I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the release build hash, we had to go through a full acceptance test. As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. As a result there were a hole pile of bugs that we (and customers) ended up just living with.
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 obvious answer is that the more bugs you batch up, the higher the chances the next build fails - this is why CI became a thing, small iterative changes are safer and lead to greater throughput
CI doesn't mean doing all the tests all the time though. The expensive tests still wait until there's a major reason to run them. I had the same question as the parent and I still don't quite see why this can't work.
I didn't work on this project, but I've been involved with similar ones.
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"
Well, approval is a different beast from passing tests. But also, that's not how I was imagining this. I was imagining maintaining separate branches on top of each release, only combining them (merge or rebase or whatever) when you have a good reason to. That keeps things independent and makes it so you can always cut a release with solely the critical fixes (and test them in isolation, etc.) whenever needed, letting you integrate the noncritical ones opportunistically.
That sounds odd. The way it was done in every place I worked, is that a set of changes were approved for a release before they were planned and implemented. We organized the work as expected: each bug/feature on its own branch, with its own set of unit tests, etc., and automated testing applied on each commit. These branches are then merged to the integration branch once they are known good. Before the release process starts, QA would get a copy of the integration branch and test that.
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.
What I described was for bugfixes, not features. Features were set in stone way before this.
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.
It's may seem like a nitpick but I think it's a whole different way off looking at it to phrase it as "applying a bugfix that changed the order of allocations at startup exposed memory corruption somewhere else"
I do think there is something to be said for both perspectives, especially for code that is extremely critical. With sufficient testing and determinism maybe you can actually make sure that dormant issues stay dormant meaning there is real value in being change-averse. Still it's a very precarious situation having a known memory corruption hoping it's the testing has made sure its benign in practice.
IMO All it exposed was writing past the end of buffers.
There was no memory corruption previously due to partially to luck, and partially to heavy testing (which would have exposed most forms of memory corruption).
I think it is fare to say that the change was a cause of the vtable corruption occurring, since without the change it didn't happen.
Once this is discovered, you need to rethink your change plan for the next release; if you back out this one change, your software will return to a working state. Whether doing that, or fixing your buffer overflow is the correct thing to do depends on a lot of specific factors.
I don't really understand how any of this contributes to "defense". Sounds like "offense" to me. Just patrolling the skies over non-white countries and launching missiles at weddings. The reason the Pentagon invests so heavily in this kind of technology is our wars are so indefensible, they can't convince Americans to sacrifice blood in any quantity for other people's natural resources.
> Introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, the term denoted one of three purported major races of humans: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid
cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work. If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family.
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
> 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.
Cost plus isn’t nearly as common as it used to be.
But you still run into similar issues regardless of the contract structure. Try and build a rail network without anyone in government wanting something different for 20 years.
Yep, because of the incentives. Few people in the government making those choices are depend on the thing actually getting built.
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.
They can pop out defects and if things go wrong and there's friendly fire or civilian loss, it's chalked up to scrappy efforts in war. The USA does not get the same amount of leeway, saving our people is a top priority and the media harps on any mistake.
And it makes sense. If the choice is between getting killed by the enemy and loosing the war or risking that one in 10 000 launches results in friendly fire it might be worth it but it would not be for a country not fighting a war for survival.
To be fair, I know plenty of people there. Drones are important, but they aren't the only reason the front is holding. Both sides rely heavily on drones.
> Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work.
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.
Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue.
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.
Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
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!"
That’s a damn good point, probably more costly and more of a hassle to adopt off-the-shelf products to work reliably in a military environment while minimizing risk.
But aren't the politicians also corrupt? (or at least most of them) One therefore assumes that any action by congress must be corrupt. This appears borne out by the evidence over the past few decades.
The bureaucratic development process sounds like Autosar in automotive. I am not surprised that newcomers from USA and Chinese auto companies are able to completely dominate in software because Autosar based development has been like giving a birth to a hedgehog. Slow and painful.
> one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact
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.
This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion.
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.
Maybe if you're in a war that actually threatens your country. In the US, the Republican Party wages wars (such as the Iran War) pretty exclusively to facilitate borrowing public money and dumping it into the pockets of the rich. What looks like waste to the taxpayer is a feature to Republicans and their paymasters (including Israel, in the case of the Iran War).
> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not.
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.
