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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

breakingdefense.com

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Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#261

Post by sandworm101 »

justin66 wrote: post #252
sandworm101 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this does create dramatic videos, it does not represent much of an actual change. Most of these small drone operate well within the range of traditional infantry-killing weapons such as mortar shells. The tactics have changed, but the idea of an infantry unit killing another infantry unit at a couple miles distance isn't a revolution.

This seems just completely wrong. The trend for drones is that features and capabilities are increasing and costs are decreasing because they're based on cheap software and cheap consumer hardware. The trend for unguided mortar rounds or artillery shells is that they're as cheap as they're ever likely to be at thousands of dollars a round, plus the cost of the gun and its replacement barrels and crew. (guided artille…

Capabilities are not the same thing as effects. A drone represents different capabilities at different price points, but the net result observed on the battlefield are not all that different that past infantry engagements. If enemy infantry knows your position, they can today reach out and kill you at similar ranges as they did in wars past. The how has changed, not the what.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#262

Post by ToDougie »

justin66 wrote: post #243
mesofile wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy." — Kelly Johnson Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...

Ben Rich expanded on Johnson's advice regarding the Navy in his book, although I think he also conceded that the Navy has some pretty good engineers.

Skunk Works is such a fantastic book. Would recommend to all engineers.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#263

Post by littlestymaar »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #259
gnatman wrote: post #245

I guess autonomous platforms are exciting to defense procurement and war planners because they can use them much more aggressively in theatre without risking expensive pilots. It's hard not to think of the recent reporting on the "Lavender" AI targeting system and how these two ideas combined will lead to more indiscriminate killing of civilians. What's the calculus for human American pilot lives to collateral civili…

Collateral damage should be at historic lows with an ai army. Fly a swarm like birds over a city, identify your target, and you can selectively eliminate that target with a single bullet from the drone. Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.

The problem is how you define your “target”. In Israeli Lavender program it seems they are killing people for belonging to the same Whatsapp group as someone identified as a terrorist. And that's because Israel has a long time policy of “punishing” family members of “terrorists” (the term includes both legit terrorists but also people who are just political opponents).

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#264

Post by unclebucknasty »

sandworm101 wrote: post #256
wildzzz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing traditional artillery makes you vulnerable to counter-battery radar. Since rockets, mortars, howitzers, etc all fire in a predictable ballistic trajectory, you have to quickly move or risk being shot at before your rounds even hit their target. An anti-personnel drone can move in any direction and can operate much lower to ground to avoid radar so no one will know exactly where it came from. You don't get as m…

Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team. From what I have seen, the Ukrainian drone teams have to "shoot and scoot" in much the same way as the motor/artillery teams.

Part of the exposure is also due to the limited range of some smaller drone control systems, meaning those drone operators have needed to be much closer (a few km) to their targets than artillery crews (several dozen km).

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#265

Post by bugglebeetle »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #259
gnatman wrote: post #245

I guess autonomous platforms are exciting to defense procurement and war planners because they can use them much more aggressively in theatre without risking expensive pilots. It's hard not to think of the recent reporting on the "Lavender" AI targeting system and how these two ideas combined will lead to more indiscriminate killing of civilians. What's the calculus for human American pilot lives to collateral civili…

Collateral damage should be at historic lows with an ai army. Fly a swarm like birds over a city, identify your target, and you can selectively eliminate that target with a single bullet from the drone. Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.

It’s the height of irony to respond to this comment with some techno-utopian BS, when the parent is describing how AI is actually being used, right now, to inflict mass casualties on a civilian population. At what point to people abandon their Panglossian hypotheticals and stare reality in its face?

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#266

Post by gnatman »

littlestymaar wrote: post #263
kjkjadksj wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collateral damage should be at historic lows with an ai army. Fly a swarm like birds over a city, identify your target, and you can selectively eliminate that target with a single bullet from the drone. Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.

The problem is how you define your “target”. In Israeli Lavender program it seems they are killing people for belonging to the same Whatsapp group as someone identified as a terrorist. And that's because Israel has a long time policy of “punishing” family members of “terrorists” (the term includes both legit terrorists but also people who are just political opponents).

Exactly. Simply "identify the target"! It's an incredibly broad handwave that ignores all the unsolved problems in computer vision and warfare fire control.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#267

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #261
justin66 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems just completely wrong. The trend for drones is that features and capabilities are increasing and costs are decreasing because they're based on cheap software and cheap consumer hardware. The trend for unguided mortar rounds or artillery shells is that they're as cheap as they're ever likely to be at thousands of dollars a round, plus the cost of the gun and its replacement barrels and crew. (guided artille…

Capabilities are not the same thing as effects. A drone represents different capabilities at different price points, but the net result observed on the battlefield are not all that different that past infantry engagements. If enemy infantry knows your position, they can today reach out and kill you at similar ranges as they did in wars past. The how has changed, not the what.

[deleted]

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#268

Post by psunavy03 »

willcipriano wrote: post #118
torginus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development. And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. I…

You know how you hear a lot of complaints about private prisons? How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned? We have a private war apparatus. We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.

This is an absurdity. The US did counterinsurgency brush fires and that's it since major combat operations ended in Iraq. Go look at Ukraine. THAT is what "being at war" looks like, and you should be thankful we haven't been forced to do that for 30 years.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#269

Post by ethbr1 »

willcipriano wrote: post #186
ethbr1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objective is the same for every superpower in the world: to try and establish military hegemony and retain it for as long as possible.

I'd believe that if we won the wars instead of losing them all. This is just looting.

South Korea's doing pretty well.

Germany's in one piece.

The Balkans aren't on fire.

Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#270

Post by psunavy03 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #60
anyfactor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all. Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually se…

Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly. The breakthroughs a…

And it's frankly a childish sentiment. Go look at what's happening in Ukraine today. Why did that occur? Because a dictator woke up on the wrong side of the bed and said "you have, I want, I take." Military force and military innovation is the only thing stopping him from literally committing genocide against the Ukrainian people. Not "genocide" as in faculty lounge hyperbole . . . actual genocide.
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