Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer
forbes.com
forbes.com
With a completely autonomous drone in contested space (presumably with EW around), there's no way for a pilot to tell the drone "fly a little to the left to see what's behind that tree." Each drone has very specific use cases.
Litter your trenches in inflatable mannequins (anti-CV), put all your soldiers in ghillie suits (anti-CV), have cheap fireworks ready to spread chaff (anti-radar) and flares (anti-IR).
Even then, if they just put a bullet into anything that has the approximate optical & heat signature of a human, it'll work fine. Who cares if you blow up a few inflatable mannequins and flares if you also get all the soldiers?
* A Kalman filter is an algorithm, not a magical wand. How is that algorithm implemented? What are the parameters? How are they tuned? How is the state, and uncertainty thereof, modeled? How accurate is that model in the field? Details and implementations matter. Finding answers that work reliably in the field, even for a limited set of circumstances, takes huge amounts of time, money and talent, and involves a continuous process of trial and error.
* Drones have a limited payload capacity, which means a limited amount of ammo to burn on false positives, and a limited amount of smarts and sensors with which to process their environment.
* Many attacks rely on the element of surprise to catch the enemy unaware, or leave them with little time to plan - shooting fake targets alerts others to your presence and can quickly give away your position, providing time to take cover and/or stage a counterattack.
* The people developing the smarts for these drones are a limited resource that need to be found, hired, and paid, and they have to play a cat-and-mouse game to maintain the robustness of the targeting system.
* Asymmetric warfare is a time-honored guerilla favorite. It doesn't matter how fancy and sophisticated your drone's targeting system is if rendering it useless is cheaper, and wasting ammo on non-targets can very much tip the scales here.
And more importantly, that's what I mean with arms race. Now the mannequins in the trenches get a little heater element to keep them at body temperature, and they get internal water bladders with the appropriate radar cross section, ect. Easily doable today, and orders of magnitude cheaper than a sensor fusion drone.
Add counter drones and point defense cannons, and the attack drones need rocket motors for final approach, which makes CV another order of magnitude more difficult, ect
At that point, isn't it easier to just shell those civilians if they are in drone range, or cluster/fire bomb them if you need to fly in an aircraft to deliver the drones anyway?
Terrorism by non-state actors is a danger, of course, but guys with AKs and pipe bombs storming a football stadium seems easier to pull off and yet hasn't happend so far anyway.
When the launcher and the drone connect they make up a completely random key. It is known only to the launcher and the drone. The drone will self destruct if it receives said key. The enemy could jam the destruct but they couldn't trigger it. Note that no encryption is even needed.
One time pads are inherently unbreakable crypto other than by compromising the pad. And in this case the secret is known only to the drone and controller.
You even have different types of drones providing different function. A mama drone carrying smaller drones to the place of operation for example.
"But they have to test to guarantee safety"
Nobody cares, there's a reason Ukraine is using cheap consumer/commercial drones, because they're effective as hell, and you get much more bang for buck without most of your money going into the back pockets of defense company executives.
If national defense is sooooo important, why aren't defense companies publicly owned?
They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1].
[0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=1...
In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.
Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukrai...
They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems.
Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.
Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing.
On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth.
They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers, or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many have to have their positions go empty or be filled by someone new without adequate experience?
As is 10 percent of annual GDP.
I could see a sci-fi future where we visit some planet somewhere and when we land there are no living beings anywhere. Just killer robot factories pumping out more killer robots fighting an endless war with each other fully autonomously.
That's another AGI super intelligence end state. You get two AGI super intelligences fighting a war against each other and they fight until the entire planet is turned into killer drones and explosives. A plausible form of paper clip maximizer.
Use, or expend?
Interesting, do you have more information on state of the art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once, ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight controllers are configured for out of the box.
It's $80,000 for a switch blade drone, which can loiter for 40 minutes.
Buying a consumer fixed wing drone with similar flight time costs <$1000.
The tooling for an artillery shell is used only for artillery shells. Not many consumers looking to buy 152mm shell casings and high explosives.
