US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious.
The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough.
I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.
I'm not sure if "AI for red tape mitigation" is a thing, but "AI for killer drones" sure is. I suspect that "killer drones are insufficiently smart" is easier to fix with AI than "too much red tape". Because the amount of red tape, if unopposed, will expand to consume any capacity of dealing with it, AI or not.
Seems unlikely. Regulation and Health & Safety are both societal luxuries, which only happen once societies are stable and prosperous enough to start valuing human life beyond its ability to perform labour.
The moment the bombs start dropping, the time for luxuries also stops, and the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society. There isn’t the money or resources for anything more than that.
The US (most developed democracies) places an extremely high value on the lives of soldiers, because dead soldiers in foreign wars does terrible things to politicians in power. Paying 1000X more for the same tech as Ukraine to minimise the number of service members killed using it, is a pretty small price to pay.
Rules and regulations on safety and health will maintain combat effectiveness and manpower where the loss -even temporary due to injuries or sickness- of well trained specialists (and don't forget that even a "simple" infantryman is a highly specialized expert in his field!) is not acceptable. Those rules were written in blood and modern western militaries can not sustain the rate of loss that Russia seems to be ok with. Western leader will be well advised to try to minimize losses to real combat casualties.
But I sure think that they will start to cut corners, at least where it comes down to documentation and purely cya.
> the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society.
OP was talking about how US munitions software needs to go through a 6 week long integration test before it can be deployed. I seriously doubt that kind of testing would last very long if the US was engaged in peer level war, and their enemy had found a flew in their munitions guidance systems that made the munitions useless.
At the end of the day, when at war time isn’t just money, it’s also lives. When you have people dying on the frontlines, the risk of equipment failures from lack of testing will be substantially smaller that loss of lives from ineffective equipment, that can only be improved every other month.
Preventing that is much more important than the exact dollar efficiency of said equipment during peacetime.
Regulation - or more generally - formalization comes with scaling up. A skunkworks project can innovate really fast, and has no integration and scale needs. When you want to scale up any project (hardware or software), integrating and scaling become a real bitch, and you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page or face costly "silly" mistakes that history is replit with.
You can't magick away coordination challenges by labeling the process "red tape." This happens every single time any small nimble organization grows beyond certain thresholds. On a personal level, organizing a trip for 3 friend is process-free, but for 10+ people requires checklists and heavier processes, for 30 people it becomes a nightmare requiring professional assistance. Low probability events become regular occurrences when you scale, and you have to plan and/or mitigate them adding "red tape".
It matters if you care about 1, 2, or 10 out of the 30 people on the trip missing a flight, getting lost, or going hungry.
Of course there's a bare minimum for a product that works at all. Beyond that there are increasing levels of rigor that focus on reliability, and these can be non-linear.
As an aside, the word Guerrilla (little war) was coined during Napoleon's occupation of Spain to describe the resistance effort by locals and peasants against the French army.
Every Goliath may, in the long run, meet a David that beats it, but this premise ignores all the thousands of Davids that don't win.
If you glass the villages and salt the fields, you even win against the taliban and vietkong.
Yes because Ukraine fights an existential war and at this point on both sides people just shrug when a few civilians get blown up.
The US isn't under existential threat and when they go to war their highest priority is to never risk the lives of operators and if possible, if only for PR reasons (and even then it doesn't always work) not generate news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones. The attack on a school in Iran that killed 150 children apparently was already the result of a rushed mission that ignored procedures because this kind of thinking is starting to take hold in US defense circles.
That's not just an ethical disaster but also a political and strategic one because these events can rally enemies around a regime and the political arena is where for the US wars are won and lost, both at home and abroad.
Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.
Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.
Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.
Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.
Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.
Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.
People say “it’s a one line change” (once they argued it was a 1 bit change!). But lacking a fully controlled and hermetic build system with its own exhaustive test suite you can’t be sure about the relationship between the source and the binary. And that continues to every step to get the binary into production (updating existing devices, etc).
Sure, your ultra paranoid checking of everything might catch an extremely rare bug caused by something like interactions between a benign code change and a build system. But is it worth slowing down the development process by that much?
Is it worth missing out on an entire generation of technology, like what happened with US and the shift from 00s drone warfare and 20s drone warfare?
Usually not.
For the consensus algorithm in your distributed database? slow down there buddy...
You have to ask: how bad could this get? How hard will it be to fix? Could we loose or corrupt user data?
> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.
This also misses the point imo. A simpler answer is "necessity is the mother of invention". There is value in a regime for peacetime. One is also a fool if they do not recognize needs change drastically in wartime. Two things can be true. The United States, like nearly all sensible nations, has almost always understood this and acted accordingly. On the other hand, nations that govern themselves as if they were on a perpetual war path are usually far less desirable societies. The idea that we need to speed rush "AI for killer drones" because otherwise we will find ourselves on the wrong end of an existential invasion are nonsensical. Americans would be far better off if our leaders and our people stopped acting like every potential conflict was existential.
There is no Russia on our borders. The only thing American adventures overseas have accomplished in the last two decades is making our country weaker.
In Ukraine the military will take any drone they can get their hands on, so all you have to do is build a drone, give a bunch of them to the army to try out on the Russians, and within a week they will tell you if it works or not. So your design iteration loop is probably weeks. If you are successful, the time between hearing the general say "give me 1 million" and when the bulldozers start clearing the factory site is probably measured in days.
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
It's even worse than that. Schedules slipping and cost overruns are good things for the manufacturer, because they can charge more on top of their initial contract. Cost-plus ftw.
But you still run into similar issues regardless of the contract structure. Try and build a rail network without anyone in government wanting something changed from the initial design for 20 years.
Most are paid to prevent projects with a given defect type from proceeding. They aren't rewarded for the number of projects that succeed without defects. Preventing CYA from running wild is a legitimately hard problem to solve.
Well yes, that and the fact that cheap drone guerilla tactics have fairly recently become a technological possibility. Remember that Ukraine is actually a bit late to the party here, with Hezbollah and ISIS having used cheap drones with cameras and/or explosives tied to them years before Ukraine or Russia did. The asymmetry in cost between those cheap drones and the existing "more hightech = more better" militaries were (and are!) used to was already established. That a party such as Ukraine faced with a more advanced and much larger opponent would lean towards such an approach makes a lot of sense. Ukraine did not (and does not really) have significant amounts of the traditional stuff.
Now given that they chose that path, they have been very effective recently, but note that the tethered fiber-optic drones were a Russian invention. So even that deeply corrupt, large dinosaur of an institution innovated significantly. It is also important to note that a significant part of the recent successes of Ukraine are due to them having Starlink access and Russia no longer having it.
I'm not saying the sheer will to survive or the inventive organisation of the Ukranians did nothing (far from it), but I do think it is a mistake to think that their success should only be viewed through that lens.
Ukraine fights back or they lose their sovereignty. Most of the conflicts the US gets into, it's entirely a choice to put soldiers at risk.
So yeah, the evaluation of war effort will be different, because the situations are completely different.
Startups = have few resources, product has to work or company dies
Big tech = minimal cost of failure, instead minimizing risk
And yet this mechanic is also why startups are able to innovate and bring new products to market so much faster.
Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks between iterations (and possibly more after it leaves your shop) that takes a one year effort and turns it into about 1.5. So the program office decides you should do one big release each year, which also ups the risk because a lot of testing that would catch bugs isn't done until the end in that big 6-week test effort. Oops, now your 1 year + 6 week effort just got turned into 1 year + 6 week + (unknown rework time) + 6 weeks. Probably 2 years.
It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.
I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.
See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.
The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.
I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.
For every Curiosity and JWST, there's ARM and Artemis. It seems like it's getting better now, but very slowly.
1. Something blows up.
2. It gets pasted all over the news.
3. People wonder why we give NASA money to blow stuff up
4. Congress people with room temperature IQs grill NASA admin for months.
5. NASA becomes risk adverse.
6. Today.
There's some sort of happy middle ground between flying a ship that has a very significant chance of a catastrophic failure killing all crew and can't even fly unmanned, and almost not letting Ingenuity fly because the chance of failure was deemed too great. NASA didn't find it.
Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.
There is a process for getting a change into version control. Each change needs to have a (virtual) paper trail: motivation, risk analysis, sign-offs &c.
If you can't get something into VC quickly, you can't really do CI.
The obvious solution would be to have an integration branch that doesn't need the process to get in, do CI testing on that branch and then make the process for merging to the real branch.
I've never seen this done personally, but I have been told some places do it, and then you end up with "Change X, which got approved had a dependency on Change Y that didn't get approved and we didn't realize it until now because Change Y was put in the integration branch before Change X"
The dependency problem doesn't exist, because all the features were already approved to be in the release. The only way there would be a problem is if someone decided late in the game to pull a feature and that feature was a dependency to something else.
