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US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

arstechnica.com

211–220 of 365 posts

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#211
post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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 defendin…

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Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#213
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.

Why do you think war in Iran is a mistake? They definitely became richer. Isn't it the goal of the people in power at the moment?

I suspect even that was unexpected bonus by them. They just stumbled upon a way to manipulate the market. I have hard time to see any action by them as being thoughtful.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#214
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. tax billionaires, then

not a fan of defending billionairs, but is mostly a useless populist slogan* 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…

> 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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.

Most of us who build weapons of war live with some awful dilemmas. One of them is: We want to perform our work skillfully, effectively, and professionally. But we never want our tools to actually be needed. (Another is that we can't effectively create a shield without the risk of it being used as a sword.)

Or as my dad, a CSAR pilot, used to say, "I'd be happy to be out of a job."

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#217

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…

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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#219
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.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#220

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 guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheap…

> 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.

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.
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