Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-w...
Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
Recently they have been using them to drop spikes to slow vehicles which are then hit by a second set of drones.
At some point soon these drones will have specialised capabilities and will go out in swarms to autonomously figure out how to take down objects.
Drones evolve under this pressure. Dynamic frequency changes, computer vision, maneuvering (like "go up when lost signal") and many more counter measures are adopted on both sides.
Cities are hugely hostile to low power transmission, especially in the 2.4 and 5ghz frequencies.
The effective range of cheap DJI "mini" drones in cities is measured in kilometres. If you get away from the city, you can double and triple your effective range.
Flying your drone around in a city is not the same as flying it against an opponent skilled in electronic warfare.
You can jam the signal, but you can work around signal jamming in software by having it back off or gain altitude.
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
I could see microwave-based APS (probably powered by a high energy consumable?) proliferating.
Ukraine hunted that tank down and destroyed it by drone, btw.
The harder part I see is friend/foe identification, rather than just attacking anything else that's small and flying slowly.
Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.
And when you remove the need for even a single human, you also remove their logistics footprint.
Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier
Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?
Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.
Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.
This is very different to artillery which is too expensive to lose to return fire and even more expensive if you try and make it operable remotely.
Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.
(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)
If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.
the economist: https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... https://archive.is/nJYJ0
As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/unmanned-flying-te...
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
[1]: https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/mike-kofman-and-rob-lee-on...
AI is not the limiting factor as much as sensors, energy, datalinks, logistics, and costs are. Yes we can miniaturise TERCOM now, but then where would the vehicle get maps from (battlefields change!), how would it see the terrain (at night? on a foggy, rainy day? deliberately dazzled/blinded with a cheap laser?), how far can it travel, how much payload can it take, where does it launch from, and how does it get to the launch point? Working through those questions and anticipating cycles of adaptation, I think it's easy to end up with a $1m JASSM-ER or a $3k 155mm shell (neither of which Ukrainians have in sufficient numbers).
For example, if you know there's an enemy platoon in that forest, why would you fly a swarm of autonomous tree-avoiding hunter drones there if you can drop some 155mm instead? The enemy can't blind a 155mm shell, EW wouldn't work, shells don't care about fog or darkness, payload-to-weight ratio is ~100%, and they're cheap. Of course if you don't have shells you have to be creative, but that doesn't mean the creative solutions are better.
On the other hand, according to the episode I linked, humble unarmed non-AI DJI Mavics have a very persistent and systemic impact. They provide 24/7 eyes in the sky over the entire front line, which makes tactical surprise impossible. This is very much not "AI swarming slaughterbots" many seem to imagine and invisible to folks on the sidelines like us, but that's why I'd be cautious of making inferences from the media we get to see.
The 10% estimate is not mine, it's from a legitimate expert who regularly goes to the frontline in Ukraine.
[1]: An amusing anecdote from that podcast: Tesla battery packs are a big source of batteries for FPV drones. The packs can be sourced for next to nothing from totaled Teslas, and individual cells are very reliable.
[2]: https://www.twz.com/ukrainians-are-cutting-open-u-s-cluster-...
[3]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/17/ukraine-frontline-ammo-...
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
The top end of course got much bigger, CVNs displace almost twice as much as Yamato.
HMS Dreadnought: Length: 160m / Beam: 25m / Displacement: 18410t
Acorn-class destroyer (contemporary with Dreadnought): Length: 75m / Beam: 8m / Displacement: 780t
Burke Flight III: Length: 155m / Beam: 20m / Displacement: 9900t
Less than 10% is not good when you consider how much does it cost in practice. Drone teams are often 2 pilots + technician + explosives technician (an incredibly risky job btw, those bastardised RPG warheads are live and sensitive) + infantry cover. At least double that if you want to strike beyond line of sight and need a retransmitter drone. Those teams can only move at night and on foot because they are actively hunted by the other side. They can only have one or two drones simultaneously in the air at best, and the drones need to get to their targets first without giving away the launch point. All of that for less than 10% success rate is not "incredibly effective".
Now compare to fire-and-forget Javelins that are way more lethal and are just something added to a normal infantry platoon.