I also maintain that it is impossible to know which changes depend on other changes. In one case, applying a bugfix that changed the order of allocations at startup caused vtable corruption somewhere else because it changed how much padding a particular malloc() call was returning, and someone was writing past the end of their allocation.
[edit]
Also note that what you described is not CI; things are developed on their own branches and not integrated immediately.
Roll back the change? Also, fix the approval process - no way that should have been approved.
Generally speaking that is risk management, an unavoidable engineering tradeoff. In lower stakes situations, for example a critical application or server for a small office, we let low-impact bugs accumulate: Imposing risks, and therefore eventual costs, to avoid minor workarounds and low-impact bugs is poor engineering and risk management.
Engineering and all risk management includes tradeoffs. It's easy to criticize the downside of the tradeoff - the same people criticize the reverse decision when the server (or drone) crashes - when someone is not responsible for both sides of it, when they are not accountable for their words when the outcome occurs.
That's speaking generally. It's also poor risk management to be overly safe. I don't know about the parents' situation. But drone crashes (risking humans), mission failure, $50 million losses, and associated downtime (including delays) and labor costs, seem like high costs that are worth some pain to avoid.
You used to be able to take a hit and survive a war. Those days are gone. Now you die because 1kg of C4 blew up your entire ass, or you take a less dramatic hit but you will never be dragged back to a field hospital.
Eventually the US or similar will have to get into this kind of war, and there will be a come to jesus moment for all the hoo rah americans who think your chances of surviving a war are based on anything other than sheer luck.
This is Bad, man.
Nukes already showed you can't make a weapon so crazily deadly and destructive that man would end war, so things will be bleak for the rest of humanity's reign.
artillery, missiles, and long range drones are in the mix too. AI enabled spotting makes ISR detection rapid and effective.
some kubernetes container spots a random pixel that means hidden vehicles and a HIMARS strike is dispatched ASAP
Also recent advances in battery tech brought increased energy density: the same drones which had range 20km now have 40km.
(The killcam is a WW2 invention, starting with linking cine cameras to the machine guns of fighter aircraft)
We want to perform our work skillfully, effectively, and professionally. But we never want our tools to actually be needed.
(Another is that we can't effectively create a shield without the risk of it being used as a sword.)
If you make a hammer, it can always be used to murder someone, but if you make an AK-47, there's only one way it can be used. So if you don't want what you make to be used for killing, don't make an AK-47. If you 're good at toolmaking, choose to make tools that are not weapons.
Even when it comes to more expensive things like cruise missiles it seems the planning has to be that some high percentage of them may be shot down (and much higher for slower moving drones), so you really want them cheap and in high volume, with reliability somewhat of a secondary concern.
Not to bring Tesla into this, but the contrast here is stunning. From a component manufacturer about the mindset of Tesla:
"Hey, we sent you over the new firmware for the component, check it out." (The test suite for this component takes approximately 36 hours to execute.)
Three hours later:
"This is working so much better, thanks a lot!"
"???"
"Oh, we just flashed a car we have here and took it out for a drive."
"?!?"
Oof.
I'm surprised that someone who uses such a phrase was working on classified hardware in the "mid and late 00s".
tl;dr, not in practice. Far as I can tell this is still the SOTA in FPOV drone autonomy:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-drone-racing
Basically, those guys trained a drone to beat human FPOV racers but they had access to the race course layout before the race and trained extensively on it. Can't do that on a battlefield.
Also: no shooting at enemy drones during FPOV races. Makes surviving to the end of the race simpler.
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisi...
Are Spanish people white or Hispanic according to those definitions?
'Original peoples' is an interesting phrase. Neanderthals? Beaker people?
A single category for everyone from Pakistanis to Japanese is weird.
Sounds totally legit.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal. I guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheaper alternatives also.
My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?
There is a group in South Florida who stand watch over turtle nests on the beach to ensure the hatchlings make it to the ocean instead of instinctively moving towards the street lamps or the bright hotels. I would use drones to hover over the nests to detect if the turtles hatch so people don't have to stand there.
What would you do?
I like to think about how providing 4-week paid parental leave would cost $2 billion annually and actually help US families. Meanwhile we have spent over $100 billion on this war.
