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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly.

I'm not sure that follows.

Military drones like the Predator have been around for 30 years - at a cost of $30 million a drone. US military contractors are many things, but they're never cheap. And at that price, you don't have many and so they're never where they need to be.

The battlefield impact in Ukraine has been because for $500 you can strap a grenade to a DJI Mavic and you've got 60,000 times as many of them. And sure it's got much less range and inferior sensors and less jamming resistance and so on - but the price lets it be it's in the right place at the right time.

Defence contractors aren't famous for their cost-effective practices, so I'm not sure they can improve on the most important aspect of these drones.

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A DJI Mavic with a grenade has a flight time of only about 20 minutes, and can only operate at low attitude and close to the operator. The MQ-1 Predator can travel hundreds of km under satellite control and orbit for hours at medium altitude to provide persistent overwatch with advanced sensors. The cheap drones used in Ukraine are in no way a substitute for large, expensive drones like the Predator / Reaper. They address totally different missions and it's naive to compare them.

NATO has been flying large, expensive drones equipped with long-range radar at the edges of Ukrainian and Russian airspace. You don't hear much about it but this has been tremendously helpful for feeding Ukraine targeting data and warning about attacks. Can't do that with a cheap drone.

0 of these heavy UAVs will be able to operate in contested airspace. This is why you no longer see Bayraktar footage anymore, and they aren't even remotely as heavy.

Successor heavy UAVs such as the RQ-180 are specifically designed to operate in contested airspace. These are far more capable and survivable than anything Turkey can produce.

To be tested in a real conflict.

In the middle there is, among other things, the "cardboard drone"[1]. 120 km range. Quoted costs $700 - $3000 depending on role.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sypaq_Corvo_Precision_Payload_...

We're back to "is the purpose of a defence contractor to siphon public money, or is there a war currently on which might impact the personal lives of the C-suite of the defence contractor?"

But exactly - Ukraine's defence contractors and suppliers have to innovate, and do it on the cheap. As a result there will be lots of lessons to learn, and after the war, hardware and concepts to sell (like Israel does, it's a top military exporter because it has had to develop and innovate).

Also, the US has shown it can stomach its pride and buy foreign off the shelf designs which are better (okay, not always, cf. the KC-45 vs KC-46, but still). And of course there's the whole rest of the world.

There's a new generation of defense contractors (Anduril, Ares) coming online that seem to promise order of magnitude improvement on the status quo.

It's good to have more options but Anduril and Ares are mostly a lot of hype. They won't achieve anything close to an order of magnitude improvement. Costs are largely driven by the laws of physics, and those are the same for everyone.

I'm honestly not informed enough to comment, but everyone seems to agree there is really bad mismanagement at Lockheed & co + the incentives as set up are truly fucked up (I remember reading on that, but don't have the source handy) and actively encourage manufacturers to pile on costs to make more profits.

If there's good R&D and first-order thinking in the mix, one order of magnitude does not seem insane to me. It's a cliche, but look at what Elon Musk has achieved, everyone said it couldn't be done, but it happened.

Ultimately other things can help, like designing new innovative form factors and cathering to a changing reality (it's doesn't make sense to shoot down 50k$ drones with 1M$ missiles).

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