Neros has raised $121M to build military drones
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000.
It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities).
Related:
Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.
This has nothing to do with keeping up with the intel from the conflict. This is entirely the product of our manufacturing issues. Manufacturing drove our success in WW2. Now we can't even manufacture low cost low(ish) tech drones at 1/10th the volume of potential adversaries.
Our military manufacturing volume was not very high before WW2. It wasn't until the potential adversaries became actual adversaries that we ramped it up.
If a similar sort of nation-uniting threat arose, to the extent that we'd be willing to take extreme measures like halting all manufacturing of civilian automobiles, drone production could be massively increased.
Of course, the problem is that the willingness is unlikely to be there until a serious war breaks out, and then we may not have the luxury of taking a couple of years to ramp up.
We can't, because we don't want to. Its theoretically possible for the USA to ramp up to be the biggest producer in world, but not quickly. Drones have many parts that aren't produced in the USA at all, so all of those lines would have to be developed from effectively nothing. This is not a fast process. Like that old saying, if you think you might need the wood in the future, you plant the seeds now.
On the plus side the govt did pull off a successful moonshot with the development of the vaccines.
On the downside it got derailed by a bunch of internet trolls and social media influencers to the point that it was denouncing its own (and arguably only) achievement during this period.
> “Vendors in the United States would laugh at us,” Hichwa said. American-made radios could cost $10,000 when he needed something for $30. The founders realized they’d have to build components themselves and seek suppliers outside the defense industry. Instead of using computer chips common in military equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, Neros used chips designed for parking meters at $1 each.
By the time your certification process represents 99.7%+ of your total costs, there's a chance it's hurting you more than it's helping.
Lots of Ukrainian commanders would happily trade FPV drones with grenades attached for mortar teams with lots of ammo and effective aircover.
Modern militaries need drones, but the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play.
An F-16 costs US$200 million and can be destroyed by a US$500 FPV drone with a grenade attached, as Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.
Surely you are correct that commanders would happily trade one FPV drone for one properly equipped F-16, even without the mortars. But it isn't clear that they would trade 400,000 FPV drones for the F-16, and that's the trade actually on offer.
The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war, probably because they don't work very well yet; that's why the Ukrainians are dinking around with FPV. The US Army has never faced even the kind of FPV drone war we're seeing in Ukraine. Their materiel has, though, since they shipped a lot of it to the Ukrainians, and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are trying to keep their tanks off the front lines when they can, and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.
Mix a targeting drone with a vehicle mounted mortar team and they can have faster rounds on target and get of the X quicker than drone teams. And nets don't stop mortars.
200M will by a lot of that and can be fielded in a very flexible way.
The obvious thing to do is to guide your mortar rounds with canards mounted slightly forward of the center of gravity, but the distance between "obvious" and done has a lot of rotting corpses in it.
When scarce weapons can defeat abundant weapons, and it's not because of range, it's usually because of precision. Drones are great at precision. 3 mortar rounds falling within 30 meters of your target trench are still ten times less deadly than a single FPV drone you can pilot straight into it.
TBF based on Ukraines own statistics drones miss a lot as well.
That's just absurd. There is almost no mission a real aircraft can do with ease that a drone can replace.
>and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.
Who told you that?
>Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.
The one that took out max 10 planes from a year long endeavor that occupied significant special forces? Russia seems to continue sending cruise missiles. They are closer to running out of planes, and cannot replace a single loss, but that operation was far more of a propaganda victory than a tactical one. Maybe it caused Russia to have to be more careful about the border and tie up some troops in that?
>The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war,
The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though. The UK did it before computers, and the US navy invented a brand new networked and automated battlespace management system for their fleet to handle hundreds of Russian cruise missiles launched at a surface group. In the 60s. The same Navy invented a mechanical gyro system for inertial navigation that modern ring laser gyros do not even come close to touching.