Of course they did, arguing anything else is complete lunacy, especially since you later advocate for the usage of Javelins, which, if effective and available, obviously reduce the value of tank. They also have the imense drawback of exposing the soldier to enemy fire.
I don't even get your other points. Why would drone operators be hunted more than Javelin operators? Why would Javelin operators not have to worry about giving away their position? Why don't Javelin operators need infantry cover?
Tanks' value doesn't come from their invulnerability. They weren't invulnerable since WW1, if ever. Their value comes from being better than alternatives.
As for Javelins, Javelins don't need operators that have to sit still and blind, guiding their slow drones to targets. Javelins don't need dedicated operator teams, US army more or less hands them to infantry platoons as needed. Javelins don't need "infantry cover", their operators are infantry. Javelins are fire and forget, so you can shoot and immediately leave, unlike drone teams. Javelins don't require extensive training and fine skill.
The only thing Javelins don't do is first person videos. See my original point about drawing wrong conclusions from footage we get to see.
ATGMs did lower the value of tanks, but not to 0. Anything that can knock out a weapons system decreases the value of that weapons system.
It's an unavoidable dilemma: commodity stuff is cheap, but easily countered; stuff that isn't easy to counter isn't commodity and isn't cheap. You probably heard "yes but you can JUST add a jamming-resistant radio, and a thermal camera, and autonomous recognition/coordination, and larger payload, and…", but that's just motte-and-bailey.
Plus the drones still need the payload. If they are used against armour, they need shaped charges, which aren't free. In practice they often get random RPG-7 HEAT warheads from Soviet stockpiles, but we can't compare that with newly manufactured western 155mm HE.
A Howitzer itself ranges from $2m - 3.7m USD each.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
The Army is somewhere in the middle.
"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."
https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...
— Kelly Johnson
Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.
When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.
(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)
Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.
The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.
I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
If nobody stands up for our rights and freedoms at home they could easily be eroded, or lost entirely.
The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.
I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.
Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
> I made changes that impacted
> tens of millions of users in...
> no significant way whatsoever.
> Certainly not anything they'd
> remember on their deathbed [...]
Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.
Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
It was pretty explicit.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.
The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned?
We have a private war apparatus.
We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.
This is just looting.
Germany's in one piece.
The Balkans aren't on fire.
Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...
You can make a lot of complaints about the defense industry like waste and corruption, but a lack of a clear objective is no longer an issue.
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
Weird nitpick, I know.
There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston.
On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden
It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it.
Because that's exactly what it is
I'm getting strong PAC 750XL family vibes from that, we had a modified version hardened to fly 80 m drapes across all of Mali some years back .. locals were taking random potshots as it passed over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks
Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.
Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".
US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.
Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).
I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.
Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?
Is this article really equating Palmer Lucky to Oppenheimer?
Having interacted with Luckey in a number of unpleasant ways, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And if so, you are saying his achievements are nullified by his behavior?
The dude's a hacker, not a god.
As near as I can tell, he is successful for advocating for VR headsets.
I do not believe that's equivalent to splitting the atom. But hey, I guess we all see things our own way.
> Essentially, Luckey’s aim is to make the US and its allies almost impossible to harm — “a prickly porcupine” in his words — as well as to supply weapons powerful enough to put adversaries off attacking in the first place. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.
> The thesis is not original. It’s the same idea that led to Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb. America’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the second world war, killing more than 100,000 people, and nuclear weapons have not been deployed in conflict since.
Newspaper headlines are usually added by the copy editors, not the author of the article.
The implication is that Palmer is Silcon Valley's Oppenheimer.
EDIT: Although, now that you mention it, Oppenheimer is in quotes. I guess it's possible that the FT is being sarcastic.
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Oh, never change Hacker News. Got to love the casual breach of classified information.
The main problem is, there are more than enough drones. All I’m saying above is you probably just need 8 of them to get through Andurils system.
Also, the method to defeat such systems is not classified. It’s quite obvious and china can even easily overwhelm carrier defenses using this method.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/09/what-ukraines-...
Additionally, Iran claims that Israel did not intercept any of the hypersonic missiles they fired at Israel.
NATO does not possess any hypersonic missiles. Some people might say that NATO is keeping them secret, but that makes no sense. Nations exhibit their technologies as a deterrent.