My last job was like this, a full round of QAs manually testing, along with writing up a grandiose release document, stakeholder approvals, and whatnot, for something that should just take two days of development work, and an insistence on putting configuration values into the database, supposedly because it's "safer" than deploying a new configuration file.
If you are in an environment where deploying a new configuration file is easier than adding data in a pre-existing database, you are in a bad place already.
Surely the dev wasn't able to merge that one-line code fix causing 6 weeks of testing without any other eyes on it and without someone else's PR-like approval...right?
In contrast I read that Ukraine is approving 4+ new weapons systems PER DAY !!
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.
This only makes sense if you have to test each fix in complete isolation which seems silly even for government employees and contractor body shops. You can't batch 80 real bug fixes and 20 "silly bug with no practical impact" fixes together?
In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory.
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.
I don’t know the details of that situation, but I have been on the other side of that debate.
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?
I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.
That applies everywhere. You’re commenting on a forum for startups that compete against established players. David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.
I'm hesitant to use 'always' language but the innovator's dilemma is indeed another application of the same principle. It's remarkable when a company like Google can pivot in a way that threatens its existing core revenue streams.
> If you glass the villages and salt the fields, you even win against the taliban and vietkong.
You may win tactically, but you lose strategically - firstly by demonstrating that surrender is pointless, and secondly by creating a martyr movement across the world.
When you sow fields with salt, the only harvest you should reasonably expect is more blood.
Which binds the empire crime family together. This was how it was done allover until 1945. Its how its still done in russia, near china, how the middle east does things. That we "shall overcome" only applied to the west as a selfset achievement. And history tells us that the dead are forgotten. Nobody is out there avenging jews or armenians. Thus also the pro active paradigm of "better fuck around as a empire" then being "found out to be peace loving". Congrats to the anti western westerners, you won so much, you got the old world back.
Thinking of past notable Goliaths: Ma Bell has been reconstituting herself from the split apart companies, IBM and GE are… alive, and Edison Illuminating Company and Carnegie Steel are alive in successor companies.
> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.
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.
The regulation crucially results in your recruits not dying for no good reason during training just because some random piece of trash equipment predictably failed.
Preventing that is much more important than the exact dollar efficiency of said equipment during peacetime.
No. Certainly not. The fundamentals of modern flight safety rules, Procedures and organizations were created in the Second World War when losses of aircraft and crew due to weather, environment, maintenance, poor training and so on greatly exceeded the losses inflicted by enemy action.
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.
"It works well enough" is a significant understatement. I think it would be more accurate (especially given the perceptions at the outset of the war) to say that it has worked significantly better than anyone expected. Ukrainian ingenuity is single handedly driving conversations about the "future of warfare" in capitals from Brussels to DC to Beijing.
> 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.
Correct, but it goes deeper than just the building components. In the US you have to go through an entire military procurement process within each iteration loop. So you design a weapon, then try to sell it to the military, but just the process of demonstrating it and selling it to the military takes a long time and costs money. If you fail you can go back to the drawing board, but each iteration loop is probably a year minimum. And if you are successful now you have to set up and scale production. Get ready for years of environmental reviews and lawsuits.
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.
Emergency is the mother of making exceptions. During both US gulf wars, the army broke from its long tradition of over-regulating new systems before they could be fielded, especially for small semi-autonomous platforms like flying drones and robots. Entirely new systems as well as major updates to fielded system were routinely prototyped in-country / on-the-battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demand for new capabilities and fixes was simply too great not to ship ASAP.
> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.
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, i 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 problems by labeling the process "red tape"
Yes and no. Acceptable failure levels is important.
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.
>The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned
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 have news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones make the news. The attack no 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.
It's interesting that the red tape is still there on the Russian side. A Ukrainian drone maker can make a new one and put it on their brave1 website straight away, Russian ones have to go through a lengthy bureaucratic procurement process. I think Russian interceptor drones still can't use explosive warheads because regulation, health and safety etc. It's quite a plus for the Ukrainians.
You are making a good point but blaming the wrong thing.
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.
They should be deploying half baked prototypes, testing them in the field, and iterating incrementally improved designs as fast as possible, not trying to design the perfect product to sell to the military. That's how you lose a war. The DOD procurement process needs to be deleted and replaced with hundreds of startups with a hardline fail fast philosophy.
for sure, no way even an intelligent person could possibly make a text-to-speech typo when writing a comment on an informal internet forum. Definitely a lying liar who lies
This just seems like poor planning. If it were planned better, you could group a bunch of smaller bug fixes under the same acceptance test. The full acceptance test is a good practice for safety critical systems. Project management just has to get better at doing smaller unit/int testing on each bug and then grouping those changes under the full acceptance test.
> Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact.
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."
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.
The defense industry has spent the last 40+ years grooming the DoD into thinking it costs $30mil/unit to produce missiles and drones. They should have rejected any of the bids, but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA, they don't have to answer to any sort of efficiency or profitability.
These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.
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.
between these extremes there are, parent posits, some efficiencies to be had. Do you agree that its at least possible to get a cheaper solution thats 90% of the way there? Ukraine seems to do pretty well for themselves on this front, and several other countries around the world are no slouches either. Even iran themselves do quite well.
>> are five redundant drones with worse optics better than one big one
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 really depends on the kind of war being fought.
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.
Yeah, but you can always buy a slightly smaller bird, strap the warhead directly to it, and fly that into your target 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).
Correct, now let's also talk about US government-funded [research, healthcare, education, construction, foreign aid, intelligence, infrastructure, entitlements]
Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.
This statement implies a misrepresentation of how these kinds of supply chains work.
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'.
>It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.
It's likely not even that. According to Jacek Bartosiak, Polish geopolitics popularisator, it came by a kind of blind "luck".
He travels a lot to Ukraine and talks a lot with military and dual use manufacturers.
Regular arms manufacturing in Ukraine was, just like anywhere else, not very innovative and dominated by big actors that could make sure nobody else can enter the market.
But the drones were not seen by them as anything serious, and due to dire needs the market has been deregulated, which allowed many small businesses to flourish and develop the fantastic industry that Ukraine is so proud of now.
But that came mostly because the big fish let the small underdogs on the market because they thought there is no market.
Most government agencies cant even pick a different vendor for toilet paper. I cannot imagine the politics involved for trying to supply weapons. All those stories on Flock cameras and being insecure etc is politics at play. Companies know the government will take a decade or more to change vendors, if ever.
I once worked at a startup that did just that. Developed a system that was significantly better and cheaper than an existing legacy solution. One of the generals who saw the DARPA demonstration overrode the whole bureaucracy and brought it with him into theater.
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.
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.
guess what, Iran will hold the gulf hostage regardless if US is there or not
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 strait was open with no tolls before the Israel/US attacks. Everyone with a brain and a modicum of imagination (except Trump, apparently) knew for decades that Iran had the latent capability to close the strait, and hence preferred either a diplomatic resolutions or a defacto detente.
The US has been the monster for most of the world for the last 70 years. It's shocking that most Americans still don't see that.
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.
> The Defense Innovation Unit notice called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapons payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying with a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles—or 8,000 nautical miles on a one-way strike mission—while executing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the US military
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.
Yeah, it's about requirements. The Ukraine war has shown that fast-iterating MVPs are better in many battlefield situations. The saying that militaries end up preparing for the prior war instead of the next, comes to mind.
True, but I think the US requirements are indeed different. Ukraine must repel invading forces in their own country -> lowish range, mass produced, not necessarily precision strike.
US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
Always fighting the last war. But wait until you see how the next generation of our drones fails in a future war!
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?
While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter.
Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.
Right, I can see the need for both, but that suggests to me that they could differentiate the sensor package + loiter drone significantly from the shahed clone (which, given that it is a one-way trip, has a very similar operational radius)
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?
Yes because the lag between Hellfire and target is way less than "launch Shahed and wait 20 minutes". A continuum of strike times has value, all the way up to hypersonics.
For sure, though I will note that a 8-rack of hellfires only accounts for around half the desired payload. I imagine they are still planning to strap JDAMs to these things as well
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
There's an ok documentary on a similar situation (A10 Thunder II) on curiosity stream and it explains how politics basically causes problems like this.
- 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.
A 50-100kg payload is only useful against soft targets if the purpose is to "blow shit up". It is the reason Ukraine needed to develop platforms like Flamingo with a much larger warhead capacity than a cheap drone can carry.
> 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.
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.
There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
Put another way, if I had $1B, my life would be different. $1B is a lot of money.
Or we can spread a cost more, rather than less: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the universe. But that would be a silly thought exercise, kind of like dividing the cost by the number of living human creatures within the usa.
> The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.
$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.
Operations is about 1/4 of the budget ($1.75T), and half of that is DoD. 60% is payments for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The remaining 15% is debt service.