People have this weird idea that the US military industrial complex is incompetent and it's just radically misinformed and silly. The F35 had teething problems, same as every craft. The Switchblade is overpriced and underpowered, because it was a tiny experiment for mostly "Special forces" and thus had a special forces price tag. It's also dramatically more electronically sophisticated. The military refuses to build a new self propelled artillery system for.... reasons?
But the US military has a looooong history of fixing those teething problems and creating incredible equipment. Air to Air missiles started with a dud rate of like 60%. But the people who called them a fad were wrong. The people who said the US should invest into more cheap air power that had no bells and whistles (like ejection seats or radar warning systems) and that burning money on expensive SOTA aircraft using cutting edge electronics would be a boondoggle and would fail, and they were so fucking wrong. Literally those exact people were the ones crying about the F35 being crap and not living up to expectations, and they should ask Iran, who had plenty of Russian and homegrown anti-air weapon radars and SAM systems how well they fared against the F35, and the B2 which is an older Stealth system.
Meanwhile the biggest issue with the B21 raider is that Lockhead might lose money on it due to inflation.
The Navy definitely has trouble, but they've always been prima donnas when it comes to procurement, insisting on changing off the shelf stuff with custom requirements and asking for absurdities like the Zumwalt's original cannon, but the Aircraft Carriers are still insane and we can buy frigates from someone else.
Like, you people know that "The Pentagon Wars" about the Bradley was an absolute fiction, right? And that the claims Colonel Burton made in that book are wrong? And if you ask the Ukrainians, the Bradley (an old version at that!) is not only very effective, but an outright lifesaver. Something like 80% and above survivability for crew and passengers when it is destroyed. BMPs have radically worse survivability.
The US military has already adapted, with for example slapping a laser tracker on dirt cheap Hydra rockets as a way to reliably take down cheap munitions like Shaheds. That system has been a great success, and is super scalable. Beating that would require much faster munitions (at that point you are a pricier cruise missile) or being launched from so close you might as well use an artillery piece.
The single most powerful thing that small, cheap drones provide is small group ISR, allowing individual soldiers to have the kind of battlefield awareness in trench fighting as your average CoD protagonist. Maybe we are close to emulating the "Enemy, front, 300 feet" from Arma.
> Who told you that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM #video from May 19: #interview with #drones developer Sergey Tovkach from #Russia on how #weaponry from #Ukraine is far better than what the US and even China have, and now 70% of fatalities on the battlefield are from drones.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/... “#Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in #Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say. (...) drones rule the battlefield. They have far surpassed conventional arms as the war’s most lethal #weaponry. (...) The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say. (...) Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured, with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added. (...) Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025. (...) Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy. ¶ However effective they may be, the drones fall far short of meeting all of Ukraine’s war needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, commanders warn. Heavy artillery and other long-range weapons remain essential for many reasons, they say, including protecting troops and targeting command-and-control outposts or air-defense systems. ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-88Z-xqImI #video on #Ukraine #drones #weaponry, which it said is largely made by Vyriy and the Vampire’s maker Skyfall. Says dropping 10kg TM62 anti-tank mines onto tanks, and also dropping heavy bombs from drones, is a “warfare first”. The Vampire (Baba Yaga) can carry them 10km. Says the Donetsk battlefield is “dominated by FPV drones on both sides”. The most popular ground drone is Ratel’s 35kg-capacity Ratel S or “Honey Badger”.
> > Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.
> The one that took out max 10 planes from a year long endeavor that occupied significant special forces?
Yes, but that's only the beginning. Don't be like the people who dismissed covid as unimportant because it had only caused 2000 deaths.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-destroyed-t... #Israel #drones destroy two F-14 airplanes in #Iran. #weaponry #politics
> dirt cheap Hydra rockets as a way to reliably take down cheap munitions like Shaheds. That system has been a great success, and is super scalable. Beating that would require much faster munitions (at that point you are a pricier cruise missile) or being launched from so close you might as well use an artillery piece.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_70 a Hydra rocket costs US$2799, the cost of five Ukrainian FPV drones (though still a twentieth of the cost of the Shahed), and Operation Spiderweb found ways to launch their drones from nearly that close, ways that wouldn't have worked for an artillery piece. And you can beat laser targeting by humans simply by launching more simultaneous drones than there are defenders, or by flying below treetop level, or by flying outside the troposphere.
