US Military struggling to deploy AI weapons | Hacker News Reader

US Military struggling to deploy AI weapons

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The US is too proud to admit that Ukraine is the world expert on drone warfare and that Americans should learn from Ukrainians.

"Ukraine's homegrown drones have become increasingly lethal, critical tools in war with Russia" https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-fedorov-drones-war-rus...

"Poland turns to Ukraine for drone warfare expertise after Russian weapons enter airspace" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/poland-turns-to-ukraine-f...

The US needs Ukraine to exist and not be annexed by Russia.

What if their drones weren't good? Just a country being attacked, with no strategic war technology transfer. Then, what should the US position be?

Call me an idealist, but I think the priority in this conflict should be their sovereignty and the well being of the people over there. Otherwise it's just weird.

Two points here. (1) A lot of technology that Ukraine uses is based on what the Western countries have provided them. (2) Ukraine struggles with AI as well, in fact, according to some sources, Ukraine is already behind Russia in drone technology. One of the reasons cited is that they invested heavily into AI and it did not yield viable drones. On the other hand, Russians decided to invest into manually controlled drones controlled via optic cables and they are very effective.

I trust very few "sources", especially these days. And even more especially, in the middle of a war between two former USSR states that have deep histories in manipulating public opinion and weaponizing that against their adversaries.

> weaponizing that against their adversaries

I understand your skepticism, but here is an interview from April 2025 with the founder of VYRIY, a Ukrainian drone company: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/vyriy-founder-compares-accura... According to him, Russian drones are far superior. "In terms of [Ukrainian drone vs Russian drone] quality, well, like 10% vs. 80%. It’s not even comparable,” Oleksii Babenko sums up.

That article suggests that the difference is due to economics & possibly intended use, not technological advances.

Manufacturing is a technology.

But manufacturing something simpler to achieve optimal cost/benefit ratios is not a technological advance.

Again, I don’t trust sources that are random quotes on the interwebs during a conflict where people are dying (or corporate PR speak) but maybe that’s a me problem?

1. Did you read the first link? Virtually all of Ukraine's FPV (first-person view) attack drones are domestically produced.

2. If that's the case, why is the US trying to invest heavily into AI as well if we learned from Ukraine that AI controlled drones are shittier than human controlled drones?

> If that's the case, why is the US trying to invest heavily into AI as well if we learned from Ukraine that AI controlled drones are shittier than human controlled drones?

What is according to your estimates the ratio for research funding for human-controlled and AI-controlled weapons in the US nowadays?

The US and EU/NATO are facing growing technological obsolescence. They lack the capability to effectively counter modern threats and appear disconnected from the realities of contemporary warfare.

A clear example is NATO’s struggle to respond to Russian drone incursions. Recently, over 20 drones were launched into Polish airspace—yet only four were intercepted, at a cost of millions of dollars. The remainder crashed across Polish territory, highlighting serious gaps in air defense systems.

Weren’t there well over 100 launched, most of which were intercepted by Ukraine, and 20 made it into Polish airspace?

Oh, totally, I'm so glad you have all the facts and can enlighten us.

I think NATO is more important now than it has been in decades.

NATO can't decide if they should try and shoot down Russian missiles and drones over their territory because they are afraid to escalate and don't want to anger Russia. Did you know they only agreed to shoot down Russian war planes flying over NATO territory after Trump okayed it? Unbelievable that they would let an adversary fly their bombers over their territory in the first place. Did you know that NATO has member countries that are aligned with Russia? I encourage you not to take my word for it but investigate it for yourself, there are plenty of trustworthy Western Analysts that support what I have said.

Trump said that Russia is a paper tiger/bear, but Russia exposed that the West/EU is just as incompetent and NATO is basically useless without the support of the USA which is questionable. But I'm sure 100% NATO will get a chance to prove its worth, it will be interesting to see if it can meet the coming challenges.

Hey, I didn't say NATO was effective (they should be shooting down anything Russian that violates their NATO airspace, just like Turkey did).

I just said NATO is really important at the moment. It's a tool - an important tool - but that doesn't mean it's being wielded correctly. Is that the fault of the hammer or the fault of the Trump supporter holding it?

"Warm water ports"

>The US is too proud to admit that Ukraine is the world expert on drone warfare and that Americans should learn from Ukrainians.

there is literally nobody in America who nurses that type of pride, quite the opposite, Americans have been unusually open to integrating foreign ideas from the beginning.

Broad statement.

i took a peek, you didn't reply "broad statment<period>" to the comment I was replying to... hmmm, pov masquerading as logic/grammar nazi?

Huh?

This is what happens when you only talk to like-minded people and live in a bubble. There are still plenty of people I know who would reject foreign ideas simply because "pshaw. We can [do that/do it] better."

