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

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/us-seeks-cheaper-hunter-killer-drones-after-iran-destroys-1b-worth-of-reapers/

by rbanffy • 14 days ago

278 332 14 days ago

freedomben2• 14 days 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.

hvb22• 14 days ago

Why would those fixes not be batched up? So fix 20% of those and do one round of testing?

bad_haircut722• 13 days 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

tehjoker2• 13 days 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.

peyton• 13 days ago

They are white [1].

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisi...

ivell4• 13 days ago

Drones can be used for both offense and defense. For example the usage of drones in Ukraine can be classified as defense.

scottyah8• 13 days ago

The best defense...

pjc506• 13 days ago

cf the other thread: 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• 13 days ago

To add that Ukraine was also USSR's drone research center; not to detract from what you are saying.

rayiner• 13 days ago

Yeah, their tech development in drones is really impressive. An invading army has a way of focusing the mind and bureaucracy.

letitgo12345• 13 days ago

Well there's long term impact but yea that doesn't create enough political pressure to make process efficient

27183• 13 days 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.

scottyah8• 13 days ago

They can pop out defects and if things go wrong and there's friendly fire or civilian loss, it's chalked up to scrappy efforts in war. The USA does not get the same amount of leeway, saving our people is a top priority and the media harps on any mistake.

Fedot• 13 days ago

To be fair, I know plenty of people there. Drones are important, but they aren't the only reason the front is holding. Both sides rely heavily on drones.

mizzao• 13 days ago

Not sure if you're alluding to this but it's analogous to the same differences between startups and big tech companies.

Startups = have few resources, product has to work or company dies

Big tech = minimal cost of failure, instead minimizing risk

And yet this mechanic is also why startups are able to innovate and bring new products to market so much faster.

dinfinity• 13 days ago

Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work.

Well yes, that and the fact that cheap drone guerilla tactics have fairly recently become a technological possibility. Remember that Ukraine is actually a bit late to the party here, with Hezbollah and ISIS having used cheap drones with cameras and/or explosives tied to them years before Ukraine or Russia did. The asymmetry in cost between those cheap drones and the existing "more hightech = more better" militaries were (and are!) used to was already established. That a party such as Ukraine faced with a more advanced and much larger opponent would lean towards such an approach makes a lot of sense. Ukraine did not (and does not really) have significant amounts of the traditional stuff.

Now given that they chose that path, they have been very effective recently, but note that the tethered fiber-optic drones were a Russian invention. So even that deeply corrupt, large dinosaur of an institution innovated significantly. It is also important to note that a significant part of the recent successes of Ukraine are due to them having Starlink access and Russia no longer having it.

I'm not saying the sheer will to survive or the inventive organisation of the Ukranians did nothing (far from it), but I do think it is a mistake to think that their success should only be viewed through that lens.

pixl973• 13 days 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.

matwood2• 13 days 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.

quickthrowman2• 13 days ago

I would guess that DoD procurement rules have more to do with it than Congress, but perhaps Congress defined DoD procurement rules.

Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.

general1465• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

This is why Ukraine is making equivalent tech now for 1/10th the price. It's great to see.

yonaguska2• 13 days ago

All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.

varispeed• 13 days 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?

mmooss3• 13 days 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.

legitster2• 13 days 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.

throwaway8943453• 13 days 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).

Jtsummers2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

LgWoodenBadger2• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

"Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an aircraft also adds weight."

HarHarVeryFunny• 13 days 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• 13 days 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?

ACCount375• 13 days 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.

lokar2• 13 days 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).

setgree2• 13 days ago

I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.

avianlyric2• 13 days ago

I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

Seems unlikely. Regulation and Health & Safety are both societal luxuries, which only happen once societies are stable and prosperous enough to start valuing human life beyond its ability to perform labour.

The moment the bombs start dropping, the time for luxuries also stops, and the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society. There isn’t the money or resources for anything more than that.