> The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though.
The US military just lost a war against Afghan shepherds, and the people in the US military who "fought skies filled with thousands of targets" retired decades ago. And they weren't paying for thousand-dollar toilet seats at the time.
Also, and this is crucial, thousands of targets is very different from millions of targets, and you are going to be seeing wars with skies filled with millions of targets within five years. More accurately, millions of weapons; the humans are their targets.
It is not going to look like a video game. Those are rigged to be winnable.
It's tough to imagine a scenario where the US is so bogged down on a front line that a few miles of range on a Ukraine style FPV drone is going to be a critical weapon, especially if this scenario also requires that the US not be able to perform SEAD, destroy GPS jamming, or hit the target with JDAM/Hellfires/ETC.
Having a Mavic or Mini drone that can perform recon, a small drone capable of delivering a grenade sized payload to hit entrenched targets, a larger drone that can offer BDA and recon for artillery/MLRS, or the "Loyal Wingman" airforce drones are all reasonable ideas. But I just don't see the US standing up a dedicated FPV regiment - it doesn't align with the rest of the force's composition or likely missions.
Essentially it's this dichotomy: If we need to project force overseas, it's existing at the end of a massive chain of logistics, air/sea power and lift capability, and a lot of dollars. Whether the drone costs 500, 1000, or 10,000 doesn't really matter at that point because the soldier operating it and the logistics to get him there has already cost hundreds of thousands, and even a $50K drone-bomb is cheaper than the cost of the JDAM, F-35 flight time, pilot, and carrier that would otherwise be used to hit the target.
If instead we are fighting on the homefront, battling over tens of miles of heartland and building drones from parts scavenged from a bombed out Best Buy or imported from some imaginary, untouched part of the world (because what would the world's supply chain look like in this scenario??), all assumptions go out the window and the idea of mass-producing any armament at all is impossible.
A disparate drone swarm taking out power distribution stations (I don't know what they're officially called) all over the country would be devastating. Lessons from https://cybersquirrel1.com/.
(I think there's an 'imagination' and/or 'perspective' limitation when you're already the gorilla. You think like a gorilla, you're unable to think like a parasite)
I believe the military term of art for this would be a “nothingburger”.
This kind of stuff is not expected to have a meaningful impact on your ability to fight.
Yes, it’s inconvenient for civilians. Has next to nothing to do with winning wars, much of WW2 was fought in much worse circumstances than “the electricity doesn’t work”.
Focusing on things like this results in diverting resources from fighting wars, and results in losing them (or at least hinders your ability to win). The goal isn’t to preserve quality of life for civilians, but to at the very least preserve the integrity of the nation.
It's the same reason why US military doctrine worries very little about jamming.
If something is jamming, the tactical response is to destroy the jammer.
If someone is drone attacking you, the tactical response is to destroy the drone launches.
Apparently, air defense is good enough to make the aviation use too expensive too quickly. It's possible that the US can saturate the air defense by the sheer number of airplanes, accepting heavy casualties in return. But what if it fails?
The war in Ukraine looks like it does because Ukraine has had to fight with constant equipment shortages. It's not really the future of warfare that modern militaries are prepping for.
There is a reason this administration is fast tracking drone production and easing up on procurement. Some stuff doesn't need super sophisticated systems with traditional processes to get off the ground quickly with a cheap swarm approach.
It's probably the only thing I can agree with this administration on.
With that said America would be doing both drone swarms and advanced missile systems where they are most effective.
Afghanistan proves your point.