From the theinteldrop link: "several sources within the Russian military and defense industry told the newspaper Izvestia on Saturday"
From the sputnikglobe link: "Moscow-based military expert Alexey Leonkov told Sputnik"
A very weird thing to say, given Russia's humiliating defeat (in terms of the objectives it believed it would surely and painlessly achieve) in 2022.
NATO+ countries aren't fighting him, they are using Ukraine as a proxy, while Vlad is fighting with his own army. NATO has been waiting nearly 80 years to attack Russia directly. They very motivated to make sure that Vlad continues making errors. As such, the longer this war takes, the better for NATO. And, unfortunately, the worse for Ukraine.
I think data collection is for sure one aspect, but I think Russian casualties is the largest motivator
In what way would having the whole of Ukraine annexed like Crimea be better for Ukraine?
It was not said that Ukraine would be better off it it stopped fighting. Only that Ukraine will be worse off the longer the war takes.
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2024-01-08...
IIUC this is the Wingman program for the F22 and F35 so these aren't "slow" drones like predators, these are going to be high performance jets. This is a serious contract!
It's much lower than it can be because there's no point in investing in a stronger airframe when the sustained acceleration would kill any pilot. These unmanned drones can easily be designed to withstand much more.
[1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-2...
Also in that table: Acceleration of a nematocyst: the fastest recorded acceleration from any biological entity. 5,410,000 g!
Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
Modern anti-ship missiles, torpedos, and BVR missiles also are designed with the ability to "go to this point in space and then find yourself a target and kill it"
We automated target selection and tasking in warships shortly after the second world war, to combat the fact that we expected the soviets to send 200 missiles at a task force at once, and didn't think humans could manage that kind of task load.
If you turn the right keys in an Arleigh Burke, every single human can leave the command part of the ship and it will still shoot planes out of the sky, all automated.
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
[0] Clausewitz, drink!
In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily
Unusable in actual war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...
In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.
The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.
If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.
Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.
Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.
This contract is for cutting edge unmanned fighter jets. Other countries don't make them at all!
These unmanned Wingman jets will be the first in the world to do that too.
If they could make an F16 equivalent combat drone, they’d jump at the chance.
Diversity, or "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements"[1], in this case a wide variety of suppliers.
I assume most of us are speaking English here.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diversity
>Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future.
You win wars by buying your equipment from the most capable suppliers. If that happens to be a centralized cabal of suppliers (this stuff is expensive, after all), then it is what it is. It's not the mission of the DoD to diversify the economy, its mission is to win wars as effectively as possible at any cost.
Wars are won on logistics; a corrupt, stagnant, or under-innovating market is a barrier to successful defence.
The mission of keeping the economy healthy lies upon the Commerce and Justice Departments, whose missions are to manage the economy and keep industries within the confines of the law respectively.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
[0] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...
Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.
An unmanned fighter jet is a whole different ball game for them.
That said, I agree, we also need lots of cheap drones.
This hasn't been innovative in a military context since at least Desert Storm.
Actually a shared battlespace run by computers managing contacts and sharing the data with tens of platforms including sending specific intercept data to specific in air interceptors and relaying data those interceptors get back to the rest of the fleet and managing tasking for tens of different surface combatants to intelligently and efficiently task hundreds of incoming threats was rolled out to American fleets in the 1960s
Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.
It's not as simple as you say and it doesn't work currently as you say.
I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.If high tech superpowers went at each other full bore with H bombs we’d probably be LARPing Mad Max, but so far that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely. All leaders in all these powers know that any such exchange would be mutual and thus suicidal (MAD) so the only way it happens is if you get someone truly insane in power.
What has happened since the bomb was developed and what’s likely to continue are skirmishes and proxy wars. Drones are the modern weapon of such conflicts with Ukraine and the Israel-Iran skirmish being heavily drone based.
This is ugly because it’s often not the soldiers of the superpower puppet masters dying but those of puppet states, and drones allow more technological powers to beat up on less technological people like it’s a video game.
If nukes are used in conflict in this century it will probably be just a few in one of these conflicts, followed by an overwhelming condemnation.
But the silver lining is that since the bomb was developed the overall per capita number of humans dying in war globally has fallen dramatically. As long as we continue to avoid huge scale conflict this number will probably stay low. Without the bomb it’s likely that a WWII style conflict between the US and USSR would have erupted and killed many millions more.
