US Special Operations Command picks Anduril to lead counter-drone in $1B deal
defensenews.com
defensenews.com
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/quit-using-the-terminator-as-...
"This Terminator picture is wrong for so many reasons. First of all, the Terminators fire a lot of bullets that miss their targets. Why do they do that? Secondly, it makes people think that autonomous weapons are science fiction. They are not. You can buy them today," Russell explained.
"Third, it makes people think that the problem is SkyNet, the global software system that controls the Terminators. It becomes conscious, it hates humans, and it tries to kill us all."
For example a company of a dozen people that make just a laser sensor which is then integrated into defense products.
What would be nice is more like defense contract interaction as a service. How to navigate the defense contract acquisition and compliance environment is hard and boring and part of why defense systems actually work and why they’re so expensive.
Generals have to make judgement calls about what will work in the next conflict - talk about incomplete information - while the future enemy’s preparations and even identity is unknown. Then this has to be translated into something that can slot into existing military systems.
To say nothing of political and career considerations, moving budgets, revolutionary new ideas that will come along, training and culture.
And if they get it wrong, the bad guy wins the next war.
it's called bribing politicians and generals
I want SV/Texas enterpreneurship to completely dismantle the MIC and start afresh. Even if you disagree with defense applications and its ramifications, simply from ROI perspective (tax payer dollars), instead of increasing military budget, we should be asking how can we do more with current budget. Or even cut down the budget and expect 2x more productivity from these fat military contractors with moats like no other.
"Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"
"Sorry, we just didn't see enough users of this product, so we remotely bricked it."
"We didn't QA this properly and now people are dead."
Move fast and break things is supposed to apply to the missile, not the process to write the guidance system.
> "Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"
Yes, that’s how we won WWII: we shipped prototypes based on the new ideas, and improved them based on the lessons from the field. In war, stakes are higher, and you can’t always afford to delay for a long time to ship perfect product: by the time it arrives, the war might already be lost.
Although that was more of a Bureau of Ordnance / Congressional fault, for insufficient interwar funding and testing.
An extreme but absolutely relevant and potentially devastating example of the current system is the F-35.
SpaceX has absolute massively iterated in every single thing they do, what the heck are you talking about? The Falcon 9 more than doubled it's payload from v1.0 to FT Block 5, and gained first stage landing/reusability through a host of iterative improvements. Starship's development has been all about hardware rich iteration with plans to enable it right down to the basic material level. They've been big on MVPs and then iterating from there.
They were not "big on MVP"
Their engineers from the start delivered a very solid vehicle tested, and re-tested probably more than NASAs own rockets.
All improvements they had since were enhancements over the original masterplan, nothing like "throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks"
It sure was not a lack of technology.
And you think that doesn’t happen at Boeing & Lockheed?
Isn't the F35 developed like that though?
America's allies are now safe from malevolent authoritarian actors.
https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-israel-is-greatest-exporter...
They have a strong anti-drone industry, one area in which Anduril seeks to differentiate itself:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-08-...
And Israeli designed-and-built sniper drones have already killed people in Gaza:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/israeli-military...
It does seem like a failing of Silicon Valley that it doesn't produce more military tech startups. Palmer Luckey had to get megarich first before it was possible to get Anduril funded. Same thing Elon Musk had to do to create SpaceX.
There's obviously a VC funding gap, and clearly "the VR guy" and the "the PayPal guy" can do a lot more than most people believed. And so can a lot of other people who understand modern software and hardware.
My defense company will be a portmanteau of a LOTR weapon and a Nikola Tesla reference.
What they should absolutely do is put more money into the SBIR program.
And stop doing so much of it through the fucking navy lol.
SpaceX and Anduril seem to be unique in that they're following the Silicon Valley tech startup playbook and not the typical US government contractor playbook.
A normal relationship would be that you have 5 people who make guns who all show their gun to the army and the army picks the best gun. Instead the army has the 5 companies "propose" a gun, and they choose who gets to TRY To make that gun. And if they fail its sunk cost fallacy all the way down. Also part of why they choose a company to try and make that gun is because they always choose that company and they have the most "experience".
The argument for this state of affairs is that the military industry can no longer be spun up on demand and basically needs to be subsidized so it can continue exist in peace time. The reality is that these industries fuel continual low level conflicts, waste massive amounts of money and destroy the country.