... maybe. maybe not. the same army lost against stubborn Afghan shepherds. and before that against Vietnamese farmers.
Now that didn't translate into accomplishing the political war goals of nation-building, changing cultures, and counter-insurgency without massive troop presence; but that wasn't a failure of the armed forces.
What's that line: the US doesn't lose wars, it gets tired of them?
In the broader context of the discussion, the post I was replying to made it sound like US military might would be rendered ineffective against drones, just the same as it supposedly would against IEDs. That isn’t the case.
While IEDs accounted for losses, the US didn’t fail to accomplish war goals in Afghanistan because of technology, power, or IEDs, but just because of simple politics.
How would you propose the armed forces act differently in Afghanistan to change “hearts and minds” among a people that quite clearly support Taliban values and the existing way of life?
If you take that as a large variable then all the US wars of a last 50 years were mission accomplished.
I don't see the point in judging the wars from the obvious sideshows of "spreading democracy" or something of that nature.
It's like the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory: you lost and squandered trillions while tarnishing your reputation, but your sheer economic and geopolitical power made it so you didn't feel pretty much anything, nor did you learn much.
That might be okay if the national hobby is airlifting a BK to some forsaken land every 30 years. What happens when the technological gap is smaller and your opponents have access to a substantially higher manufacturing capacity? What happens when you have multiple conflicts and coincidentally suffer an economic slowdown? Being able to casually outspend your enemy is a nice luxury, not an advantage.
I suppose in a sense you are right: superpowers never lose; they just get tired, and more tired until they become Russia or the UK.
"They declare victory and run away."
This grates a little after the utter debacle of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya ...
I'd go 180 degrees the other way. The US needs to be less involved so it can focus on the cancerous legal corruption of all the rackets. Without dealing with that the wrong things will always be built for the wrong reasons at huge cost.
No relation!
An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness.
Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets.
No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer.
By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction.
Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars.
Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare.
And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think.
There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming.
Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there.
Russia uses plenty of artillery shells daily even today. Its own production easily outpaces NATO countries and they buy a lot from NK in addition to that.
Though they try to increase amount of "smart" munitions like Krasnopol, since they can be more cost effective than "dumb" shelling when you have guidance from drones.
>both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam
Tell that to fiber drones. They are used in such large amounts that entire fields get covered in fiber. Even radio controlled drones quickly evolve with wing-based drones acting as re-translators and carriers.
And in the near future (year or two) we will see mass adoption of drones which are able to fly autonomously with on-board computer vision. Initially it will be just guidance during final stages after the target is locked, but later we will see drone swarms launched into the enemy's direction which autonomously search and destroy everything what moves.
>They've only been useful on very soft targets.
Sure. And this is why on both sides shiny tanks and MRAPs from parades and military exercises now look like Mad Max vehicles.
>The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision
Meanwhile Russia found a huge success with its UPMK-modified FABs.
The situation may change significantly if an effective and cheap (kinetic or laser) anti-drone defense is developed and mass-deployed, but for now the sword is much stronger than the shield.
By the time it hits the ground target already moved, drone on the other hand will follow and allow you to aim at weak spots/soft targets of opportunity. That <$1000 drone IS your cheap Bonus round.
>mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective
30K dead russians every month is quite the harassment
>China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace
everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. How many Reaper shot down by Houthis? 7? 9?
I've emailed the mods to ask them to replace the post's URL.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-d... ("The 20-Somethings Who Raised $121 Million to Build Military Drones" by Farah Stockman)
Probably mostly a good thing now that I think about it - it moves the paper closer to the model of 20th century journalism (a local quasi-monopoly on news gathering and distribution funded by advertising) that was, for all its faults, pretty fucking good in retrospect.
Also, this is the NYT we're talking about here, the outfit that promoted the fiction about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and doxxed Scott Alexander while insinuating he was a Nazi. It's not a good choice for a poster child for "quality journalism".