Some argue based on this that the bomb was a peacekeeping invention. So far that’s been true but we will see how the future goes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
Sticks and drones?
You might disagree with the SJW fork attack on nix. But if you also disagree with the idea of Haskell powered death drones blowing up innocent little baby humans, then you might have incentive to support - or at least loudly ignore - the forking / sabotage / leftist troll op.
Me, I will take an Even More aggressive track: I honestly hope this turmoil leads to a better version of the nix syntax. Perhaps something much cleaner: A YAML based syntax that eliminates curly braces and the need for many nix functions.
Yes, I'm being a little evil >:]
And many old fighter jets retire as target drones, going on to fly unmanned for perhaps decades. New purpose-build designs might have lower operating costs but their purchase price will always be higher than slapping radio controls onto already-purchased jets.
Well the whole point is not to reduce headcount totally but reduce the amount of people put directly in harms way, for example a pilot flying in a direct combat scenario.
When it comes to fighter pilots, salary is irrelevant. The few pennies paid in salary is absolutely nothing compared to the millions of dollars a year it takes to train and maintain an active combat pilot. Those costs are at the center of nearly every discussion re military drone tech. An autonomous pilot, a computer program, doesn't need check rides. It doesn't need to re-qual its AAR ticket every month. And it doesn't retire or get promoted out after five years.
Like is any of this mentioned in the article or this comment section? Or are you just complaining about bad arguments you heard elsewhere?
(I am aware that current autonomous piloting technology is very limited and can only accomplish a small subset of Air Force missions.)
Building an airframe strong enough to handle G forces beyond what a human can endure also comes at the price of greater weight and reduced range. It's not worth the trade-off.
Those aren't meant to fly high and send missiles at weddings on the ground, those are maneuverable wingmen for F-35s.
As for if it does what it says on the tin I have no idea, maybe the commenter that suggests they have insider knowledge can clarify.
https://twitter.com/anduriltech/status/1730451908794720388/v...
https://youtu.be/gwrH4EpUxvE?si=5yyu86OEDb5JGU3L
This fucking golf cart with a laptop welded to the dashboard is next generation stuff. Holy holy shit. Look at it take out those Chinese subs.
See what I mean about the marketing?
I do know that Anduril has done this for many of their products including the single rotor drone. Additionally it has all the hallmarks of industrial design. That shell looks way too over the top with those lines.
So I was exaggerating a bit. My mistake. I should say “very incredibly likely an industrial designer was involved to the point of obviousness due to my previous experience with the company”
3 years ago this topic would be full of people protesting this. Pointing out the inhumanity, the potential for abuse, the hypocrisy, the dangers of desensitizing war. Censorship changed the game entirely.
Obviously they won’t, but because the problem here is that the humans do not want the machine to question them, it’s only a matter of time before the bad guys have them anyway. I’m inclined to say that it’s better the good guys (at least from my perspective) have them first.
We ought to worry that these will let General Ripper go rogue more easily or an adversary hack them, but I don't think this moves the needle at all one whether advanced AIs could be dangerous.
Both are by right wing Silicon Valley libertarians sucking on the government teat.
But when you're a libertarian doing it - I just have to laugh.
Ditto Tesla. It's not a coincidence that all these guys are suffering the same hypocrisy.
I don't think you've thought about this very hard.
But they almost certainly don't just take this work. They advocate for more work. They lobby for more funds.
I'm not a libertarian, so I don't know the details, but I believe advocated for larger government must be contrary to their beliefs, no?
Yes, but you're ignoring my central point. They aren't merely taking advantage of something, they are pushing to expand and enlarge it.
Palmer Luckey got kicked out of Meta for funding Trump ads, I don't think you can classify him as a libertarian lol
(though there are many other self-described libertarians who are even more right-wing-authoritarian, so maybe nitpicking isn't worthwhile)
If you don’t want to build anything that could ever potentially be used in the manufacture of those weapons, you probably shouldn’t be building open source software or contributing anything to do with any programming language at all.
I did, however, have to expand on the concept that it's very easy to have strong opinions about war when you yourself are sheltered from the consequences of it.