The US (most developed democracies) places an extremely high value on the lives of soldiers, because dead soldiers in foreign wars does terrible things to politicians in power. Paying 1000X more for the same tech as Ukraine to minimise the number of service members killed using it, is a pretty small price to pay.

justsomehnguy• 13 days ago

And the consequence of this is a total lack of the consequences when something goes wrong. Complete with a PR cover-up all over the world.

godwinson__4-85• 13 days ago

"It works well enough" is a significant understatement. I think it would be more accurate (especially given the perceptions at the outset of the war) to say that it has worked significantly better than anyone expected. Ukrainian ingenuity is single handedly driving conversations about the "future of warfare" in capitals from Brussels to DC to Beijing.

I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

This also misses the point imo. A simpler answer is "necessity is the mother of invention". There is value in a regime for peacetime. One is also a fool if they do not recognize needs change drastically in wartime. Two things can be true. The United States, like nearly all sensible nations, has almost always understood this and acted accordingly. On the other hand, nations that govern themselves as if they were on a perpetual war path are usually far less desirable societies. The idea that we need to speed rush "AI for killer drones" because otherwise we will find ourselves on the wrong end of an existential invasion are nonsensical. Americans would be far better off if our leaders and our people stopped acting like every potential conflict was existential.

There is no Russia on our borders. The only thing American adventures overseas have accomplished in the last two decades is making our country weaker.

consensus12• 13 days ago

Correct, but it goes deeper than just the building components. In the US you have to go through an entire military procurement process within each iteration loop. So you design a weapon, then try to sell it to the military, but just the process of demonstrating it and selling it to the military takes a long time and costs money. If you fail you can go back to the drawing board, but each iteration loop is probably a year minimum. And if you are successful now you have to set up and scale production. Get ready for years of environmental reviews and lawsuits.

In Ukraine the military will take any drone they can get their hands on, so all you have to do is build a drone, give a bunch of them to the army to try out on the Russians, and within a week they will tell you if it works or not. So your design iteration loop is probably weeks. If you are successful, the time between hearing the general say "give me 1 million" and when the bulldozers start clearing the factory site is probably measured in days.

overfeed2• 13 days ago

I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

Regulation - or more generally - formalization comes with scaling up. A skunkworks project can innovate really fast, and has no integration and scale needs. When you want to scale up any project (hardware or software), integrating and scaling become a real bitch, and you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page or face costly "silly" mistakes that history is replit with.

You can't magick away coordination challenges by labeling the process "red tape." This happens every single time any small nimble organization grows beyond certain thresholds. On a personal level, organizing a trip for 3 friend is process-free, but for 10+ people requires checklists and heavier processes, for 30 people it becomes a nightmare requiring professional assistance. Low probability events become regular occurrences when you scale, and you have to plan and/or mitigate them adding "red tape".

Barrin92• 13 days ago

The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned

Yes because Ukraine fights an existential war and at this point on both sides people just shrug when a few civilians get blown up.

The US isn't under existential threat and when they go to war their highest priority is to never risk the lives of operators and if possible, if only for PR reasons (and even then it doesn't always work) not generate news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones. The attack on a school in Iran that killed 150 children apparently was already the result of a rushed mission that ignored procedures because this kind of thinking is starting to take hold in US defense circles.

That's not just an ethical disaster but also a political and strategic one because these events can rally enemies around a regime and the political arena is where for the US wars are won and lost, both at home and abroad.

tim333• 13 days ago

It's interesting that the red tape is still there on the Russian side. A Ukrainian drone maker can make a new one and put it on their brave1 website straight away, Russian ones have to go through a lengthy bureaucratic procurement process. I think Russian interceptor drones still can't use explosive warheads because regulation, health and safety etc. It's quite a plus for the Ukrainians.

MrSkelter• 11 days ago

You are making a good point but blaming the wrong thing.

Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.

Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.

Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.

Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.

Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.

Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.

giardini• 13 days 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".

freedomben2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 13 days 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

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• 14 days 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• 14 days 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• 13 days ago

since the budget is never balanced

When the Republicans rule.

wafflemaker3• 13 days 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

hvb22• 14 days 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

pjc506• 13 days ago

And let's not forget: the voters back them on this.

mountainb• 13 days ago

Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.

