reason for the expensive airframes and other weaponry is because we decided we don't want to carpet bomb and otherwise use non-precision weapons. Spend a million and hit the window where the target is sitting, vs 50K to drop a bunch of bombs that destroy a city block. Precision is often efficacious, to be sure, but we are doing this for moral reasons as well.