What signal are you looking for with that question? It feels much more like a thought experiment with friends while having a few pints than something reasonable for a job interview.
(Your share of overall defense spending is ~1,000x higher, of course.)
I wish political leaders would express it that way. And you need to include the time factor: $10/year for 10 years differs from $20 for a one-time event. And somehow figure in capital accumulation (as opposed to e.g., consumables) and depreciation. But there are clear, effective ways to communicate it: 'I propose each American spend an average of $80/year for 50 years on this fighter jet program'. 'This moon mission will cost everyone $5/year for 2 years.'
To nitpick a little, I think your math is off: There are 350 million Americans, but we need to exclude most children, elderly, etc.
Thinking of country-scale finances in the same way you think about personal finance is wrong in many ways. Take debt for example. As an individual, it's arguably best not to have debt at all. As a country, sovereign debt is the foundation of the world's money supply and fuels continuous economic growth.
Also, though the U.S. has $31 Trillion dollars of debt, $22 Trillion of that belongs to U.S. domestic traders.
If we were to cut our debt down to zero, we'd cripple ourselves with taxes and stifle growth. We'd have zero debt but we'd be sent into a massive economic depression, and that would likely ripple out across the planet.
Less than half are net income tax payers, IIRC. So if you pay income tax, you're actually on the hook for more $6, on average.
> I would use drones to hover over the nests to detect if the turtles hatch so people don't have to stand there.
And put brighter lights on the drones to lead them in the right direction!
But if you asked me that in an interview, I would probably question whether I wanted to work there. I don't think random, irrelevant, put-me-on-the-spot questions help anyone on either side of that coin.
You are just assuming that the whole readership of Hacker News are US-citizens.
I, for example, are from an EU country. So "there are 450,000,000 of us" if I'd had a similar attitude.
So $1 billion is about equal to 4 hour hours of government spending.
$7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.
The organizations that do this have mobile apps and collect tons of data. If I'm use ML, I'd start with time series forecasting to see if I can get the window done to a few hours.
tax billionaires, then
You can do full Dekulakization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization) on them and it won't change anything in current economic situation.
Confiscating 100% of all billionaire wealth (~$8.4T) covers - ~1.1 years of federal spending (~$7.4T) - ~4.4 years of deficits (~$1.9T) - ~23% of debt (~$36T):
and pretty much kills US ability to rely on private sector (and I dont think we have a way to rely on public sector)
The sooner we all start focusing on things that actually matter -- like improving democracy, quality of education (btw spending more may not solve it) etc -- the faster we will improve situation.
Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc). Taxing more may not be the answer.
*it should be studied what motivates people to repeat it
So...what are you talking about?
I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.
The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.
US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
I'm not sure if "future" is a good word for the widespread civil unrest, nascent insurgencies, and very normal soft-target gun battles that happen weekly here, but our "US conflict" looks like street-to-street fighting, within our own borders, with people who are already here.
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." -- Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5
Does one really need to bring along 2,500 kg of ordinance, when we can launch another $50,000 shahed-equivalent at whatever hard targets the loitering drone locates?
- Reapers fly at a "medium" altitude, which is up to about 50,000 feet;
- They can fly up to 300mph;
- Despite being relatively high up they are relatively slow so lots of country have the military capability to shoot them down and have done so. This includes Iran and the Houthis;
- A typical payload is 2x GBU-31 JDAM (1000lb each). The explosive payload is roughly half that but these are relatively cheap (<$50,000) because they're barely-guided gravity bombs;
- They will also have 4x AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which are precision-guided, costs $100k+ each but only has an explosive payload of under 20lb. When people talk about drone assassinations that becccame super-popular in the Obama administration, this is largely what they're talking about;
- You can also skip the JDAMs and just have 8x Hellfires instead.
Now Shahed drones aren't as fast, don't fly as high, aren't as precise and you know they're there (a lot of Hellfire attacks are a surprise). But they're incredibly cheap and they overwhelm missile defences easily just by sheer volume. In fact, we're using $1-4M Patriot interceptors to shoot down $20k drones. Obviously that's not going to scale when Iran can produce thousands a month and the supply lag for Patriots is actually years long. Supplies of certain missile defense munitions are suspected to be critically low already and will take years to replenish.
So where I'm going with all this is that Reapers and Sheheds serve different purposes but however you look at it, a $50M Reaper with $1M+ in munitions is WAY less efficient at deliverying payloads that a swarm of cheap drones, particularly when your enemy has invested a lot in missile defense and your $50M Reaper is vulnerable to air-defense systems from even non-state actors (ie the Houthis).