None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.

I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.

Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.

FatherOfCurses2• 13 days ago

And yet so much of the spending goes to big ticket items benefitting defense contractors while things that actually benefit the soldiers (better armor, better VA hospitals) go by the wayside.

ryandvm• 13 days ago

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.

Matl2• 13 days ago

Killing people is just a side effect

That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.

BariumBlue2• 13 days ago

An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.

An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.

You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.

RugnirViking• 13 days ago

between these extremes there are, parent posits, some efficiencies to be had. Do you agree that its at least possible to get a cheaper solution thats 90% of the way there? Ukraine seems to do pretty well for themselves on this front, and several other countries around the world are no slouches either. Even iran themselves do quite well. Sure their drones dont have the fanciest optics or whatever, but when looking at a cost per millitary effectiveness standpoint, are five redundant drones with worse optics better than one big one? what about five hundred vs one? five thousand? The same logic goes for most of the components.

myrmidon3• 13 days ago

The modern (UA) take is to strap the warhead directly on the thing, make it just as big as needed and directly fly everything into the target.

If you insist on firing guided missiles at ground targets from a drone that returns to base you're never gonna be able to compete on cost.

paytonjjones• 13 days ago

Correct, now let's also talk about US government-funded [research, healthcare, education, construction, foreign aid, intelligence, infrastructure, entitlements]

Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.

newaccount6702• 13 days ago

If you think you can produce them for cheaper, you could make yourself a lot of money and save taxpayers a lot of money by starting your own company.

bluegatty• 13 days ago

This statement implies a misrepresentation of how these kinds of supply chains work.

These are captured markets, there is no competition. The bar is set high, or specifically, so that small players cannot compete, and this is done by extensiive relationship management at all levels, and heavy marketing.

It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.

Even in the face of glaring evidence form Ukraine the system is slow to react.

Shaheds are used for years and the US just let their gear sit out in the open in the Gulf.

You could provide 'irrefutable evidence' to a political system of some fact, it's not hugely helpful.

The system does not change until the power dynamics do - aka Iran destroyed gazillions in US gear and some senior level people are 'demanding answers'.

Defence contracts are an 'inside game' it's extremely political.

Only when people are in a rush do they start to look at outside agencies to find the best gear for the problem they need to solve 'right now'.

cricketsandmops• 13 days ago

Most government agencies cant even pick a different vendor for toilet paper. I cannot imagine the politics involved for trying to supply weapons. All those stories on Flock cameras and being insecure etc is politics at play. Companies know the government will take a decade or more to change vendors, if ever.

angiolillo• 13 days ago

I once worked at a startup that did just that. Developed a system that was significantly better and cheaper than an existing legacy solution. One of the generals who saw the DARPA demonstration overrode the whole bureaucracy and brought it with him into theater.

Five years later the startup had been bought by a major military contractor, budgets ballooned, a number of the original people (including me) left, our software was on its way to becoming the legacy solution, and the cycle continued.

After seeing how US military contracting works up close, I no longer find it surprising that military tech costs orders of magnitude more than commercial or consumer tech. It's also not surprising why so few organizations are able to do both government and consumer/commercial technology -- optimizing for one makes you ill-suited to compete in the other.

ck22• 14 days 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-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_BubbleTime2• 13 days ago

ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off

Oh. You should have started with this.

newaccount6702• 13 days 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.

pixl973• 13 days ago

just completely exit like Afghanistan

We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.

ck22• 13 days ago

guess what, Iran will hold the gulf hostage regardless if US is there or not

exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban

regardless if US was there or not it would have happened

world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters

you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses

btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?

at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point

hunmernop• 13 days ago

Drones are only one piece of the puzzle. Once again ars is on the wrong side.

swiftcoder3• 13 days 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.

matwood2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

tclancy2• 13 days 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.

alex435782• 13 days ago

While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter. Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.

swiftcoder3• 13 days ago

Right, I can see the need for both, but that suggests to me that they could differentiate the sensor package + loiter drone significantly from the shahed clone (which, given that it is a one-way trip, has a very similar operational radius)

Does one really need to bring along 2,500 kg of ordinance, when we can launch another $50,000 shahed-equivalent at whatever hard targets the loitering drone locates?