In the industrial age, volume production is the usual solution to keeping costs low. Artillery shells would be a lot cheaper if we built as many of them as we did in WW2.
(As a side note, this is one reason why housing was so cheap in the post-WW2 1950-1970 era. There was a whole lot of surplus construction equipment leftover from WW2, so you could acquire the tooling needed to build a subdivision really cheaply. Once the surplus aged out and there was no economic reason to build a huge number of new diggers and bulldozers, construction got a lot more expensive.)
They are big chunks of metal that needs to be identically machined to tight tolerances and filled with explosives and a fuse.
$3k is pretty cheap for custom work.
Then you need to transport and store them.
You can buy drones off the shelf made with cheap components.
And the answer is yes, China makes their artillery shells cheaper. American labor is very expensive and American military manufacturers tend towards low volume nowadays, because they don't trust the government to commit to 1 million shells a year for two decades, because every time there's a changing of the guard in the whitehouse, plans get gutted seemingly as a "Fuck you" to anyone who worked with the previous admin.
That being said, I'd like to see a citation for the $3k figure being thrown around. The number I've seen is more like $800
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artill...
[x] this item is a gift
[ ] gift wrap this itemThat Wikipedia page contains a link to a picture I've always found totally mind blowing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:No...
Insanity.
Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean, just imagine all that activity.
We'll see it again as soon as two super powers are engaged in an active shooting war.
The US pushed ~28,000 tons of supplies ashore in the first 5 days of Overlord. Eight days later it had grown to 117,000 tons. [1] Can you show us your loading and sealift plan for delivering 10,000 tons per day of supplies, sustained, in a partially-contested airspace, especially over a beach? We're not talking about unloading a Maersk Triple E-class [2] at a container port in peacetime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_logistics_in_the_Norm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship
As for assorted supplies without too heavy or bulky separate items, 10K tons per day is a joke and can be shuffled by helicopters alone. Remember distances were absurdly short, 120-150km, easily within helicopter range, and they can make several sorties per day at this short range. Over time, pilot fatigue will become an issue and accident rate might get bit too high, but for combat operations this isn't a big deal because there will be higher losses to enemy fire.
A San Antonio has ~20,000 square feet of deck space usable for vehicles and cargo. If you stuffed it with TEUs you could fit 125.[0][1] Maximum mass capacity for a TEU is ~21t, let's call it 20t for easy math.[2] So a San Antonio moving containerized beans/bullets/bandaids is only lifting ~2,500 tons per sortie. There are only 12 active San Anontios, and keep in mind roughly 1/3 of any fleet is down for maintenance), so you would need half of all likely available LPDs (4 of 8 available with 4 in yardwork) of the largest (by tonnage, not hull numbers) Navy on the planet.
As for helicopters, you can carry palletized cargo internally on a CH-53 (one of it's few advantages over a CH-47). The K model, with stronger engines (and therefore payload capacity) than the E model, can move ~12t at 200km.[3] Let's just call it 10t at 200km, again for easy math. You would need 1,000 sorties in a day to move 10kt. If you pushed your aircraft to 3 sorties per day (limited by ground crew ability to turn the aircraft), you could do it with ~333 heavy lift helicopters. The US only has ~20 operational CH-53Ks, and ~140 CH-53Es. So no, moving 10kt per day is not a joke, and can't be shuffled by helicopters alone.
It would take both asset classes combined, let's call it 3xLPD for 7.5kt and ~80 CH-53s flying 240 sorties for 2.4kt. That would pretty much be a maximum effort for the Navy-Marine Corps Team, which is inarguably the largest and most capable military power projection and expeditionary logistics force on Earth.
So even in 2024, what they accomplished on D-Day is not a trivial amount of effort.
[0] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Team-Ships/PEO-Ships/LPD-17...
[1] 20000 / (20ft long x 8ft wide TEU) ~= 125 TEUs worth of deck space, assuming you use ALL deckspace but can't/don't stack them 2 high
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit
[3] https://www.navair.navy.mil/product/CH-53K-King-Stallion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdDJDQA0Ek
It's the largest ship in their ferry fleet.