Open Source means you can't really prohibit Anduril from using your projects; but _welcoming_ them and their money is a different matter altogether.
Meanwhile if you were to get the defense industry to not use your product, they're not going to go out of business or do less of whatever you didn't like. They're going to bring the same money to someone like Oracle or Microsoft with no qualms about taking it -- or bring even more money to them, which is your tax money, as those companies charge quite a lot.
This makes me suspicious that the people agitating for "don't take their money" are being subtly or not so subtly encouraged to do so by the people who want to take their money instead. After all, the historical norm is the opposite. Not just TCP/IP but Tor and SELinux and microprocessors and, considering that AT&T has long been a major defense contractor, transistors and lasers and solar panels and C and all the rest of it. Are the same people who want to refuse their money also inclined to refuse all of the other things it paid for?
Would we be better off if the University of California never took a Unix license or created BSD because of where it came from?
They want the CoC to be able to silence undesired speech in the first place, and if they refuse, it becomes their strawman to allow them to keep arguing the same thing all over again.
To me this reeks of the "paradox of intolerance" e.g. "you cannot be inclusive without allowing people to say things you don't like".
I do not identify as a leftist, and would not be considered one, but as an aerospace engineer I would never work for something that aids the US war machine.
Those weapons are never used in "defense". Do they defend an unsustainable way of life ? Sure.
How is that not defence?
Ukraine is the only case. And let's not forget that the US is indirectly responsible for the Russian invasion.
I know that it is very hard for you to see things objectively, and I am sorry for what you and your country is experiencing.
Ukraine is a strategically important region to Russia. They don't have to invade as long as they can threaten to invade, and thereby get concessions without armed conflict.
If Ukraine joins NATO then Russia could no longer credibly threaten to invade because it would put Russia at war with NATO. Ukraine about to join NATO is thereby destabilizing, because then Russia has to choose between invading immediately before they join, or doing nothing and permanently losing their leverage. This does not make the invasion justified but it makes it expected. US diplomats knew this perfectly well and pushed for Ukraine to join NATO anyway.
It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
Yep, better deal with this damn dog once and for all.
Can't live in uncertainty like this, never knowing when the dog will break in to the back yard and bite the kids
Ukraine is stuck between a rock and hard place, but they also have agency.
The initiative for joining NATO came from Ukraine and not the US diplomats. Prior to 2014 the public support was too weak for it to happen. Popular support first shifted almost overnight from the majority opposing NATO membership to supporting it after Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and shifted even more towards support after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
Neither invasion had anything to do with NATO. In 2014, Russia correctly judged that the international response would be too weak and made a successful land grab. After the spectacular American retreat from Afghanistan that mirrored the last days of Saigon, Russians again sensed weakness and thought Biden was too weak to intervene in Ukraine and decided that the climate was suitable for taking the next step in restoring their former empire in 2022. Planning for the 2022 invasion began around the time of US retreat from Afghanistan.
> It's like telling your friend to corner a vicious dog. The dog is not innocent, the dog is going to bite them and you knew that and told them to do it anyway.
This is a narrative propagated by Russians, and sounds convicing on the surface, but has little actual substance. Nobody's cornered. Russia's threats are bluffs, intended to paralyze you with fear and guide you into inaction, which Russia will then exploit, as they have done in Ukraine.
To continue your dog analogy, they are a dog that barks and barks, and bites only if they sense fear and weakness and see an opportunity to bite. Show strength and they'll back down. (And this is how you deal with actual dogs too; they smell fear from sweat.)
It doesn’t make one an intellectual to shroud their own tenuous grasp on reality with a cover of “ooohh!!! Nuaaannce!!!”
The international geopolitics here are very simple.
The russian federation aims to rebuild the former russian empire. They’re prosecuting this by first trying to exterminate Ukraine as a population, as a nation, as a culture, and as an identity.
It has nothing to do with NATO expansion, or sob stories russia has published about them needing to defend themselves.
To me, it looks like you are repeating kremlin propaganda. It looks like you’re another victim of the Chomsky school of propaganda.
The USA isn’t responsible for russia’s invasion of Ukraine (or Georgia, earlier). If they are, it’s only responsible insofar as allowing useful idiots to apply political pressure to their governments and force them into pacifism, thereby enabling russian aggression.