ButlerianJihad• 13 days ago

potential future US conflict

I'm not sure if "future" is a good word for the widespread civil unrest, nascent insurgencies, and very normal soft-target gun battles that happen weekly here, but our "US conflict" looks like street-to-street fighting, within our own borders, with people who are already here.

"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." -- Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5

FuckButtons2• 13 days ago

If you look at us military procurement over the past 20 years you will find that many, many projects have been sunk because of this exact reason.

hypercube33• 13 days ago

There's an ok documentary on a similar situation (A10 Thunder II) on curiosity stream and it explains how politics basically causes problems like this.

jmyeet3• 13 days ago

So I looked up the specs and found:

- Reapers fly at a "medium" altitude, which is up to about 50,000 feet;

- They can fly up to 300mph;

- Despite being relatively high up they are relatively slow so lots of country have the military capability to shoot them down and have done so. This includes Iran and the Houthis;

- A typical payload is 2x GBU-31 JDAM (1000lb each). The explosive payload is roughly half that but these are relatively cheap (<$50,000) because they're barely-guided gravity bombs;

- They will also have 4x AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which are precision-guided, costs $100k+ each but only has an explosive payload of under 20lb. When people talk about drone assassinations that becccame super-popular in the Obama administration, this is largely what they're talking about;

- You can also skip the JDAMs and just have 8x Hellfires instead.

Now Shahed drones aren't as fast, don't fly as high, aren't as precise and you know they're there (a lot of Hellfire attacks are a surprise). But they're incredibly cheap and they overwhelm missile defences easily just by sheer volume. In fact, we're using $1-4M Patriot interceptors to shoot down $20k drones. Obviously that's not going to scale when Iran can produce thousands a month and the supply lag for Patriots is actually years long. Supplies of certain missile defense munitions are suspected to be critically low already and will take years to replenish.

So where I'm going with all this is that Reapers and Sheheds serve different purposes but however you look at it, a $50M Reaper with $1M+ in munitions is WAY less efficient at deliverying payloads that a swarm of cheap drones, particularly when your enemy has invested a lot in missile defense and your $50M Reaper is vulnerable to air-defense systems from even non-state actors (ie the Houthis).

Put another way, $20k for a 50-100kg payload is incredibly efficient and the US has essentially been forced to evacuate all their Gulf bases because they're completely unable to defend them. Billions in damage has been done to these bases too.

The Reaper just isn't fit for purpose anymore. Use it against a more militarized opponennt (eg Russia, China) and they'll shoot those things down like it was a carnival side show.

jandrewrogers• 13 days ago

A 50-100kg payload is only useful against soft targets if the purpose is to "blow shit up". It is the reason Ukraine needed to develop platforms like Flamingo with a much larger warhead capacity than a cheap drone can carry.

Someone• 13 days ago

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.

Partly, but I think there also is a feedback loop. Reapers are expensive, so they must reliably reach their targets. That makes them more expensive (need to be faster, more reliable, less visible on radar, etc), so fewer get ordered, so they must get even more powerful and reliable. That makes them more expensive, etc.

Also, being very expensive, you want them to be able to return home after a mission. That again increases weight, costs.

Result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper says only 575 got built over a period of about 20 years. In comparison, the USA built about 96,000 aircraft in 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...), reaching that total in about two days.

dataviz10004• 13 days 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?

ImPostingOnHN2• 13 days 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.

FatherOfCurses2• 13 days ago

$3 is still too much and I would rather it go towards paying the debt down.

jschveibinz• 13 days 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.

ImPostingOnHN2• 13 days ago

Yikes, that is a lot.

mmooss3• 13 days 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.

pchristensen• 13 days ago

Operations is about 1/4 of the budget ($1.75T), and half of that is DoD. 60% is payments for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The remaining 15% is debt service.

