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

arstechnica.com

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

#311

Post by postsantum »

tclancy wrote: post #58
delecti wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basicall…

>Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board The fact they unironically used Star Wars in their war memes was an amazing self-own.

Yes, literally scrawny underdog rebels against the hecking iranian islamic death-star

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

#312

Post by lokar »

ACCount37 wrote: post #194
lokar wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

Welcome to Tradeoff Town. 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…

It depends. For a JS web front end? Go crazy.

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?

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

#313

Post by overfeed »

Supermancho wrote: post #88
gherkinnn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless if US was there or not it would have happened 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.

Google: straight of hormuz 2026 closure timeline Graciously, "if the US was there or not" is a reference to the US navy being near/in the straight of hormuz.

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.

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

#314

Post by s1artibartfast »

overfeed wrote: post #310
ACCount37 wrote: post #167

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. 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), integrating and scaling become a real bitch, and you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page or face costly "silly" mistak…

Yes and no. Acceptable failure level 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.

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

#315

Post by mrguyorama »

ndiddy wrote: post #116
yonaguska wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.

Yeah FPV drones have massively increased the cost of invading a country. It's basically a return to WWI style trench warfare, except no man's land is the size of the range of the drones (20+ KM).

It's a million times worse than that. Drones have commoditization accuracy and precision and dramatically improved ISR, and that has produced a dramatic jump in lethality.

You used to be able to take a hit and survive a war. Those days are gone. Now you die because 1kg of C4 blew up your entire ass, or you take a less dramatic hit but you will never be dragged back to a field hospital.

Eventually the US or similar will have to get into this kind of war, and there will be a come to jesus moment for all the hoo rah americans who think your chances of surviving a war are based on anything other than sheer luck.

This is Bad, man.

Nukes already showed you can't make a weapon so crazily deadly and destructive that man would end war, so things will be bleak for the rest of humanity's reign.

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

#316

Post by s1artibartfast »

Retric wrote: post #187
27183 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 changed from the initial design for 20 years.

Yep, because of the incentives. Few people in the government making those choices are depending 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.

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

#317

Post by Hikikomori »

xienze wrote: post #305
khriss wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can guess where the bar is when the guy in the white house was literally convicted of sexual assault in a court of law, and he still won the republican nomination. Now compare that against a credible accusation being enough to derail a senate hopeful in a must win seat for the Democrats. Sorry, I don't see the hypocrisy. Actually, I do see it, just not on the side you insist it's on.

> literally convicted of sexual assault in a court of law It was a civil case, not criminal, and had included no physical evidence. And the claim was so old the statute of limitations had run out, but no worries, New York temporarily extended it so she could bring her lawsuit against Trump. It was bullshit, like most of these cases of women crawling out of the woodwork after decades during very critical times are. Wh…

And lets just ignore him being long time friends with Epstein and burying the case?

Or the many other women that came forward. We trust Mr grab them by the pussy instead. That totally didn't cheat on his wife with a pornstar and paid her off illegally to keep quiet.

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

#318

Post by maerF0x0 »

padjo wrote: post #288
maerF0x0 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally? China. Is it rational, IDK. It's just the largest more capable power at this moment. (particularly their industrial base and ability to out produce weapons / soldiers)

It's not rational. China has even less interest in invading the USA than the USA has in invading China. And I think the USA's interest is effectively zero.

here's more irrational. Because they have >1M single men who will never have a bride. Maybe they want to come and take.

Maybe Xi decides they're mad that we're defending Taiwain.

Maybe the decide to do the inverse vietnam and that the American left deserves to be freed from "Trump" and that communism is freedom and virtuous to give to the American people.

Like I said, probably not rational.

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

#319

Post by brnt »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #254
foxglacier wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has seeing the horrors of the Ukraine war made you want the west to stop it and force a surrender? More horrors don't make people want less war. If anything, it may be the opposite. People pretend to be anti-war right up until there's a war and then suddenly it turns out they're actually anti-losing-the-war.

I want less war. I'm against attacking other countries, but totally in favor of defending yourself if you get attacked. Those aren't contradictory statements.

Never start a fight but always finish one.

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

#320

Post by Hikikomori »

ck2 wrote: post #40
pixl97 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

US actions caused the current regime to gain power in Iran...

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.

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