Put another way, $20k for a 50-100kg payload is incredibly efficient and the US has essentially been forced to evacuate all their Gulf bases because they're completely unable to defend them. Billions in damage has been done to these bases too.
The Reaper just isn't fit for purpose anymore. Use it against a more militarized opponennt (eg Russia, China) and they'll shoot those things down like it was a carnival side show.
Partly, but I think there also is a feedback loop. Reapers are expensive, so they must reliably reach their targets. That makes them more expensive (need to be faster, more reliable, less visible on radar, etc), so fewer get ordered, so they must get even more powerful and reliable. That makes them more expensive, etc.
Also, being very expensive, you want them to be able to return home after a mission. That again increases weight, costs.
Result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper says only 575 got built over a period of about 20 years. In comparison, the USA built about 96,000 aircraft in 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...), reaching that total in about two days.
Being less flip, the pull quote suggests (per my bias) our drone design is as much influenced by how much shit contractors can sell to put on a drone as it is by tactical needs. The kinds of targets that would require one ton of explosive are fixed sites that have been specifically hardened against attack. You'd hope some modern McArthur would look at the situation and say, "Screw it, we will just go around those sites and bomb the hell out of their supply lines with tiny drones", but what the hell do I know?
In short: War is sell.
The same with the other stuff, they have super important radar and super important ships that need to be defended and a failure creates irreplaceable loses. Iran on the other hand, just like with their super important leaders lost all its “super weapons” like destroyers and the drone ships and yet again brought USA to its knees.
Maybe USA has more fundamental problems, not just drones. Maybe the problem is the obsession of wonderweapons for destroying wondertargets.
It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him.
Maybe the desire for concentration of power and seeing everything through that lens is the issue?
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.
The fact they unironically used Star Wars in their war memes was an amazing self-own.
This is just a personal opinion, but lines up with Ukraine (burning refineries), EU (seizing sanctioned tankers FINALLY), VZ (cutting exports to China and moving to USA), and Iran (close the strait every so often). The unifying thread seems to be applying consistent pressure around China.
Germany plays Russian anthem like you've never heard it before (Dec 12, 2021)
(did he cry ?)
Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).
The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.
The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the Soviet invasion. They were maybe surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.
The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands as the Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. The Soviets had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan. The Soviets did have plans to possibly attack Hokkaido, but as the wikipedia entry says "...Historians have generally considered it unlikely that an invasion of Hokkaido would have succeeded. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
There were plans to increase the A-bomb production rate. After November 1945 U.S. would produce a atomic bomb every 10 days. The production rate for year 1946 was planned to be 6 bombs every month.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1...
So after 1946 there would be not much of Japan left to invade.
The bombing of Iran is nowhere the scale of bombing of Japan, see for example the fire bombing of Tokyo.
Had they not, the carpet bombings would have continued - not just the fire bombing of Tokyo, another 71 cities had also been bombed flat. With H&N that made a total of 74 cities down and a list of targets for future bombing still ready to work through.
FWiW the HE+incendiaries bombings used more planes but were cheaper overall than (at that time) atomic weapons - and (at that time) caused much the same amount of damage, injury, and death.
The US (well Israel) saw this as the stars aligning. Trump even called on Iranians early in the engagement to seize the opportunity.
But the ground swell didn't happen, and the US got played. Trump rolled a critical fail.
How it could be a surprise more riots didn't happen?
No one in Iran wants their children bombed for US to "free them". US and Israel don't care about Iran.
They just want to destroy our country and take our wealth. Like they have been doing all over the world.
Source: Iranian who doesn't support the Islamic Republic, but have some family members who do.
We can resolve our internal issues with discourse (and sometimes violence if it comes to it).
A.) Would you be happy if the government changed? (85% approval)
B.) Are you willing to potentially sacrifice your life and the lives of your sons to change the government? (3% approval)
It's almost like you can't paint an entire country with one brush?
One of the few exceptions was the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which the entire chain of command was killed and the Agriculture Secretary ends up as the leader of the refugee humans.
Yes we do, it is called imperialism. Now with a sprinkle of senile Fascism.
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
First, despite the Millennium challenge being "debunked", it still played out in the same direction.
