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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal.
I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsess 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 drone ship 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?
The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country.
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
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.
Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
From what I know, the 'defense' industry has their production cleverly across all 50 states so that they're seen as one of the few sources of stable employment for most, sadly.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
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.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
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'.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process
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.
This is why Ukraine is making equivalent tech now for 1/10th the price. It's great to see.
All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.
Why would those fixes not be batched up? So fix 20% of those and do one round of testing?
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
If safety is extremely important, why there were bugs in the first place? Surely these should have been caught before code would get into main, no?
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.
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.
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.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal.
I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsess 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 drone ship 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?
The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country.
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
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.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense.
And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked:
"Don't you support our troops?"
And that'll be the end of that
Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
And let's not forget: the voters back them on this.
From what I know, the 'defense' industry has their production cleverly across all 50 states so that they're seen as one of the few sources of stable employment for most, sadly.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
> Killing people is just a side effect
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
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.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
> since the budget is never balanced
When the Republicans rule.
If you think you can produce them for cheaper, you could make yourself a lot of money and save taxpayers a lot of money by starting your own company.
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'.
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.
> 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.
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.
Our country is a joke
Drones are only one piece of the puzzle. Once again ars is on the wrong side.
there's a better way for 100% savings
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
>just completely exit like Afghanistan
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
> ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off
Oh. You should have started with this.
The fact that this person thinks the Afghanistan exit was a success should have let you know he is a crackpot well before the last sentence.
"fishermen" lmao
And George Floyd was a saint with no fent in his system.
What compels people to advocate for the world's trash?
As much as I love democracy its unfortunate we both get to vote
Empathy.