I mean I literally worked with a guy who got annoyed at the harmonized power cord I bought because it used IEC wire colors and "This is America where we use American wire colors, not that European shit. I taped the leads red white and blue!"

Can we not use examples from the bottom 5% of the population and extrapolate that to the entire population?

Also 99.99% chance the guy was making a joke.

> bottom 5% of the population

Where did that number come from?

> Also 99.99% chance the guy was making a joke.

If you have no idea who this person is how can you even begin to make such an assumption? You are in fact 100% wrong.

Not getting jokes is a skill issue, what can I say.

You can say you are wrong because you don't know the person at all.

I will say I have very low confidence that your perception of reality and actual reality match.

That is a really silly take. The US has had "advisors" embedded with Ukraine forces since the beginning of the war. Multiple high level Pentagon officials (think multi-star generals) have mentioned in interviews over the years how valuable is the intel they have been learning and collecting from the war. I can guarantee you that somewhere in Langley there are many analysts constantly churning out reports about battlefield lessons and techniques from the Ukrainian war.

I like to think that there is core of career public servants inside the US government who take their jobs seriously and they perform it well. Whether decision makers take their inputs into account is a different matter.

> I like to think that there is core of career public servants inside the US government who take their jobs seriously and they perform it well.

That could have been taken for granted in every administration before this one.

I once backed a kickstarter for a US company called Vantage Robotics. They were building a cool drone and it looked like it would be fun to have. It took them about 2 years to get it delivered and by then, drone technology had advanced far past what they were offering. The thing crashed on its first flight, destroying it.

Instead of just shutting down, they dropped all their early supporters and pivoted to US military contracts. Their website is still full of out dated technology. Reading this headline is no surprise to me.

You are right, the only moral thing for them to do is ship fully explosive military grade versions of their product to all backers

The link doesn't work.

Also missiles already use AI to know where they are, so I'm skeptical that the headline is true.

That's the previous generations of AI which has been rebranded to "machine vision" and "machine learning" rather than "AI" due to the numerous hype crashes making the term AI unpalatable for a generation.

It's materially different than "Generative AI" which is the current trend of AI hype, which is what I think the "AI" in the title is referring to.

Unlikely to be Gen AI. The military applications of missiles that can generate LinkedIn posts about B2B marketing as they descend on their targets are probably quite limited.

You’re not using your imagination enough. Warfare is more than just munitions.

Yes, I see great potential in injecting your AI into the enemies communication system. Being able to have an AI try and persuade your enemy to do things in your favor, confuse them, or censor information all processed in real time and potentially at scale of the enemy's entire army is very powerful. It could even take a passive role and serve as pure intelligence gathering of the current state of things.

Aside from the potential scale, those arent really new ideas. The scale could actually be a hindrance. Once it's used, it's future utility drops dramatically. Kind of how the intelligence community don't want to burn their zero days or exploits for low value operations. Even utilizing intelligence frorm passive opperation can tip them off.

In this instance the article does say "An ambitious Pentagon plan to field thousands of cutting-edge drones to prepare for a potential conflict with China has [...] struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work."

So these particular "AI weapons" would appear to be munitions.

I feel like a lot of those other uses are more aligned to the three letter agencies for intelligence and influence if were talking mostly about gen AI. I assume the next best place (excluding munitions and their delivery systems) would be cyber operations. But this realm is touchy and the leaders don't want to start a shooting war with cyber retaliation/strikes. The oversite, need for human in the loop, and aversion to collateral damage make AI weapons difficult to develop and deploy, especially if we earent counting older computer vison etc. It's no surprise the military is having trouble developing and deploying AI weapons in that environment.

You can use Gen AI to generate actuator inputs.

How about a multimodal model that looks at sensor inputs and decides about what it sees being the actual target and what might be a decoy, and generates guidance commands to the real target? Does that sound like a military application of the GenAI capabilities we know exist today with vision and computer use?

Or perhaps an AI with a tactics/strategy prompt that watches the statuses/locations of several drones and coordinates their actions to achieve an overall objective? Does that sound like a military application that the military could be working on?

The link works for me.

> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.

> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.

So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.

I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.

In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.

> because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians

says who? the US military is completely fine with mistakenly killing civilians

> want to

> fine with

In military theater it’s an important distinction.

But really, you just wanted to post a comment trashing the US. It didn’t add to the conversation.

Redirects to home in Android FF with UBO. Chrome loads the article on the same device.

Missiles famously know where they are not.

https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

> Missiles famously know where they are not.

what if it misses a few locations where they are not?

Archive: <https://archive.is/JTx8p>

(Origin works for me as well.)

Getting this patchwork of weapons to work will be another test for Anduril and Palmer Luckey

Reply on news.ycombinator.com