Now you know why there is war. We have war because the U.S. is failing. Just look at the reversal of the 10 and 30 y bonds over the last 20 years. All the free money that was given to the oligarchs killed our economy.
And they’re still on cnbc daily saying rates need to go down to save the us. There’s a guy on right now saying rates need to be lower to save the ai bubble.
> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
(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.
> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that.
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.
The cost of not having this war could have been 8 trillion and countless lives, or some arbitrarily huge number. Many of the actions taken this year are directly intended to curb the possible events that could lead to World War 3. Iran is directly connected to all of that.
> the possible events that could lead to World War 3. Iran is directly connected to all of that.
If any event has pushed us closer to WW3 it is the US's decision to preemptively attack Iran.
> Seems like money well spent.
Based on what outcome? The regime is still intact, if not stronger. They are likely more resolute in wanting a nuclear weapon, as we almost certainly wouldn't have attacked them if they had one. They have validated their control over the Straight of Hormuz and it's impact on our economy.
> If any event has pushed us closer to WW3 it is the US's decision to preemptively attack Iran.
The US is reacting to Iran's attacks in the region. Iran has been attacking first.
> Based on what outcome? The regime is still intact, if not stronger.
> They are likely more resolute in wanting a nuclear weapon, as we almost certainly wouldn't have attacked them if they had one.
Russia has nukes and yet Ukraine is happily able to attack deep into Russia. Russia hasn't nuked Ukraine yet. I suspect if we had to, we still would've attacked them. Countries like Iran and North Korea lose their entire country if they launch a nuke.
> They have validated their control over the Straight of Hormuz and it's impact on our economy.
What was validated is that they have limited control over the strait, and we also have validated control over the strait as well as economic impact on Iran.
The more they harass the strait, the weaker that card becomes as more investment goes into alternatives.
That's a propaganda line. Iran has lost most of its capacity to make war, but it can still harass.
The money is also not as relevant as people think. The amount of money is largely political fluff, not much in the way of serious economic impact in a $32 trillion economy.
Iraq was never really about WMDs. WMDs were a surface political mechanism to achieve the aims, which were different. If you look at all the individual events that transpired before then it was clear something had to be done, but it wasn't a neat one liner that's easy to rally people around like WMDs.
Mom gets 3 weeks before birth, both gets 15 weeks each, and 16 weeks can be distributed as parents see fit.
So if mom gets the full 16 weeks, she gets 34 weeks total, and partner gets 15 weeks.
Parents can decide to get 80% pay, in which case they get 61 weeks total.
Some weeks around birth is fixed, apart from that parents can decide how to use it. One could work two days a week and have three days off, for example.
The pay is capped, but many employers will compensate the difference for high earners.
> There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
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
IMO its a useful populist slogan because it solves a different problem: The power that comes with being a billionaire. E.g. its all well and good to focus on fixing democracy instead, but if (some specific) billionaires are focused on deploying their wealth to destroy democracy, then what?
I've generally come around to believe that we need to limit wealth from a purely power / control point of view.
I think it's a great system of checks and balances- billionaires are only created by dealing with a lot of people and successfully solving a lot of problems. Once they have it, it's work to hold on to the money though. Politicians don't really produce anything measurable to show if they've helped or hurt society, and so they work to devalue the meaning of the dollar.
If you get rid of wealthy people's power, what takes its place other than politicians?
Hi again. You are definitely correct on the first point. But the second point shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works. Our economy highly favors capital over income. The only way to make billions and then lose it all is to be a complete degenerate. They will always be wealthy. The amount of money these people lose on a given day as the stock market bobs around demonstrates that once achieved, money in the hands of the wealthy operates on a level the average American really can't fathom. Over time, they will always continue to do well. Deploying capital, once earned, is not hard. If it is work, it must be one of easiest things to do in the world. It's like saying trust fund babies have to work hard. If it was hard to hold onto wealth our society would be an extremely different one. It's in fact so easy that a lot of the economics around startup investing comes from the phenomena that rich people get bored with their own money. Why settle for boglehead style returns when you can yolo millions of dollars into a potential > 10x return. How do you even spend a billion dollars? You really can't. The only way is to put it into things were again, it is far more advantaged than actual income. Yes there is some work involved in vetting and talent etc. But don't buy into all the hype. A lot of it comes down to luck and getting to the point where you have the capital to spread your bets, knowing the economics mean that even if you lose, you will still win. It's the getting there that is hard. Not the staying there.