The only real solve is that the they need a new branch of the military that handles production and R&D in house, and also mans and owns the factories, and to stop giving contracts to parasitic companies.
This seems to be Anduril's approach as well. Whether they can execute as well as SpaceX has done remains to be seen.
Personally I dont think its a great idea for a country to let their military technology stagnant if military supremacy is a core part of your international doctrine like the United States.
Might be a good idea, but the military doesn't pay enough (and can't because of regulations) or have the prestige to do this. Part of why the contractors exist is so the military can pay more.
In fact military training is the primary pipeline for people to enter industries with esoteric skill sets. Adding to those skill sets stuff like "chip production" isnt that big of a reach.
The brutal reality is that the modern American military is a giant jobs program to begin with. Having a "factory corps" that has "soldiers" who are basically assembly line workers with military retirements and benefits might actually be a plus for alot of people.
And yes retention is a constant problem for people in specialized training. But even in "grunt" jobs, if individuals are willing to work for a PMC they can make more money. The military trains electrical engineers, network engineers, security engineers, (even a few software engineers), medical doctors, materials scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists and more.
The officer corps is filled with people with advanced degrees and training. Most of them are in because of the benefits package they are guaranteed to get and pension. I once met a person who got their medical degree from the military and managed to retire debt free in their late 40s while pulling a military pension and was opening their own medical practice basically free of the debt worries that plagued most doctors (and was able to use their veteran status to get some nice loans to set up their business too).
This shocks people but some people actually ARE motivated by a sense of patriotism as well, and in the military it becomes possible to work on things that are basically impossible to do in the "real world". Not everyone is universally motivated by wealth so long as they hit a certain degree where they feel safe and secure in their livelihood and future.
Beginning of WW1 era worked kind of liked i am talking about, companies would make prototype guns, and the army would test them all out and choose the one they liked the best. The companies that lost the bids might and did go out of business. But relative cost to make a prototype gun was relatively low. Im sure there was quite a bit of good old boy network going on, but at least we have evidence of the different prototypes being competed and assessed against.
But something like modern fighter jets are just too expensive for a company to have a working prototype first. But I would argue thats a sign that a nation shouldnt be investing so heavily in things like F35s to begin with. I think most estimates have an actual peer level shooting war result in most air plane fleets being wiped out pretty quickly by missiles and destroying the bases. Why does Russian need an F35 equivalent when they can produce more than enough SAM missiles to destroy it? And the time to actually replace an F35 that gets destroyed is what? A year or more? Time to make missiles isnt a year.
The nation that has designs for a "good enough" plane that can go from factory sky to in 1 to 3 months will win that conflict, and the United States doesnt explore that style at all. Even though its the exact method that helped them win their last major conflict!
It depends on what weapons we're talking about, some (most?) are also sold to allies.
You think the Houthis will agree to that?
Longer-term, as the technology becomes easier to DIY... if it became unavoidable, it would not be fun, but I am confident the right coalition of the willing could align the Houthis with international weaponry guidelines.
RC planes have been around for decades and are mechanically very simple. High-performance quadcopters and their component parts and widely available on sites like Ali Express. Everything that’s difficult to DIY in a modern UAV- microchips, gyros, cameras, radios- are necessary component of any regular smartphone. This genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
I initially jumped into this whole topic because I was terrible at estimating and thought it was a uniquely personal failure. I started reading into it an US Military has a history of projects that are incredibly late and massively over budget:
- The joint strike fighter program, of which F35 [1] is the result. 10 years late and double the cost (projected life time cost of nearly 2 TRILLION, with a T).
- F22 raptor, initially 750 were planned for but only 170 were made [2].
