Pentagon Wants to Buy 1,000s of Small, Cheap, Autonomous Drones in Next 2 Years | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Wants to Buy 1,000s of Small, Cheap, Autonomous Drones in Next 2 Years

airandspaceforces.com

46 pointsmikece25 comments

Why just 1000? Why not 100M? From the war in Ukraine it seems that future wars will be fought by swarms of cheap drones. Most of them will never hit a target. Some of them though will do so. Ships, tanks, soldiers, jets, nothing stands a chance.

It seems to me that the country that develops the best supply chain of cheap drones will be the one that will be able to win any war.

These are not the quadcopters used to sight in artillery or drop grenades. These are loyal wingmen to be used alongside manned fighters dogfighting j20s deep in the pacific. The 1000 comes from giving the 300-odd f35 fleet 3 wingmen.

The cheapness comes from them being 1/10 the cost of a manned fighter.

Reminds me of Ace Combat 7.

Does the US Air Force have a union? They won't be happy being replaced by drones.

For the price of one of those + accompanying Jet you can manufacture >10K autonomous drones with 100km range, enough to overwhelm any carrier defenses and wreak havoc on the deck.

Keep in mind, that counting small drones is a fairly new problem. What works today might not work tomorrow.

Would US fare better than russia tonight? <50 drones resulting in probably around $300-500mil in hardware damages alone (6x Il-76, potentially refinery and electronics factory). And those are primitive loud improvised drones flying slow and quite high.

Even the best AA system will run out of ammo under heavier assault. Patriot in Kyiv got overwhelmed with less than 20 cruise missiles it could easily track, now make that hundreds of targets gliding few meters above the surface to the target.

You seem to think we should copy Russia's strategy of scattering swarms of drones across the territory of their enemy. These 'kamikaze' drones are highly damaging and dangerous to civilian life.

Maybe the US military should focus on how the heck we can defend against these vast swarms of kill bots, instead of flooding the skies with more and more AI death squads.

Edit: and to people pessimistically saying that the US military doesn't prioritize civilian lives... I think we'd agree that should change

There was a paper on HN about a year ago published by the DoD (if memory serves) that roughly speaking the only way to combat drones is by having more, possibly smaller, drones.

So I think at least one "how" has been arrived at.

Yeah well maybe they should think a bit harder. I am not taking the DoD's word on it.

We really can't use directed energy weapons to snipe them out of the air? Scatter pebbles and rocks in the air space above them to ground them? Use a dozen helicopters to drop huge nets on top of them Scooby Doo style?

Come on people, time to get creative. If your only solution to swarms of death bots is more death bots, then you won't see a single willing dollar from me.

The US military is retooling to confront China in the Western Pacific theater. They need drones with sufficient range to fly from US and allied bases in the region to Taiwan. Those won't be cheap. The battle space is completely different from what you see in Ukraine.

Why have 1000 highly capable weapons if you can have 100 million weapons that are useless after they run out of energy within five minutes?

I have a DoD background and some would say too many hobby drones. This news sounds 20 years old.

Is Lady Gaga’s drone swarm display really 10 years ahead of military doctrine? (No, it’s just ridiculous to see this headline).

Would love it if anyone closer to this topic knows a great youtuber or publication that hits this niche (currently following Sandboxx and Task & Purpose).

Hit this niche? This has been a major AF initiative/talking point for years now. You can read about it on any of the defense news sites. Hell even OP's military.com is reporting on it. I can't stand the people who are like "I'm in this industry and even i don't know about it-" if you haven't seen the massive rolling stone barreling at you for the past five years, that's on you.

Yeah… I was hoping someone had some super cool forum they look at every day. Definitely played a card there. I guess I am as up to speed as you are.

This is what a "drone" looks like. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qR4t_vSjETA

To be clear, what the Deputy Secretary implied was “less expensive than manned platforms,” not less expensive drones. The DoD has a cadre of existing “qualified” (incumbent) suppliers of drone systems, and these contractors will likely be the recipients of additional orders. It’s hard to break into that supply chain.

These drones are intended to accompany manned fighters. The Air Force is designing the next fighter, NGAD, and drones together. They are basically mini, disposable fighters.

Prediction: < 1000, larger, more expensive, and not in 2 years.

This is the one they are going to buy, not quadrocopter, but fighter jets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie

And this will lead to toner wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Can a small, cheap, drone following modern fighter jet? If these drones are to be a companion to a fighter jets, I would think that they must be able to match speed and range, in order to be useful.

I was thinking one way the world ends because of AGI is that the strong AGI uses up all the earth's natural resources turning everything into drones to fight an endless drone war.

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

I'd be surprised if they haven't been already doing for the last year. This is just some other kind of small, cheap, autonomous drone.

Fine, but don't spend a trillion on manned fighters that are obsolete already.

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