It's very important to acknowledge this. Because this wealth is retained long after w/e the societal problem addressed that created the wealth is solved. It is an open question how to deal with that problem, which becomes a societal issue in its own right. I however also share your hesitancy to turn over said gains to politicians, who don't seem to solve any problems or produce any solutions. Unfortunately we shouldn't also forget that they are society's elected proxies. Perhaps we can strive for a system were both politicians and billionaires are weakened in furtherance of some notion of the common good. The idea of "reinvestment" need not be either a wholly public or private enterprise. Most successful societies understand the checks and balances lie somewhere in thinking less in terms of a public/private dichotomy and more like a public/private partnership. The United States used to operate more like this, before the Reagan era ushered in a time of pronounced deference to capital [1]. It would really not take much to bring things back into a more reasonable balance.
> 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):
Adding a wealth tax doesn't mean eliminating existing income taxes.
> Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc).
Perhaps , but what about poor states like West Virginia or Alabama. It's not universal if they don't receive benefits also.
Probably is an issue but sea turtles hearing is adapted to ocean not air and low frequencies. Also, waves and wind blowing likely muffle a lot of noise.
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.
> My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?
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.
The it was the initial culture / behavioral interview for a job developing AI for education of children. Considering how these drones are used in the article linked, the question is apropos.
>It pales compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
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.
> 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.
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.
I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsessed with destroying some super important target to win, like they did with killing Iran leaders only to find out that new leader replace the perished.
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?
Don't overlook the "the people of this foreign land are yearning to be free of their current rulers, and just need a little help from their neighborly U.S. armed forces" trope. I think there are plenty of people who actually believe it.
I guess it doesn't matter if the Iranian people want regime change in their country. Lots of people want lots of different things (plus a pony). It only matters what they do. And it doesn't appear that they want regime change enough to take the risks of making it happen. I suppose this is the hubris of polling.
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)
People seem to forget that Iranians were rioting in the streets in the weeks leading up to the US attacking. The Iranian government was shooting protestors and pulled the plug on the internet.
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.
From the videos and analysis I have seen, it was Kurdish militia that was formenting the riots. The US and Israel have even admitted to arming them. They were burning and destroying infrastructure, fighting and killing legitimate protesters, and fighting governement forces. So it was a 2 way fight between the militia and government forces with innocient protesters in the middle. Not trying to cast blame or defend any side, but these protesters are not fighters or soldiers, they are kind of like gen-Z TikTokers. So to plan an entire war around this "event" is kind of crazy. But the US government doesn't care, they just needed to sell the justification and everyone bought it.
Its like 2 dogs fighting, the US wants to win a display of dominance and have the other dog concede defeat - but if instead the other dog is prepared to die, now its a fight to the death and in fights to the death usually both sides die, even if one is stronger. The mentality of "we will just punch them till they capitulate" shows the US mentality, they're not in an existential struggle and they aren't ready to face one.
The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.
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.
>...had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered
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. "
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."
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just the beginning. At the time of bombing of Nagasaki already a third nuclear weapon was been assembled.
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.
The USA Military strategists are/were quite aware that Iran is not an easy target.
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.
That's speculation. We were going to attack Iran regardless. My point was, the attack you are talking about was done BY Israel and was not part of the plan.
The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.
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.
> 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.
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.
In practical terms, the US is more fascist and more authoritarian than most countries. There must be thousands of soldiers who know the war is illegal and that they are committing war crimes. Yet they persist because, the president said so. Thus, the strange presumption that other countries worship their leader in the same way. Thus, the strange presumption that by just replacing the leader they can profoundly transform any country.
HN has been compromised by propaganda bots that can't decide between "The US is a paper tiger that can't win anything" and "The US is bullying poor Iran". Only a fool would think the US can't win militarily. Here's how:
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.
I thought this at first, but I’m not sure at this point.
The republican establishment has slaughtered the more populist anti-war wing of the party in primaries across the country. The democratic establishment has begun to do the same against their populist candidates. Politicians go on TV and brag about how they’re going to be eating lobster when asked about the state of the economy on their constituents. Every election post I see in a state with a couple contentious ones coming up is filled to the brim with boomers explaining how they’ll always vote on party loyalty, to the point of completely ignoring any of a candidates positions or motives.
These are not the actions of groups who are concerned about upcoming elections.