Noaidi5• 13 days ago

Now you know why there is war. We have war because the U.S. is failing. Just look at the reversal of the 10 and 30 y bonds over the last 20 years. All the free money that was given to the oligarchs killed our economy.

dawnerd• 13 days ago

And they’re still on cnbc daily saying rates need to go down to save the us. There’s a guy on right now saying rates need to be lower to save the ai bubble.

xienze2• 13 days ago

In this particular case I think it's just because Trump can't resist doing every single thing Israel wants.

budsniffer9524• 13 days ago

10y rates are almost exactly where they were 20 years ago, and about 10% lower than they were 20 years before that.

So...what are you talking about?

mmooss3• 13 days ago

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.

(Your share of overall defense spending is ~1,000x higher, of course.)

I wish political leaders would express it that way. And you need to include the time factor: $10/year for 10 years differs from $20 for a one-time event. And somehow figure in capital accumulation (as opposed to e.g., consumables) and depreciation. But there are clear, effective ways to communicate it: 'I propose each American spend an average of $80/year for 50 years on this fighter jet program'. 'This moon mission will cost everyone $5/year for 2 years.'

To nitpick a little, I think your math is off: There are 350 million Americans, but we need to exclude most children, elderly, etc.

selimthegrim• 13 days ago

Would have been nice to do that in Lebanon so that woman could still be alive.

5upplied_demand4• 13 days ago

When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that.

I like to think about how providing 4-week paid parental leave would cost $2 billion annually and actually help US families. Meanwhile we have spent over $100 billion on this war.

joenot443• 13 days ago

My back of napkin figures gave me about $20-40b. I'm curious how you got to the $2 billion number?

lazide3• 13 days ago

So far….

milkytron• 13 days ago

Considering the push for reproduction from this admin and his technocrats, I'm curious if they would consider something like this.

toephu22• 13 days ago

California already more or less provides 8 weeks of paid parental leave (PFL program).

red-iron-pine3• 13 days 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.

tax billionaires, then

vicnov• 13 days ago

not a fan of defending billionairs, but is mostly a useless populist slogan*

You can do full Dekulakization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization) on them and it won't change anything in current economic situation.

Confiscating 100% of all billionaire wealth (~$8.4T) covers - ~1.1 years of federal spending (~$7.4T) - ~4.4 years of deficits (~$1.9T) - ~23% of debt (~$36T):

and pretty much kills US ability to rely on private sector (and I dont think we have a way to rely on public sector)

The sooner we all start focusing on things that actually matter -- like improving democracy, quality of education (btw spending more may not solve it) etc -- the faster we will improve situation.

Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc). Taxing more may not be the answer.

*it should be studied what motivates people to repeat it

mitthrowaway2• 13 days ago

Those drones are pretty noisy though.

dataviz10004• 13 days ago

Probably is an issue but sea turtles hearing is adapted to ocean not air and low frequencies. Also, waves and wind blowing likely muffle a lot of noise.

The organizations that do this have mobile apps and collect tons of data. If I'm use ML, I'd start with time series forecasting to see if I can get the window done to a few hours.

kingnothing• 13 days ago

My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?

What signal are you looking for with that question? It feels much more like a thought experiment with friends while having a few pints than something reasonable for a job interview.

dataviz10004• 13 days ago

It was the initial culture / behavioral interview for a job developing AI for education of children. Considering how these drones are used in the article linked, the question is apropos.

bcjdjsndon• 13 days ago

I would make them fly around helping people and stuff

willio582• 13 days ago

It pales compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.

Thinking of country-scale finances in the same way you think about personal finance is wrong in many ways. Take debt for example. As an individual, it's arguably best not to have debt at all. As a country, sovereign debt is the foundation of the world's money supply and fuels continuous economic growth.

Also, though the U.S. has $31 Trillion dollars of debt, $22 Trillion of that belongs to U.S. domestic traders.

If we were to cut our debt down to zero, we'd cripple ourselves with taxes and stifle growth. We'd have zero debt but we'd be sent into a massive economic depression, and that would likely ripple out across the planet.