If you want to have a discussion about this, could you start by not being so patronising?
Better stop using computers and the internet then.
You may or may not agree with this stance and that is totally fine. You’re still free to use the software for whatever you want; you can also go ahead and fork it, or create a new community endorsing this use. If enough people agree then it will thrive. That’s the beauty of it!
A specific community has the freedom—within the bounds of legality—to decide who is welcome to participate.
Be that as it may, we wouldn't have computers or the internet if everyone acted like that.
(on the off chance that some HN audience members have reading comprehension issues - this is aimed at politically driven non-contributing participants behind the anti-anduril outrage, Nix and its creator are absolutely fine)
If you can't tell that from a glance at the signatories list, you shouldn't be commenting on 'non-contributing participants'.
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-event-sponsor...
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/major-nixpkgs-contributor-leav...
The first time was a post about the latest Mark Rober video 'promoting' Anduril/military technology to a child/teen audience.
Do you mean with drone war, the usage of drones in a war (like they do in Ukraine and middle east) or a 'war' between manufacturers?
So many wars for profit. History knows best that there is no free lunch. But I suppose consuming propaganda without a critical thinking and effort for facts is good for the business. By the way Zala Aero is the current leader in this space. That's why Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure.
I'm not following the war but thanks to your comment just read about them.
They are a subunit of Kalashnikov and the latest drone uses PET bottles for fuel tank and a plywood fuselage and a banal model airplane engine found at hobby shops.
It's almost like some 90s game designer is writing the plot for this.
My country is part of NATO. Nobody asked us. No referendum. No voting. Nothing. The political class is filling their pockets with money, while propaganda is beyond the level of USSR and Nazi Germany.
Some of us have military service behind our backs. Some of us lived under a communist dictatorship, and we know the smell of leftist bullshit.
Live in your tech bubble, but know that East Europeans see clearly who is the reason for this bloodbath. And when the time comes, we will not die for your corporations as Ukrainians.:)
Eastern European here.
The putin regime is the reason for this bloodbath.
Each of the propagandists I mentioned in this comment[0] made assertions that are demonstrably false, e.g., russia isn't going to invade Ukraine; this is just a western conspiracy theory.
They each insisted that Ukraine has no chance, like you do. They each insisted repeatedly that Ukraine was just about to collapse. They said that several times in 2022. They said that several times in 2023. They're saying that now in 2024, like you are.
Tell us vatnik, how did the Moskva sink?
This is the historical reality of war. There is no technology who will remove the need of a soldier on foot to put a flag on a territory. War is logistic. War is human resource intensive. Those who have more well-trained, organized and supplied soldiers win. Currently, there is no meaningful air-defense in Ukraine.
The Russian army has a calculated approach in which they bomb with FAB's, FPV's and artillery before ground operation. There is no adequate way to replenish the lost soldiers for Ukraine. Russians are plenty.
War must be stopped by Ukraine suing for peace. "Suing for", in this older sense of the phrase, means "pleading or petitioning for".
> General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of European Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 10 that the severity of the situation in Ukraine “can’t be overstated” as troops on the battlefield run short of ammunition and as the country’s air-defense capabilities are depleted.
Ukrainian troops have been rationing ammunition as Russian forces outfire them at a rate of about 5-to-1, he told the committee.
“That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks. We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically…. We are talking about weeks,”
He obviously forgot the most important part. WELL TRAINED SOLDIERS. Money and weapons will not change the outcome.
Since when, reality is bullshit? Dude?
That’s an amusing mistranslation of a word that is immediately recognisable to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
The mask has slipped.
He's a vatnik, of the same ilk as [thankfully deceased] Gonzalo Lira, convicted sex offender Scott Ritter, or the disgraced Douglas Macgregor.
Why are you promoting a kremlin propagandist on this website?
The best thing that they could do would be to "import" a few dozen Ukrainian drone operators and engineers, people who have actively and directly fought against a near-peer US adversary, and let them design whatever they think will win the next war. But that won't make the current ghouls in the US the buttloads of money they are betting on, so that will never happen.
Weapons and bases aren't just about winning conflicts, they are about jobs (see Perun)
Yet, even that "failure" (I do agree that it failed) was still more successful than Russia's post-summer-2022 offensives.