I don't think that's actually true. Some quick Googling shows the US M-1 Abrams tank is not air-droppable, and maybe the best they can do is air drop light armored vehicles which are much lighter.
People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar.
Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber.
Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
Even if you discount the tactical effect of losing soldiers in battle, just the gear of the soldier is worth more than a thousand dollars already (just ballistic vest + riffle is enough to pass this very low bar)
What a military really needs to look at is how much damage can that target do if they don't break it first. If a target only cost $1,000 but can somehow do a million dollars in damage to me and me spending $900,000 to service that target is $100,000 savings. This is why during some wars the US was using cruise missiles on teams of dudes in Toyotas with discarded anti-aircraft guns strapped to the back. It's not those 'shitty technicals' were worth the millions of dollars like a tomahawk, it's that those things could drive around and do millions of dollars worth of damage if unopposed. If all you're cheaper assets are already working on something you might assign a multi-million dollar munition unless the target can't do as much damage as firing the munition.
Because an unserviced enemy target can generally cause an unlimited amount of damage in wartime it generally becomes cost effective to take any opportunity to disable an enemy asset.
However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue, though.
My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller boom >> incomplete boom mission.
Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver...
EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
About 600 Kpsi. That works out to somewhere around 0.1 lb per strand.
Just post it in grams, ugh.
(14g/km)
>or 0.14kg for 10km
(or 140g for 10km)
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gateway...
The fiber does not appear jacketed or supported.
I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just staple it to the wall because it holds up fine.
(I would never do this but ...)
Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot more resilient than it used to be.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gateway...
The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful for this purpose.
Already happened: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defen...
I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5 mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up. And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair. With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get GBits down that wire.
TOW missiles are specifically mentioned in the article as an example of this technology being in active use for decades (and particularly, right now in Ukraine)
There was some cool footage early on in the war where a skilled Ukrainian Stugna-P operator pointed the beam just off of an enemy helicopter (or maybe some armored vehicle, but I think it was a helicopter), then corrected to the target at the last moment. This gave as little warning as possible to the crew of the helicopter via their illumination sensors. Very skilful.
They do rely on drones being able to switch between autonomous modes upon detection of jamming attempts, which seems easy enough to do (though I know nothing about the techniques). My thought was if the detection of jamming attempts is easy enough, shouldn't it be just as easy to use RF direction finding and a fairly simple greedy seeker algorithm to find and destroy the jammer?
As far as I understand you can't simply follow the emitter signal because the jammer can easily take countermeasures. For example, putting the jammer inside a building or vegetation would prevent any unpiloted drone from causing any harm. Even if the jammer was exposed, cycling it on and off every 30s would still effectively interfere with flight but prevent a signal seeker system from reliably finding the jammer. Plus, many drones don't have the range to reach a jammer.
There are systems that can detect and locate a signal like an RF jammer, but you have to 1) deploy that system into the area, 2) operate it, 3) maintain it, and 4) protect it. Then to make use of the intelligence it produces you need to have some sort of ordnance or PGM available. That is, you need to dedicate and risk plenty of materiel to take out a simple RF signal broadcaster, with the reward being the use of drones (including the enemy's drones).
I don't think your approach is ill-conceived or anything, but the reality for both Ukraine and Russia is that it's really difficult to properly implement that approach.
I think the calculation is pretty simple, really: the cost of developing and using a reliable jammer-seeking drone is much higher than the cost of a second jammer.
I wonder how much more expensive. My feeling is a better equipped military with greater ISR capacities can probably better discriminate targets and hence make more efficiently/economical use of smarter/expensive drones. What's the proverb where the poor stays poor because they have spend just to keep afloat and never get chance to invest. A force with inferior ISR has to spam cheap drones because they don't have the expensive hardware to employ less highend drones that probably take less manpower etc etc, and problem spirals. By highend I don't mean US MIC shitshow like switchblade that cost 60-80k, there are DJI drones with AESA radar (more advanced than most gen3.5 fighters) that cost 8k, which is to say the highend component costs can be "reasonable"
I think the major issue with having RF seeking drones is the direction finding itself. Being able to do that cheaply would probably require a fairly expensive antenna array and SDR to do the processing.