HNisCIS• 13 days ago

I see this parroted constantly but it seems to be getting proven wrong by Japan and, frankly, the US

stronglikedan• 13 days ago

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.

And put brighter lights on the drones to lead them in the right direction!

But if you asked me that in an interview, I would probably question whether I wanted to work there. I don't think random, irrelevant, put-me-on-the-spot questions help anyone on either side of that coin.

apparent2• 13 days 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.

Less than half are net income tax payers, IIRC. So if you pay income tax, you're actually on the hook for more $6, on average.

dataviz10004• 13 days ago

Another way to look at it; I'll be long gone when a child born today will be paying it. Why do you think I'm concerned about a child who I will never meet getting stuck with debt I voted to accrue?

holgerschurig• 13 days ago

Na, there aren't "~350,000,000 of us".

You are just assuming that the whole readership of Hacker News are US-citizens.

I, for example, are from an EU country. So "there are 450,000,000 of us" if I'd had a similar attitude.

LadyCailin2• 13 days ago

Presumably “us” is “population of the US”, not HN readers.

mrtksn2• 13 days 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?

delecti3• 13 days 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").

tclancy2• 13 days 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.

ivell4• 13 days ago

If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine

This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.

jvanderbot2• 13 days ago

Viewed independently, I think VZ, Ukraine, and Iran look like a hodgepodge of strange actions. There is a consistent view that joins them, namely as we approach the end of the davidson window, putting pressure on China and Russia via oil restrictions might help dissuade a larger war in the Pacific.

This is just a personal opinion, but lines up with Ukraine (burning refineries), EU (seizing sanctioned tankers FINALLY), VZ (cutting exports to China and moving to USA), and Iran (close the strait every so often). The unifying thread seems to be applying consistent pressure around China.

ToucanLoucan• 13 days ago

The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.

This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.

In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.

And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.

Jblx22• 13 days ago

Don't overlook the "the people of this foreign land are yearning to be free of their current rulers, and just need a little help from their neighborly U.S. armed forces" trope. I think there are plenty of people who actually believe it.

graemep3• 13 days ago

Are you sure the claim is false?

WarmWash2• 13 days ago

People seem to forget that Iranians were rioting in the streets in the weeks leading up to the US attacking. The Iranian government was shooting protestors and pulled the plug on the internet.

The US (well Israel) saw this as the stars aligning. Trump even called on Iranians early in the engagement to seize the opportunity.

But the ground swell didn't happen, and the US got played. Trump rolled a critical fail.

Noaidi5• 13 days ago

Maybe USA has more fundamental problems

Yes we do, it is called imperialism. Now with a sprinkle of senile Fascism.

bad_haircut722• 13 days ago

Its like 2 dogs fighting, the US wants to win a display of dominance and have the other dog concede defeat - but if instead the other dog is prepared to die, now its a fight to the death and in fights to the death usually both sides die, even if one is stronger. The mentality of "we will just punch them till they capitulate" shows the US mentality, they're not in an existential struggle and they aren't ready to face one.

salemh• 13 days ago

There is quite a good book on the various problems with the US Military, and its hegemony leading to losing the arms race in missiles, and its various industry problems by Andrei Martyanov - naturalized US citizen, former Soviet military officer. Loves America, hates what its turned into, and marvels at the delusion of our military. MIC bloat is discussed here, as well as our fake financialized economy - which is not an indicator of being able to win wars.

I have only read the first book, and it was nice and humbling experience to me as an American.

https://www.amazon.com/Disintegration-Indicators-Coming-Amer...

Blog:

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/

Review:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/how-russia-views-...

legitster2• 13 days ago

The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.

Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).

The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.

orbital-decay• 13 days ago

Korean war was way more extreme. NK has been bombed into an absolute moonscape, yet never surrendered.

opo• 13 days ago

...had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered

The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the Soviet invasion. They were maybe surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.