The US can "win" for some definition of the word but at what cost to the US and the world in general? Would that really be a win or would it be a loss?
Wow your take is that we need to just start mass killing off large swaths of "unimportant" people? This is wild. It's also been done before in Hanoi, and made a lot of people quite angry (and the others dead).
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.
Makes sense, drone technology has come an insane distance since these were developed.
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.
>>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."
In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of establishing the military-industrial complex [1]. We are seeing the fruits of that now that despite an annual budget over $1T the US has been militarily defeated by Iran (and Afghanistan). We build $13B aircraft carriers that don't work [2].
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.
> And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase
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're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?
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.
US should be split up so it can't do any more damage to the world. Americans can't be trusted with putting that much power in the hands of a few people anyway.
China and Russia would love that. It would also be very bad for European security that is mostly guaranteed by U.S. strength and willingness to fight wars.
It's disappointing how often the public gives a silent thumbs up on military spend. Okay I'll grant most US citizens would have preferred Trump hadn't gotten into this war.
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 still comes up far short of the total bill. the US never talks about the destruction to civilian infrastructure, the number of innocents killed, the loss of any ability to claim to be on the 'right side'.
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.
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.
> 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.
While I am critical of Ukraine being in talks to join the EU (which IMHO it shouldn't), I am quite happy that we in EU kind of have built good relationships with Ukraine - military drone construction knowledge and expierience will become a key technology field, as cooperations between Ukraine and Europe after the war (however that will look like) will probably strengthen europes defense capabilities.
Because given the current state it is in, it will receive net-payments from the other EU states for decades and we are already on a descending path economically in the EU. No more foreign subsidies and helps until we got our own ship back on course.
Will be quite interesting what the end evolution of this will be.
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.
> It envisions delivery of “20 mission-ready aircraft” by 2031.
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.
In a metaphorical sense, Ukraine is the scrappy 'startup' aka highly maneuverable speed boat that can turn on a dime, and the US Department of Defence is a cargo ship that takes years to execute a single turn. The drone playbook is out there, plain for all to see but there are too many entrenched stakeholder interests and incentives for the US to emulate the Ukraine drone playbook. You think the US would establish underground 3D printing drone factories? That would be an insult to its military industrial complex, and a tarnish on its sterling prestige, n'est ce pas?
Ok, all the negatives aside, focused on silver linings. I am musing how it's good that the US is finding this out now, and not in a really big conflict on it's own home territory in which it cannot get out of (ie an invasion).
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 53.4 ms ] threadOn 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.
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.
I do think there is something to be said for both perspectives, especially for code that is extremely critical. With sufficient testing and determinism maybe you can actually make sure that dormant issues stay dormant meaning there is real value in being change-averse. Still it's a very precarious situation having a known memory corruption hoping it's the testing has made sure its benign in practice.
There was no memory corruption previously due to partially to luck, and partially to heavy testing (which would have exposed most forms of memory corruption).
I think it is fare to say that the change was a cause of the vtable corruption occurring, since without the change it didn't happen.
Once this is discovered, you need to rethink your change plan for the next release; if you back out this one change, your software will return to a working state. Whether doing that, or fixing your buffer overflow is the correct thing to do depends on a lot of specific factors.
[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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
Sounds totally legit.
Some defense.
You support Banderaites in such a defense.
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 different 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.
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.
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.
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!"
Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You may win tactically, but you lose strategically - firstly by demonstrating that surrender is pointless, and secondly by creating a martyr movement across the world.
When you sow fields with salt, the only harvest you should reasonably expect is more blood.
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.
Preventing that is much more important than the exact dollar efficiency of said equipment during peacetime.
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.
> 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.
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, i 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 problems by labeling the process "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.
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 have news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones make the news. The attack no 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.
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.
I'm surprised that someone who uses such a phrase was working on classified hardware in the "mid and late 00s".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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'.
It's likely not even that. According to Jacek Bartosiak, Polish geopolitics popularisator, it came by a kind of blind "luck".
He travels a lot to Ukraine and talks a lot with military and dual use manufacturers.
Regular arms manufacturing in Ukraine was, just like anywhere else, not very innovative and dominated by big actors that could make sure nobody else can enter the market.
But the drones were not seen by them as anything serious, and due to dire needs the market has been deregulated, which allowed many small businesses to flourish and develop the fantastic industry that Ukraine is so proud of now.