EDIT: Ah, the real reason the spool has to be on the drone must be that the drone can't pull the fiber through snags, and if the spool is on the drone then it doesn't have to.
The drone contains explosives. You really do not want it to come back to you in one piece.
The relay then gets to spend far more of its power budget on the relay-drone segment and has a very low power relay-base segment. Relay drones also perform surveillance while they're on station. Better bandwidth to the base station from a "wired" connection means a higher fidelity feed or potentially additional cameras to cover a wider area.
1: Never deployed operationally Luftwaffe wunderwaffen, first tested in August 1944, wire-guided air-to-air missile.
You're not going to respool that wire anyways, those drones either find their way back autonomously or all have to find a target. After the attack just cut the wire and leave. You just have to be extra careful not to be detected before the attack.
I mean, mostly joking, but maybe an IR beam could actually be visible to a night vision equipped drone?
Of course, if it was monomolecular wire [0] you'd just encircle the opposition and reel in the loop, cutting them in two (horizontally).
I suppose you could have a mobile ground-based launcher though.
I fully agree with the sentiment, but do you think that would have done anything?
The barriers to entry are just very low, and the off-the-shelf components are heavily dual-use, which makes containment extremely difficult. I think even minor powers would have an extremely easy time doing the development anyway, either in secret (China) or by just eating the sanctions (Russia, Iran).
Exactly that, line of sight. The horizon strictly limits your operational range, and for fpv suicide drones there goes your terminal guidance (or the "buzzing around inside a maintenance warehouse to blow up vehicles inside") capabilities.
Could be useful for high flying surveillance drones, but not much beyond that.
*
/ \
/ \One problem might be smoke, though, which happens both naturally on a battlefield and is also often used for concealment.
In addition, every drone has dependency on all of the drones previously. Failure at any point in the chain will cause failure in the entire system.
So in essence, there is a limit to how far you can chain drones together and they will be very vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
You also have more and more drones to control and send signal to.
could it be done? yes. viable/useful? doubtful
Inside The 'Magic Radio' Protecting Russian Drones from Jamming (2023)
https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/asahi-optical-fiber-detail.php...
Far less than the cost of the target it destroys, or the life of a trained soldier it kills.
[1] https://www.corning.com/optical-communications/worldwide/en/...
[2] https://www.fiberinthebox.com/p/21683/corning-smf-28e-100kps...
I briefly thought about having the drones spool out a pair of thin copper wires instead and having very high voltage running through the wires so the drone didn't have to carry a battery, but realized this would be wildly impractical as the resistance of the wire would kill the voltage and they would constantly be touching each other in the wind or sagging down to the ground and shorting out.
- The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone.
- The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.
- The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.
- You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to many.
- Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency can be achieved. This field has been well researched, tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.
Also do many drones use GPS / dead-reckoning and follow pre-guided paths, to avoid need for comms.
Came across - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s recently which uses an array of IMUs and filtering, to they claim get accuracy similar to a fibre optic gyro.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2415318-ukraine-will-sp...
a) Many drones still are being used for ISR (intelligence gathering). Live feed is valuable. Solving the navigation/guidance problem with dead reckoning doesn't let you solve the intelligence issue.
b) Turning FPV drones back into fire and forget munitions kinda robs them of their value proposition. We -already had- smart munitions that could be fired more or less unobserved into an area, and which could then more or less autonomously select and attack its own targets. FPV drones (in some applications) let you have part of that functionality (you can launch an attack into a general area without knowing precisely what you're aiming at, while still getting pretty precise terminal guidance) at substantially less cost (though granted the cost savings are coming from a variety of factors, not just the sensor portion).