The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands as the Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. The Soviets had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan. The Soviets did have plans to possibly attack Hokkaido, but as the wikipedia entry says "...Historians have generally considered it unlikely that an invasion of Hokkaido would have succeeded. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...

In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:

...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

leonidasrup• 13 days ago

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just the beginning. At the time of bombing of Nagasaki already a third nuclear weapon was been assembled.

There were plans to increase the A-bomb production rate. After November 1945 U.S. would produce a atomic bomb every 10 days. The production rate for year 1946 was planned to be 6 bombs every month.

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1...

So after 1946 there would be not much of Japan left to invade.

The bombing of Iran is nowhere the scale of bombing of Japan, see for example the fire bombing of Tokyo.

Lomlioto5• 13 days ago

Its the issue of the orange clown.

The USA Military was quite aware that killing Irans Leadership is not 'it'.

But Trump saw how well venezuela worked so that was it.

Yeah USA politics is not 4D Chess.

CMay4• 13 days ago

The US didn't do that, Israel did. I suspect behind closed doors, Trump thought Bibi went a little overboard there

FuckButtons2• 13 days ago

The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.

SubiculumCode• 13 days ago

The US was not brought down to its knees. That is propaganda speaking, not reality. Jeez.

MSFT_Edging• 13 days ago

There's a lot of stuff at play here.

First, despite the Millennium challenge being "debunked", it still played out in the same direction.

Second, and this is a big one, after the Church committee when the CIA was put under congressional oversight, a big majority of the clandestine work was put under Special Ops type groups, ie the Army Rangers, Navy Seals, etc.

When we were in Afghanistan, we would do the "target the leader" game, but it was far more dark in reality. Since we were going against a distributed insurgent force, we would send the special ops guys to targets intelligence deemed important. There'd be an op tempo of 2-3 a week. Years passed, and we didn't make any headway, so the op tempo was increased.

A target would be chosen, and the operators sent out. They'd kill the target, and look for any papers/documentation with other names. If you were this guy's dentist, you could be caught up in this. Since a majority of the operators didn't speak the language, they had no context to the names. It was more like the metadata network of connections exposed by Snowden.

Since we needed more operations(2-3 a night instead of a week), we'd go after less and less important targets, tangentially related to another target. We effectively turned the special ops groups into clandestine death squads with nearly zero accountability.

In addition, we were supporting warlords in the area that were pro-poppy cultivation and anti-Taliban. We'd protect the poppy plants that would go on to supply a large majority of the world's Heroin supply.

Where is this going? Well the cynic in me says it's simply a scam. We spend more on fancy military hardware that allows us to kill more effectively while barely pushing the needle on our goals. The mass amount of death we drop on populations creates new generations of "terrorist/freedom fighters" who rightfully have a grudge against the US war machine.

The money spent doesn't move the needle materially, but it provides propaganda in the form of "look at our death machines, we have the most in the world", which is a double edged sword of "hoorah" at home and "don't fuck with the crazy guy holding the gun" outside of home. The expensive weapons taxpayers buy from defense contractors are too expensive and complicated to build in bulk, so we run out quickly the second we have an enemy that can shoot back with more than an AK.

We're still trying to fight the war of 2-3 wars ago. We also learned from Vietnam that by no means should the general public easily learn the reality of the war. That worked until recently when the victim of a proxy war was able to upload daily videos onto tiktok and break the decades long good will between the US and an unnamed vassal.

Anyway, tl;dr, the ole military industrial complex is still at it, lobbying our government to spend money we don't have on wars we cannot afford as a public works program that only excels in death, rather than public works in healthcare, infrastructure, science, etc.

pjc506• 13 days ago

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.