- C5 is known for massive cost overruns ($2 billion) [3]
Burton, the author of the pentagon wars attributes it to the procurement process itself. The process does not incentivize delivery. The contracts goals is to get in with the pentagon by underbidding or not clearly defining the requirements and then having the issues be fixed in "operational testing", basically at the point right before front line troops get the hardware. In developmental tests contractors faked stuff a lot:
> The Air Force’s sensor fuzed weapon concept of the early 1980s was advertised as a new, high-tech antiarmor weapon that would home in on the heat of a Soviet tank engine. Fourteen tanks had been arranged in a tight circle, nose to tail like a wagon train in an old western movie. The antiarmor weapons were suspended on a tall crane high above the circle of tanks. When dropped from the crane, the weapons could hit a tank even without the high-tech sensors guiding them. To make matters worse, the weapons did not home in on the heat from the tank engines because the tanks did not have their engines running. In fact, the weapons had homed in on electric hot plates that the program manager had placed on top of each tank. The hot plates were heated to a temperature four times the threshold temperature for the infrared sensors in the weapons, thereby guaranteeing success of the test.
and
> The Air Force’s third-generation laser-guided bomb, PAVEWAY III, scored fourteen direct hits out of sixteen launches in developmental tests conducted by the program manager.* During the operational tests, thirty-nine launches yielded only twenty hits and nineteen failures. Operational testing was suspended seven times because the system did not work well enough to run a test. When it worked, it usually hit the target. When it did not work exactly right (which was half the time), the average miss distance was five miles.1 Yet, PAVEWAY III was approved for production largely on the recommendation of the new commander of the Operational Test and Evaluation Command. It was his view that the “bugs had been worked out,” and he expressed this same view after each of the seven interruptions. This may sound strange, but the new commander was General Richard Phillips, whose former position was that of advocate for Air Force weapons systems, including PAVEWAY III.
Finally:
> The secretary’s chief tester continued to be subordinate to and work directly for the chief developer. Under this arrangement, the chief tester’s views on the adequacy of testing and the implications of test results were stifled by the chief developer.
Has this changed at all?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
1: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35631305/f-3...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
Anduril - Aragon's sword after it was reforged, also called "Flame of the West".
Palantir - One of the seeing stones, originally made by men but corrupted by Sauron to drive people to despair who used it. Ominous TBH for an intelligence company.
And they all share one thing in common; Peter Thiel as a co-founder or investor.
What is copyrighted is a character, or potentially a detailed fictional entity behind the proper noun. If you make a story about a character with similar identifiable traits to Harry Potter, for instance, that violates Rowling's copyright on the character. Even if your character isn't named Harry Potter, but using the same name would make the case super easy to win.
They could be registered as trademarks, but then the estate would have to show that the use of the trademark was confusing or deceptive. I don't see how it could be, unless someone believes we live in Middle Earth, or unless Tolkien's estate used those names for companies (which would have to do things, not just be paper or shell companies) or products. They'd still have to show that the other companies' use of the names was confusing or deceptive; if the estate's companies or products weren't in the tech space, that might be difficult.
This is what happens when students (UBC) get the chance to name peaks... (There's another range not too far with Mt. Brew, Mt. Keg, etc...)
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Phelix+Crk/@50.6216842,-12...
I want to enjoy my LotR as an escapist fantasy without being reminded of the American military industrial complex please.
And guess who invested in it - Peter Thiel, of Palantir (among others) fame.
If there is a "trademark" issue, I would think they'd need to work directly with the Tolkien Estate, who still own the original works. (Didn't original D&D use "hobbits" and have to change it to "halflings" because of the Estate?)
(IANAIPL)
Not because trademarks, none are. But because courts have ruled if you use enough elements, esp characters you somehow are infringing copyright. Or rather, it is easier to cave and change your product than endure the risk and expense of long court battle.
Also, “The Cyber”.
These guys are all poli sci and religion majors who know more about fantasy movies than the commands they are assigned.
We really need to nuke our defense budget from orbit, starting with the officer corps, which is full of cowards, incompetents, and grifters.
The seeing stone lets you see things, but is easy to misinterpret if you're not careful. It is itself neutral, but can be corrupted for evil. Lots of power, but hard to wield. It's a tool and important for those who use it to understand the risks and account for them - to try to wield its power for good.
The man is passing a Chinese RC toy as his own development.
>The man is passing a Chinese RC toy as his own development.
Citation needed
And me being in electronics industry, working on 5 drone projects so far, with one more fixed wing in making.
These are exactly same parts of heli drone sold by one the biggest RC toy makers in China — Fly Wing (also apparently some cooler looking SAB, and MKS parts) lobotomised, and wrapped in a sci-fi looking sheet metal skin.