But that came mostly because the big fish let the small underdogs on the market because they thought there is no market.
Hope I'm not mixing anything up.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And George Floyd was a saint with no fent in his system.
What compels people to advocate for the world's trash?
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.
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.
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?
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
- 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.
Or we can spread a cost more, rather than less: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the universe. But that would be a silly thought exercise, kind of like dividing the cost by the number of living human creatures within the usa.
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.
> Based on aggregate highway spending reported in 2009, the average statewide cost of maintaining a lane mile was $13,841.
source (pdf): https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/p...
Has, not is. Clearly you didn’t take Intro to Object-Oriented Programming in CS.
So...what are you talking about?
(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.
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.
Seems like money well spent.
If any event has pushed us closer to WW3 it is the US's decision to preemptively attack Iran.
> Seems like money well spent.
Based on what outcome? The regime is still intact, if not stronger. They are likely more resolute in wanting a nuclear weapon, as we almost certainly wouldn't have attacked them if they had one. They have validated their control over the Straight of Hormuz and it's impact on our economy.
The US is reacting to Iran's attacks in the region. Iran has been attacking first.
> Based on what outcome? The regime is still intact, if not stronger.
> They are likely more resolute in wanting a nuclear weapon, as we almost certainly wouldn't have attacked them if they had one.
Russia has nukes and yet Ukraine is happily able to attack deep into Russia. Russia hasn't nuked Ukraine yet. I suspect if we had to, we still would've attacked them. Countries like Iran and North Korea lose their entire country if they launch a nuke.
> They have validated their control over the Straight of Hormuz and it's impact on our economy.
What was validated is that they have limited control over the strait, and we also have validated control over the strait as well as economic impact on Iran.
The more they harass the strait, the weaker that card becomes as more investment goes into alternatives.
This also pressures Chinese oil supply chain.
The money is also not as relevant as people think. The amount of money is largely political fluff, not much in the way of serious economic impact in a $32 trillion economy.
Mom gets 3 weeks before birth, both gets 15 weeks each, and 16 weeks can be distributed as parents see fit.
So if mom gets the full 16 weeks, she gets 34 weeks total, and partner gets 15 weeks.
Parents can decide to get 80% pay, in which case they get 61 weeks total.
Some weeks around birth is fixed, apart from that parents can decide how to use it. One could work two days a week and have three days off, for example.
The pay is capped, but many employers will compensate the difference for high earners.
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
I've generally come around to believe that we need to limit wealth from a purely power / control point of view.
If you get rid of wealthy people's power, what takes its place other than politicians?
It's very important to acknowledge this. Because this wealth is retained long after w/e the societal problem addressed that created the wealth is solved. It is an open question how to deal with that problem, which becomes a societal issue in its own right. I however also share your hesitancy to turn over said gains to politicians, who don't seem to solve any problems or produce any solutions. Unfortunately we shouldn't also forget that they are society's elected proxies. Perhaps we can strive for a system were both politicians and billionaires are weakened in furtherance of some notion of the common good. The idea of "reinvestment" need not be either a wholly public or private enterprise. Most successful societies understand the checks and balances lie somewhere in thinking less in terms of a public/private dichotomy and more like a public/private partnership. The United States used to operate more like this, before the Reagan era ushered in a time of pronounced deference to capital [1]. It would really not take much to bring things back into a more reasonable balance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
Adding a wealth tax doesn't mean eliminating existing income taxes.
> Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc).
Perhaps , but what about poor states like West Virginia or Alabama. It's not universal if they don't receive benefits also.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
It's almost like you can't paint an entire country with one brush?
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)
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).
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?
Yes we do, it is called imperialism. Now with a sprinkle of senile Fascism.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
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.
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.
Adelson Family as donor to Trump and Bibi.
Other donors might have motivated him too: Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer
I can't collect though a list of sources to read through for my statements. But i don't think my view is very controversal at all.
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.
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.
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.
I thought this at first, but I’m not sure at this point.
The republican establishment has slaughtered the more populist anti-war wing of the party in primaries across the country. The democratic establishment has begun to do the same against their populist candidates. Politicians go on TV and brag about how they’re going to be eating lobster when asked about the state of the economy on their constituents. Every election post I see in a state with a couple contentious ones coming up is filled to the brim with boomers explaining how they’ll always vote on party loyalty, to the point of completely ignoring any of a candidates positions or motives.
These are not the actions of groups who are concerned about upcoming elections.
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.