One of the few exceptions was the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which the entire chain of command was killed and the Agriculture Secretary ends up as the leader of the refugee humans.

bjourne• 13 days ago

In practical terms, the US is more fascist and more authoritarian than most countries. There must be thousands of soldiers who know the war is illegal and that they are committing war crimes. Yet they persist because, the president said so. Thus, the strange presumption that other countries worship their leader in the same way. Thus, the strange presumption that by just replacing the leader they can profoundly transform any country.

amelius• 13 days ago

Your comment basically summarizes the thinking behind the "flawless victory" PR video.

jimbob45• 13 days ago

HN has been compromised by propaganda bots that can't decide between "The US is a paper tiger that can't win anything" and "The US is bullying poor Iran". Only a fool would think the US can't win militarily. Here's how:

1. Flatten Kharg

2. Flatten a dozen roads critical to transportation infrastructure

3. Continue the blockade

4. Stonewall peace attempts

5. Wait 5-6 weeks and win

The Trump administration isn't doing that because they're trying to avoid another generation unconditionally hating the US again. Having enemies that blindly hate you is how you get into Russia's situation where even an outright victory will result in IRA-style Ukrainian terrorist groups.

mrtksn2• 13 days ago

Losing the war to avoid even bigger problems that’s not worth dealing with is pretty standard way of losing the war.

amanaplanacanal5• 13 days ago

The military is just there to enact political aims. The military could leave Iran a radioactive wasteland for that matter.

The reason the trump administration is suing for peace is because the midterms are coming up, and the situation for Republicans looks dire.

mythrwy• 13 days ago

The US can "win" for some definition of the word but at what cost to the US and the world in general? Would that really be a win or would it be a loss?

scottyah8• 13 days ago

Wow your take is that we need to just start mass killing off large swaths of "unimportant" people? This is wild. It's also been done before in Hanoi, and made a lot of people quite angry (and the others dead).

NDlurker• 13 days ago

Our country is a joke

jgerrish• 10 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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."

jmyeet3• 13 days 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-dwigh...

[2] https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-th...

runako• 13 days 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.

WarmWash2• 13 days ago

We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?

We do it to keep manufacturing knowledge and ability in the country. I really cannot stress enough how many thousands of companies exist purely because of the defense budget. It's never going away because it employs so many people. That's why red or blue or independent no one ever cuts it. It's welfare that creates work so the whole ideological spectrum has something to like.

The big names you mention are the names that end up on the final product, but those products often have a couple thousand different (all American) suppliers feeding them. Virtually all of the money in the defense budget flows back into the economy. The sum total of those players profits last years amounts to 2% of the budget, and that's assuming it's all military.

A simple example are screws. You cannot make a living making screws in the US. It makes zero economic sense because it's impossible to compete with 2nd/3rd world countries (read:China). But the military (well contractors with a mandate) will buy your screws at a price that allows you to live a decent life and employ a team of people.

This way when shit hits the fan, the US will still have a supply of screws (pretty damn important), a supply of people who know how to make screws, and in the mean time those people get benefits and careers.

Now take this idea and repeat it for everything from paper cups to tank shells to folding chairs to wire sheathing (the military buys literally everything, always wants American made, and will happily pay a premium for it).

jmyeet3• 13 days ago

You're making a different argument.

You're saying we need to retain manufacturing capability and expertise. I agree.

I'm saying we need to stop being bled dry by private weapons manufacturers on cost plus contracts who are rewarded, by definition, by making the system as expensive as possible.

If we were truly interested in having an effective military, we would bring production in-house and focus on standardized vehicles and weapons systems with standardized interchangeable parts on production lines that can be scaled up if necessary.

megous2• 13 days 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_C2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

pjc506• 13 days ago

President threatened (emptily) to cut off all trade from Spain the other day.

thatmf• 13 days ago

Another novel approach to saving money: stop fighting Israel's wars

RetroTechie• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

Noaidi5• 13 days 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?

trkarlb• 13 days ago

The Defense Innovation Unit was founded in 2015 and is full of SV interest groups:

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.

marcosdumay2• 13 days 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.

littlecranky672• 13 days 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.

amanaplanacanal5• 13 days 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?

littlecranky672• 13 days 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.

Lomlioto5• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

zmmmmm• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

Anduril will fix it

danhodgins• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

maerF0x04• 13 days 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.

padjo2• 13 days ago

Who do you imagine is going to invade the USA?

maerF0x04• 13 days 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)

thot_experiment• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

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

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