I had this idea a few years ago when I was learning about VR position tracking issues stuff. Kinda surprised this wasn't a thing immediately after the first MEMS gyro honestly?
And even if you try walking up the fiber cables (if you manage to spot them), you will become a target yourself much earlier than you manage to locate the origin of the fiber, i.e. the drone crew.
So, that wouldn't work.
It'd take a lot of grenades, but there are videos from the Ukraine war of Ukranian infantry landing hits at range on Russian positions using drone spotters.
You could get around that by having a relay drone at high altitude, but that complicates the system by a lot, and you'd have to somehow defend your relay.
such ordinance, would provide telemetry and situational intelligence resources while transiting the first kilometers of range, thus the ordinance is munition and reconaisance device.
fiber optic seems like a pretty robust solution here.
Forbes just really loves pushing lethal "urban" technology. I personally find the habit to be disgusting.
> “I am already asking Ukrainian specialists to test this control technology so that we do not end up behind the enemy,”
It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.
Forbes, of course, loves this because in our current economic model there's a lot of money to be had in inventing new horrific ways to murder people. Well, that's my "1 of 4 free articles" this month, I guess.
So the ethical answer is to what, roll over and let the Russians win? Wars are awful things. But to paraphrase Trotsky, you get to choose whether or not you're interested in war. But you don't get to choose whether or not war is interested in you.
Or negotiate for peace. It is known there was a solid negotiation process in place and the Ukrainians were interested in it. NATO was not and worked to destroy it.
> Wars are awful things.
...and _Forbes_ acting as a cheerleader of them is disgusting.
> But to paraphrase Trotsky
Trotsky was spreading propaganda. In the actual study of war, they rarely break out as described, and they often have months if not years of time where they could have been avoided entirely.
It usually turns out there is someone with vested financial interests in war and they always find themselves near the people who generate the conflict. Go figure.
If I hypothetically put a gun to your head and told you to give me your wallet and the credentials to your bank accounts, no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine or what I did any less than armed robbery. Same here.
In the case of Ukraine, Russian state media have often claimed their goal is to exterminate Ukrainians and their culture so that distinction would not exist.
Are the Ukrainians aware of this? Because massive forced conscription and closed borders for leaving are strongly pointing out against it.
>no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine
Negotiations are needed not for legality, but for example, to stop mass forced conscription of people who doesn't want to die for political ambitions of Zelensky, corrupt Ukranian government or for something else, that they think doesn't worth dying for.
They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for or otherwise valuable to them, or your general view of their government -- just doesn't factor into it.
Does not seem like it. They are not asked. They are banned from leaving the country. They are captured right on the streets and forcefully, under threat of death, sent to fight in war.
> They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
No, it's already decided for them - and decided otherwise. That's the reason borders are closed and Ukrainians are sent to frontlines against their will
> Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for That's not my idea, that's their idea - otherwise there would be no need for closed borders and forced conscription.
Just like the Allies did in World War II.
The "under threat of death" part is pure BS of course.
You'll definitely need to provide reliable sources for the specific assertion you're making here.
And lo and behold, within literal seconds of putting forth this perfectly straightforward observation -- which granted might sound slightly, vaguely controversial, but really isn't to anyone following the basic event chronology of this conflict (and the various false narratives that people keep mindlessly repeating about it) -- someone had to flag it.
Agree, it's unusual and satisfying to see the west backing a justified war of defense against a country that's a full-blown comic book villain.
Have you examined the logic of this position? You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?" And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths? So much so that it "satisfies" you?
Wow.
Yes.
> You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?
Not an entire country. The leadership of the country, yes.
> And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths?
I'm not sending anyone. If the people of Ukraine decides it is time to stop defending themselves I will accept their decision with a sad resignation.
> So much so that it "satisfies" you?
Yes. It satisfies me that we are on the good side of this conflict. Would satisfy me even more if the conflict were not happening. But spending my tax money to help people protect themselves is much better, much more satisfying than the usual status quo which is to spend my tax money to hurt innocents.
Eagerly awaiting your further questions on the topic.