Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 365 posts

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

#321

Post by Hikikomori »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #294
pjc50 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

President threatened (emptily) to cut off all trade from Spain the other day.

I wasn’t aware of that but it looks like he is upset that Spain won’t meet its defense spending commitments for NATO. Which goes back to my point about how the EU is totally reliant on the US for security. Europe’s biggest threat is itself, they won’t even do the bare minimum to ensure their security.

US would spend that money regardless of what Europe spent as they want to continue to use it to oppress and destroy the world. And the real reason they want us to spend more is to buy more weapons from them.

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

#322

Post by pornel »

milkytron wrote: post #198
5upplied_demand wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. I like to think about how providing 4-week paid parental leave would cost $2 billion annually and actually help US families. Meanwhile we have spent over $100 billion on this war.

Considering the push for reproduction from this admin and his technocrats, I'm curious if they would consider something like this.

They don't want all Americans to reproduce. Making a law they want still needs a couple of Supreme Court decisions overturned.

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

#323

Post by Yossarrian22 »

sph wrote: post #222
setgree wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.

That applies everywhere. You’re commenting on a forum for startups that compete against established players. David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

Thinking of past notable Goliaths: Ma Bell has been reconstituting herself from the split apart companies, IBM and GE are… alive, and Edison Illuminating Company and Carnegie Steel are alive in successor companies.

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

#324

Post by lazide »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #170
lazide wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean just before ‘08?

I mean 20 years ago, just like the original comment said. What is confusing? The last 20 years of interest rates are unremarkable, and certainly don't indicate the US is failing.

wow.

just before the major financial crisis, and QE?

the last 20 years of interest rates absolutely are remarkable, and reflect massive (and historically unprecedented) intervention from the central bank.

because of the near collapse of the US financial system, almost exactly 20 years ago.

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

#325

Post by Barrin92 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #167
freedomben wrote: post #2

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…

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…

>The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned

Yes because Ukraine fights an existential war and at this point on both sides people just shrug when a few civilians get blown up.

The US isn't under existential threat and when they go to war their highest priority is to never risk the lives of operators and if possible, if only for PR reasons (and even then it doesn't always work) not generate news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones. The attack on a school in Iran that killed 150 children apparently was already the result of a rushed mission that ignored procedures because this kind of thinking is starting to take hold in US defense circles.

That's not just an ethical disaster but also a political and strategic one because these events can rally enemies around a regime and the political arena is where for the US wars are won and lost, both at home and abroad.

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

#326

Post by orbital-decay »

legitster wrote: post #89
mrtksn wrote: post #28

I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsessed 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…

The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve. Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city). The only realistic sc…

Korean war was way more extreme. NK has been bombed into an absolute moonscape, yet never surrendered.

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

#327

Post by CMay »

Lomlioto wrote: post #307
CMay wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't name any strikes Israel did that the US didn't support?

The USA Military strategists are/were quite aware that Iran is not an easy target. They knew already that Iran might not belly up just because their leadership gets killed. And they knew very well how Iran is fighting (in the mountains) and that they will close the strait of hormuz Trump overruled it. He thought it was as easy as venezuela and he might have assumed that the civil unrest helps.

I suppose you have reliable sources for this?

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

#328

Post by CMay »

Hikikomori wrote: post #251
CMay wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hundreds of billions spent on a war you lost and best case scenario is going back to the deal Obama made. Money well spent indeed.

That's a propaganda line. Iran has lost most of its capacity to make war, but it can still harass.

The money is also not as relevant as people think. The amount of money is largely political fluff, not much in the way of serious economic impact in a $32 trillion economy.

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

#329

Post by CMay »

platevoltage wrote: post #287
CMay wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There were WMDs in Iraq too right?

Iraq was never really about WMDs. WMDs were a surface political mechanism to achieve the aims, which were different. If you look at all the individual events that transpired before then it was clear something had to be done, but it wasn't a neat one liner that's easy to rally people around like WMDs.

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

#330

Post by rixed »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #141
Jtsummers wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks b…

My last job was like this, a full round of QAs manually testing, along with writing up a grandiose release document, stakeholder approvals, and whatnot, for something that should just take two days of development work, and an insistence on putting configuration values into the database, supposedly because it's "safer" than deploying a new configuration file.

If you are in an environment where deploying a new configuration file is easier than adding data in a pre-existing database, you are in a bad place already.
Post reply on HN