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Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

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Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#61

Post by SimianSci »

I see drones as more of a side-affect to the new era of warfare we are in. The more powerful your economy, the more autonomous weapons you can create and eventually deploy. Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military.

The alarming part of this to me is that this heavily implies that wars will be decided more by who can successfully destroy their adversary's economy, than who can take and hold points of strength. Holding a city with an entrenched military doesnt matter much when there is still a factory deep in enemy territory producing the next wave of attacks. The incentives for targeting non-combatant civilians is rising at an alarming rate.

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#62

Post by rl3 »

GerryAdamsSF wrote: post #27
scottyah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to physically stock up on them before. It was mostly research, prototyping, comms infrastructure, software for swarms, AI piloting, ground control, etc. The next phase of building factories and manufacturing tooling/capabilities is a little bit concerning.

Simple DJI style drones employed en masse in Afghanistan would have been helpful for a variety of tasks. I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA. We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.

>I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA.

Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]

The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.

Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.

Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.

>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.

The picture below is from 1995. [1]

By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.

[0] https://www.twz.com/6866/60-minutes-does-an-infomercial-on-d...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator#...

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#63

Post by chung8123 »

SimianSci wrote: post #61

I see drones as more of a side-affect to the new era of warfare we are in. The more powerful your economy, the more autonomous weapons you can create and eventually deploy. Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military. The alarming part of this to me is that this heavily implies that wars will be decided more by who can successf…

It feels like the drone factories should be targetable and who controls that may control a war.

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#64

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jonplackett wrote: post #53
Aboutplants wrote: post #9

The most surprising thing here is that the US was previously only spending $225 Million on drones when it’s been fully apparent for the past decade(s) that drones were the future of warfare.

What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era. Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head. In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an in…

> they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore

Drones + cheap antidrones + aircraft carriers + stealth aircraft looks like a solid high/low optimum. Anyone pitching an only-high or only-low strategy is leaving chips on the table.

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SimianSci wrote: post #61

I see drones as more of a side-affect to the new era of warfare we are in. The more powerful your economy, the more autonomous weapons you can create and eventually deploy. Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military. The alarming part of this to me is that this heavily implies that wars will be decided more by who can successf…

> Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military

This has been the case in wars of attrition since the Civil War. It took between then and WWII for the message to land.

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#66

Post by analogpixel »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #52
analogpixel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we took all the money we spent on war for 2 years, and diverted it to buying $10k electric cars, we could buy everyone in America an electric car, remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it ever again; let other countries fight it out for oil while we move on to bigger and better things. or we could continue spending all of our money on wars to get oil, fall further and further behind,…

> remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it The US is the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin. They don't have a dependency on foreign oil. They are also the largest refiner of oil products in the world. Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.

If we don't need foreign oil, why are gas prices going up?

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#67

Post by TimorousBestie »

tptacek wrote: post #43
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't compare the entirety of the US education system against an incremental fragment of military spending as though that isn't a completely bogus evaluation. We spend just as much on the war machine if not more. We're talking about an incremental fragment of the US military budget. It's fair to compare it to an incremental fragment of public wellness that would cost less and have profound impact. > and a larg…

Put real numbers to this. We spend well over a trillion dollars on education. Also recognize the falsity of attributing the entire defense budget to "the war machine". There are policy debates that could take you lower or (like this request) higher, but it's not like an order-of-magnitude thing.

If we’re putting numbers on things, what’s the number you’re putting on “pure, non-war-machine” defense spending?

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#68

Post by GerryAdamsSF »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #44
GerryAdamsSF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US schools are some of the best funded in the world. The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong. Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.

> The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong. Please don't pretend that "school funding" is the same as feeding children or that we don't have established research showing a connection between school meal programs and improved academic performance and reduced student suspensions.

[flagged]

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#69

Post by ohnei »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64
jonplackett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era. Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head. In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an in…

> they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore Drones + cheap antidrones + aircraft carriers + stealth aircraft looks like a solid high/low optimum. Anyone pitching an only-high or only-low strategy is leaving chips on the table.

I'm not familiar with a stealth meant for even when you have to park it sometimes. If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure. If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.

The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.

Re: Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

#70

Post by canucker2016 »

jonplackett wrote: post #53
Aboutplants wrote: post #9

The most surprising thing here is that the US was previously only spending $225 Million on drones when it’s been fully apparent for the past decade(s) that drones were the future of warfare.

What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era. Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head. In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an in…

In the book "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works), the authour talks about the behaviour of the military officers. Spy planes weren't seen as valuable/important to the typical officer who was looking to get promoted to higher levels versus the typical sexy fighter jets or bombers.

Just as in any group, there are certain positions that are more prestigious/desired than other positions. Typically the prestige increased the more people that they supervised or valuable pieces of equipment (expensive tanks / fighter jets) in their group.

Then there are other positions with lower prestige / desirability - think support/logistics (unless your org's main revenue stream is support/logistics).

This has little correlation to the effectiveness/impact of the group.

Those who worked well with the current strategies / standard operating procedures, can't see/don't want to see how new technology can be used to operate more effectively.

Imagine how army officers treated those who wanted to use airplanes in the period from World War I to World War II.

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