Live data from Hacker News

French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

politico.eu

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#31

When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit. War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno. https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

The pamphlet was written in 1935.

Then came probably America most just war, fighting Japan and Hitler.

War may be a racket 99% of the time, but that 1% really matters.

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#32

When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit. War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno. https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

Phew so glad we've fixed that war problem. Sadly defence spending is a bit like vaccinations.

[deleted]

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#33
post #21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If France were to be at war with a nation knocking on our borders, our policy nowadays is to fire a nuclear-tipped ASMPA missile as a warning shot . We do not rely on our conventional forces or anyone else to safeguard our sovereignty should it escalate to that. Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what w…

French military doctrine: We will Nuke you as a warning. If that doesn't get the message across, we will empty our nuclear arsenal until all of your miserable cities are rubble and your farmlands are glass.

There's a famous quote by De Gaulle from the early 1960s which basically states that France isn't worth the price of killing 80 million people over, even if you have the means of killing over 800 million French people.

Also, we don't need American ballistic missiles to do so, unlike our friends on the other side of the English Channel.

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#34
post #5
post #2

> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper. > However, the reality is complicated. > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said. If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year har…

It's getting hard to believe anything in this world anymore. A million shells fired by the Germans in Verdun in a mere 8 hours and now the entirety of Europe can't make that number in a year.

Did you ever read on the early parts of the war, during the race to the sea? Both sides were extremely low on ammunition, as they realized that their ideas of how much ordinance would be used in a real war were completely wrong. It took a really long time to ramp up production capacity to get anywhere near Verdun, and for the biggest horrors of WWI's trench warfare to appear.

Everyone kind of learned their lesson for WWII, as the real signal that war was coming wasn't actual invasion, but the ramping up of industry to actually supply combat. The US intervention in Europe couldn't have happened much earlier, because setting up the logistics to do any intervention whatsoever took years... and this was at a time where, while the US still claimed neutrality, the country was already changing their industrial production to be able to begin intervention.

So even in the good old days, nobody could change their industrial capacity to supply a war on a dime. And if there is no war, the costs of dedicating so much production to unused equipment is prohibitive

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#35
From what I heard about the SMART-L [1] radar around 1990, it could spot reflective objects the size of tennis balls at a distance of about 100Km.

I guess with modern electronics and DSP, a much smaller system must be able to detect drones with ease.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#36
post #29

When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit. War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno. https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

France is an ally of Ukraine and making sure Russia loses it's baseless imperialistic invasion of Ukraine is the EUs #1 foreign policy priority, because if it doesn't it might attack NATO/EU members.

[deleted]

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#37

There must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones including sound, visual, radio. Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against? Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide…

Could train birds of prey to actively hunt down and rip apart drones.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/the-milit...

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#38
post #2

> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper. > However, the reality is complicated. > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said. If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year har…

The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though.

It's a combination of several things.

First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise.

Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger.

That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even poland). And there will be little a country like France will be able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They have nothing in between.

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#39
post #19
post #2

> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper. > However, the reality is complicated. > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said. If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year har…

If France were to be at war with a nation knocking on our borders, our policy nowadays is to fire a nuclear-tipped ASMPA missile as a warning shot . We do not rely on our conventional forces or anyone else to safeguard our sovereignty should it escalate to that. Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what w…

I suspect the doctrine of nuke as a warning shot is less effective today when a small group can launch, either for own purposes or as a proxy for another state, a large group of drones to strike with speed and precision the targets 1000+ km away. With that threat type nuking is not an option and we are back to traditional defense. My 2c.

Re: French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

#40
post #38
post #2

> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper. > However, the reality is complicated. > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said. If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year har…

The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though. It's a combination of several things. First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's…

>The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though.

... which has absolutely nothing to do with bell-cot's point in invoking it as a counterexample to France's current production ability.

Post reply on HN