Anduril Fury: Automomous Stealth Drone
anduril.com
anduril.com
I genuinely cannot believe they tout that in their marketing.
This is a machine to kill people, is anyone worried about its carbon footprint.
(Is this page satire I fell for?)
Everyone who buys this or any other fighter jet is really hoping they don’t have to use it to kill anyone. The primary use case is as deterrence. These things will spend a lot of time just patrolling—and that uses a lot of fuel and emits a lot of carbon.
Well, yeah, the people buying “machines to kill people” seem to see that as a concern:
https://www.defense.gov/spotlights/tackling-the-climate-cris...
Whatever is needed to support that is a secondary consideration.
Also it is illegal to be fired for your political views. In the case of Palmer it was more likely because of his incompetence over the Zenimax situation:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-real-reason-palmer-luckey-...
Also details some of the other drones promised in the same aid package and that Ukraine would like the battle proven, more capable larger drones.
Is it that someone who a) believes the best path to peace and stability in the region is a Ukrainian defeat of Russia and b) also opposes Donald Trump's, say, tax policy has a "dilemma" in whether to support military aid that goes to Anduril (and thus, ultimately, potentially to Trump's re-election)?
If so, this seems like a pretty facile point.
Like, life is full of pros and cons. I want to leave my umbrella at home so my bag is lighter, but I want to have it with me if it rains. WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN!?!
In a democracy, you sometimes have to do business with people with whom you disagree. You also might try to avoid doing business with them, all else being equal. WHICH WAY?!
I dunno. I feel like you thought you had some sort of deep philosophical point, but I'm not getting it I guess?
I'm in kind of a similar boat, where personally I would not want to ever work on weapons, but at the same time admit their necessity. My hope over time is that conflict becomes less violent and more economic, but induced poverty also has deadly consequences...
No doubt there are a far larger number who find weapons development distasteful or would not personally want to work on weapons, but nonetheless recognize it as an unfortunate but pragmatic necessity.
I suppose, if one were given to inane Internet snark, one might say, "Haha, you refuse to become a proctologist, yet you go for your colonoscopy. WHICH WAY WESTERN MAN?" But, frankly, that would make you look stupid, just like @yinser does.
You should support the cause, but to begin with you should know if they are real. So far, for the amount of PR we see, it's a company without a single widget sold, but megatons of very photoshopy looking photos, and 3D animations. And Palmer Luckey, you know his reputation.
Anduril was previously caught passing off a Chinese toy helicopter as his own invention https://ibb.co/8DT5JMc . What it seems they did was to wrap a Chinese toy into a "military looking" sheet metal, with anodized trinkets glued on. I see the same parts in RC toy stores all the time.
The largest manufacturers of drones for Ukraine are Polish, and Ukrainians themselves. They are already reaching into tens of thousands. For recon, DJI are still the best due to excellent Sony cameras they have.
US can directly fund Ukrainian drone makers and have far bigger effect immediately, but better focus on what others can't: very large drones like Global Hawks, Reapers, and fighter jets.
And ammo issue, USA is not making even 1% of what it can. Even bombed out Ukraine now manufactures more ammo for itself than USA makes after billions sank into paperwork needed to expand the production, but only tiny actual investment into factories expansion.
Anduril Industries won a nearly $1 billion contract to do counter-unmanned systems work for Special Operations Command, the Department of Defense announced Thursday - https://fedscoop.com/anduril-nabs-1b-contract-for-anti-drone....
Except you know something we don't know, in which case you can report to the US military and claim a big whistleblower award..
https://media.sketchfab.com/models/c550510b39a948dfa6adfd571...
This drone looks no different than what comes out of Lockheed?
Word is Anduril's trying to do the SpaceX thing to defense. Personal ideology aside, more power to 'em; DoD procurement is a lightless nightmare realm from which nothing good can emerge.
But for Anduril I fail to see what they actually do that is so revolutionary vs what was already out there. And most of the info out there, including here, is about the founder and not the company. But perhaps it's just that the cool demos are not public.
OK, I say that with some levity. From what I've seen, it was far more subtle, and this is the aspect, the "secret sauce", that Anduril might be looking to replicate.
What they really did - one of the things, the thing that's in my core interest - was go through the . . tens of thousands . . of specifications, and isolate the ones that actually mattered, versus the ones that were good but onerously labor intensive[1], versus the ones that weren't only not necessary but which were unfalsifiable[2].
One of SpaceX's great advantages is that they could just deep six such very-expensive-hourly-headcount piles of "work", before they got stuck up to their axles in an entirely speculative systems engineering approach or some other brilliant piece of paperwork.
[1] Like looking for "commonality" when no such thing exists or is even possible. SpaceX doesn't waste time trying to show how "modular" their crap is according to some spec or other - when a variant goes far enough afield, they don't hesitate to cut the cord and roll a new product. False equivalence is a poison pill across all of aerospace, but in MIL-STD especially.
[2] Like the DoD mapping of Mil-STD-881 to MIL-STD-498 to goddamn scrums - how the hell do you tell if that's useful or not? Or if it's an actual thing in the world? You can't. It's horseshit, a six million dollar Powerpoint slide.
i.e. consume information from multiple sources (satellites, ground stations, planes, drones) and use it to coordinate the action of other drones/planes/etc.
There's a list of things they actually do now on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries (see "Lattice" in particular)
There was an announcement last week (and yesterday) about a "Replicator" initiative from the DoD (using large numbers of cheap drones) that seems largely aimed at countering China in the Taiwan Strait; I can imagine this is the sort of business they want to be involved with.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/8/29/n...
""" With Replicator, we're beginning with all-domain, attritable autonomy, or ADA2, to help us overcome the PRC's advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine again last February, they had that advantage too. Yet we've seen in Ukraine what low-cost, attritable systems can do — not to mention other commercial technologies.
They can help a determined defender stop a larger aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded, and upgraded at the speed warfighters need, without long maintenance tails.
At DoD, we've already been investing in attritable autonomous systems [...] and in multiple domains: self-piloting ships, uncrewed aircraft, and more.
Now is the time to scale, with systems that are harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat than those of potential competitors. """
- (2023-09-06) https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3517213...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-oc...
One of the key pillars of globalisation is that it makes wars prohibitively expensive - not only you need to fund them, but, most importantly, you end up breaking a lot of your own supply chains.
You don’t poke a bear with a toothpick and then call it unfair when they tear your limbs off.