Second, and this is a big one, after the Church committee when the CIA was put under congressional oversight, a big majority of the clandestine work was put under Special Ops type groups, ie the Army Rangers, Navy Seals, etc.
When we were in Afghanistan, we would do the "target the leader" game, but it was far more dark in reality. Since we were going against a distributed insurgent force, we would send the special ops guys to targets intelligence deemed important. There'd be an op tempo of 2-3 a week. Years passed, and we didn't make any headway, so the op tempo was increased.
A target would be chosen, and the operators sent out. They'd kill the target, and look for any papers/documentation with other names. If you were this guy's dentist, you could be caught up in this. Since a majority of the operators didn't speak the language, they had no context to the names. It was more like the metadata network of connections exposed by Snowden.
Since we needed more operations(2-3 a night instead of a week), we'd go after less and less important targets, tangentially related to another target. We effectively turned the special ops groups into clandestine death squads with nearly zero accountability.
In addition, we were supporting warlords in the area that were pro-poppy cultivation and anti-Taliban. We'd protect the poppy plants that would go on to supply a large majority of the world's Heroin supply.
Where is this going? Well the cynic in me says it's simply a scam. We spend more on fancy military hardware that allows us to kill more effectively while barely pushing the needle on our goals. The mass amount of death we drop on populations creates new generations of "terrorist/freedom fighters" who rightfully have a grudge against the US war machine.
The money spent doesn't move the needle materially, but it provides propaganda in the form of "look at our death machines, we have the most in the world", which is a double edged sword of "hoorah" at home and "don't fuck with the crazy guy holding the gun" outside of home. The expensive weapons taxpayers buy from defense contractors are too expensive and complicated to build in bulk, so we run out quickly the second we have an enemy that can shoot back with more than an AK.
We're still trying to fight the war of 2-3 wars ago. We also learned from Vietnam that by no means should the general public easily learn the reality of the war. That worked until recently when the victim of a proxy war was able to upload daily videos onto tiktok and break the decades long good will between the US and an unnamed vassal.
Anyway, tl;dr, the ole military industrial complex is still at it, lobbying our government to spend money we don't have on wars we cannot afford as a public works program that only excels in death, rather than public works in healthcare, infrastructure, science, etc.
The USA Military was quite aware that killing Irans Leadership is not 'it'.
But Trump saw how well venezuela worked so that was it.
Yeah USA politics is not 4D Chess.
Isreals only power to doing so, was knowing USA was behind it.
They knew already that Iran might not belly up just because their leadership gets killed. And they knew very well how Iran is fighting (in the mountains) and that they will close the strait of hormuz
Trump overruled it. He thought it was as easy as venezuela and he might have assumed that the civil unrest helps.
I have only read the first book, and it was nice and humbling experience to me as an American.
https://www.amazon.com/Disintegration-Indicators-Coming-Amer...
Blog:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
Review:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/how-russia-views-...
1. Flatten Kharg
2. Flatten a dozen roads critical to transportation infrastructure
3. Continue the blockade
4. Stonewall peace attempts
5. Wait 5-6 weeks and win
The Trump administration isn't doing that because they're trying to avoid another generation unconditionally hating the US again. Having enemies that blindly hate you is how you get into Russia's situation where even an outright victory will result in IRA-style Ukrainian terrorist groups.
The reason the trump administration is suing for peace is because the midterms are coming up, and the situation for Republicans looks dire.
These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.
You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.
If you insist on firing guided missiles at ground targets from a drone that returns to base you're never gonna be able to compete on cost.
If the cheap solution involves having troops only a dozen miles away from the enemy, then you're going to take casualties, and funeral costs are FAR more expensive then the cost to buy a large bird and fly it from a 100+ miles away.
Guided missiles specifically are insanely pricey by comparison to the warhead alone; just for the possibility that your slow, vulnerable drone might be able to return (and be used again) you have to make very expensive engineering tradeoffs, and even when the thing comes back you have to repair and service it, too (and stock it up with more expensive missiles).
Depends on the goal. If the goal is to make high precision strikes - one big drone with tons of capabilities. If the goal is the terror strike campaign like russian - cheap Shahed drones are the best.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense.
And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked:
"Don't you support our troops?"
And that'll be the end of that
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
That's just a byproduct of propping up the military industrial complex; have to have conflicts to justify giving the primes sole-source cost+ contracts so they can meet their quarterly EPS targets.
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
When the Republicans rule.
Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.
