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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

It's so odd that in modern America weapons being cheap and practical is often seen as a negative. Have to make sure to fork over a couple million per shot to a defence contractor.

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Guy is full of it though. Iranian drones are very effective while American Switchblade drones shit the bed completely in Ukraine.

We have US cloning Iranian drones now https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/10/flm-136-americas-cheap-i...

You're comparing apples, bananas, and pineapples while pretending they're all one thing. Switchblades are extremely effective (albeit expensive) anti-personnel (300 model) and anti-armor (600 model) drones. Shaheds are much larger, cheap, low on capabilities, but attritable used to attack fixed positions (e.g., buildings). These are all very different.

That's the point -- maybe the US should have bought apples instead of buying bananas.

I don't understand your point. Switchblades are (roughly) more akin to FPV (300 model) and Vampire drones (600 model) with reapect to size and payloads. Shahed style drones are roughly like like low end cruise missles. Different form factors and different capabilities. All of them are needed, but they're all very different.

A cruise missile is 3,000,000$ and a shahed drone is 50,000$ so if it’s even remotely the same capability it is an immense technological improvement over an expensive and slow to manufacture cruise missile.

You need a high/low capability that mixes all levels. For example, the Ukrainians and the Russians are both manufacturing very expensove cruise missles (Neptune/Iskander) and long range attack drones (shahed/fp-2/lute/etc). At any rate the original post I was responding to was comparing Switchblades to Shaheds, which is non-sensical.

What is the use case of a dumb, slow, suicide drone for the US army?

What’s the use case of a flying bomb that can be mass produced at little cost in days to weeks instead of months to years? Yeah tough to say really.

Well, what is it going to be used for?

Let’s compare it to Lancet then.

Lancets were miles better than Switchblades.

AFAIK Switchblades were used only in first months of the war then completely abandoned.

If only they had bought banana bombs!

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