These are captured markets, there is no competition. The bar is set high, or specifically, so that small players cannot compete, and this is done by extensiive relationship management at all levels, and heavy marketing.
It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.
Even in the face of glaring evidence form Ukraine the system is slow to react.
Shaheds are used for years and the US just let their gear sit out in the open in the Gulf.
You could provide 'irrefutable evidence' to a political system of some fact, it's not hugely helpful.
The system does not change until the power dynamics do - aka Iran destroyed gazillions in US gear and some senior level people are 'demanding answers'.
Defence contracts are an 'inside game' it's extremely political.
Only when people are in a rush do they start to look at outside agencies to find the best gear for the problem they need to solve 'right now'.
Five years later the startup had been bought by a major military contractor, budgets ballooned, a number of the original people (including me) left, our software was on its way to becoming the legacy solution, and the cycle continued.
After seeing how US military contracting works up close, I no longer find it surprising that military tech costs orders of magnitude more than commercial or consumer tech. It's also not surprising why so few organizations are able to do both government and consumer/commercial technology -- optimizing for one makes you ill-suited to compete in the other.
Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
Some of us were paying attention as early as the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS was using DJI drones to drop grenades into the turret hatches of Iraqi uparmored Humvees. Others started to notice during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Azeri UAV superiority dominated Armenian ground forces. But all of these professionals were like the military officers who observed the Boer Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War, and then wrote in the military journals of their day about how machineguns were gonna change warfare in a very bad way.
Flag officers still slept-walked into the carnage of WW1 trench warfare....shrug. "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes."
Yes, the world seeing her weakness could increase the chances of someone trying (or wanting to). But I think this will help spur on a defense startup and spending spree.
Maybe Xi decides they're mad that we're defending Taiwain.
Maybe the decide to do the inverse vietnam and that the American left deserves to be freed from "Trump" and that communism is freedom and virtuous to give to the American people.
Like I said, probably not rational.
They don't want to govern California; they want to ensure that the global infrastructure, shipping lanes, and institutions run on Chinese technology and standards. From Beijing's perspective, a kinetic war on the US mainland destroys the exact global economy they are trying to lead.
just completely exit like Afghanistan
and remember all this military hardware eventually ends up in the hands of police departments domestically, next decade is going to be wild
$21 TRILLION spent on militarization 2001-2021
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
imagine how much by 2031, at least double
ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off Venezuela at a million dollars a pop
Oh. You should have started with this.
But the next 50 years of funding they received came from money we spent prior to us leaving. Certainly we could have done a better job with the withdrawal (to put it lightly), but it's nonetheless good that we aren't still spending money there.
US bombings convinced the people to them and made them into state protecting freedom fighters, which they initially were not.
What you resist, persists. What you fight, grows stronger.
We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.
exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban
regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters
you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses
btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?
at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point
The Middle-East's bad record on human rights can be traced back to in large part to the meddling of the US, because it serves the interests of Israel and because of oil. In the time of Nasser, the Middle-East was a different place.
Sources please. The war initiated by US and Israel motivated Iran put pressure on the US by closing the strait and attacking the regional US allies.
Graciously, "if the US was there or not" is a reference to the US navy being near/in the straight of hormuz.
Like how their actions managed to spawn ISIS and the taliban.
The US isn't in the business of saving anyone, they are the monster of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Innovation_Unit
They could obviously have foreseen the current failures in 2015. It is irrelevant, since the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Generals who routinely give theatrical performances for the cameras want the big toys for their districts.
The goal in Iran is also not to win but to keep the Gulf monarchies, the EU, Japan and China down by means of a low intensity forever war.
Eh... The US can not survive an economical war against the entire world.
But anyway, somebody forgot to warn whoever created this strategy that the US society is constructed in a way that doesn't allow barriers against they exporting all their oil. They will either run out, or they will see some societal changes.
Defense contracting is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. This is what unfettered cost plus contracts looks like. We ridicule the Russian military for their insane levels of corruption (eg paying for tanks that never get built and the generals pocketing the money) but really the same thing has happened here. The things get built but they don't work and the entire industry is built around hiring former Pentagon people who specialize in procurement.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the US military's past equipment was legendary. The M1 rifle and M4/M16 family were cheap, reliable and effective. The Jeep was legendary for its reliability. The original M1 Abrams tank is widely considered the best tank the military ever built. If you listen to anyone in the military they'll tell you the vehicles are constantly broken down, hard to repair, expensive to maintain and outright dangerous.
Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on roads, schools, bridges, hospitals and trains, things that would actually benefit people. We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?
And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase.
This is also why I laugh whenever anyone pushes the idea that China is the Big Bad [tm], for two reasons. First, they don't have to be. We just want their to be a scary enemy to justify all this. Second, if they were, they would destroy us because it would ultimately come down to military industrial capability and we would lose. Orders of magnitude lose.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
[2]: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-th...
Yeah, this is mind-boggling. The requested increase is roughly the size of the entire 2004 military budget. 2004, when we were fighting two separate ground wars.
There were close to 200k US troops on the ground in combat theaters in 2004. We're proposing to add a "2004 US military" to our military. The unnecessary wars we will start with this capacity[1] will cause havoc in unpredictable places.
We do it to keep manufacturing knowledge and ability in the country. I really cannot stress enough how many thousands of companies exist purely because of the defense budget. It's never going away because it employs so many people. That's why red or blue or independent no one ever cuts it. It's welfare that creates work so the whole ideological spectrum has something to like.
The big names you mention are the names that end up on the final product, but those products often have a couple thousand different (all American) suppliers feeding them. Virtually all of the money in the defense budget flows back into the economy. The sum total of those players profits last years amounts to 2% of the budget, and that's assuming it's all military.
A simple example are screws. You cannot make a living making screws in the US. It makes zero economic sense because it's impossible to compete with 2nd/3rd world countries (read:China). But the military (well contractors with a mandate) will buy your screws at a price that allows you to live a decent life and employ a team of people.
This way when shit hits the fan, the US will still have a supply of screws (pretty damn important), a supply of people who know how to make screws, and in the mean time those people get benefits and careers.
Now take this idea and repeat it for everything from paper cups to tank shells to folding chairs to wire sheathing (the military buys literally everything, always wants American made, and will happily pay a premium for it).
You're saying we need to retain manufacturing capability and expertise. I agree.
I'm saying we need to stop being bled dry by private weapons manufacturers on cost plus contracts who are rewarded, by definition, by making the system as expensive as possible.
If we were truly interested in having an effective military, we would bring production in-house and focus on standardized vehicles and weapons systems with standardized interchangeable parts on production lines that can be scaled up if necessary.
but free speech anyways -
the U.S military i.e West Point folks & officers from drawn from the army & other branches need to take over. they're smart & get things done.
politicians and corruption from the military industrial complex have taken over.
it's no longer pragmatism, problem solving but about who greases who.
Hmm, I'm not sure they fully address the problem if that is what is being proposed. The world will be an entirely different place by 2031 and 20 drones is .... meaningless? Surely they should be talking in the thousands or tens of thousands.
That time is gone. At this point the US is likely the biggest threat to EU.
But most talk is about the $$ cost of this war, how little Trump has to show for it, and price of gasoline & groceries.
Instead (for US citizens), the talk should be about what else could have benefitted from those $$, and now isn't because it'll be used to re-stock weaponry. Think healthcare, infrastructure, education, research, etc etc.
That's the real cost of wars like this.
these are seeds that will ensure that the US is treated like Russia, or WWII Germany, or Iran. A rabid aggressor that will need to be isolated and eventually contained.
I think high direct movability (like droping a few meters or shifting left/right) might be the next bigger thing for these. Easy enough to add, will make it even harder for air defence missiles catching them.
Besides, the air defence missiles are a lot more expensive than what a drone does.
And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else?
How much payload do you need anyway? Like imagine oil refinery: how much kilo of c4 do you need? I don't think that much.
Or imagine a formation of drones with small payloads and starting to crash in one house wall like into putins palace or the white house.
More drones.
When I see an article like this, I first think about the horrible lives lost in all of these wars. Many of them wonderful people who want to live their own lives.
But I also think of unofficial channels of information sharing among nations, like Iran and others. And I think it's an ironic answer to the information sharing push we saw after 9/11 with the Patriot Act.
Except I'm not laughing or thinking it's funny we got one over on a libertarian, or a conservative, or a liberal with an ironic story. I understand irony sucks when you're not writing the story.
And I'm thinking I fucking loved my Apple IIe growing up. And I hope the aerospace engineers and families in Seattle and Southern California and elsewhere who may see increased budgets for this spend it wisely on themselves and theie families but also how they want. Maybe they can more easily afford houses and that makes them feel more a part of the community.