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Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

seanobannon.substack.com

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Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#71

Post by hkpack »

umbra07 wrote: post #68
hkpack wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine is absolutely buying all the civilian drones it can get, especially the larger ones with good optics. One of the previous defense minister was skeptical of their utility too and called them “wedding drones”, and now you can see very frequently in war footages mentions how they are using “wedding drones” in this or that reconnaissance or surveillance operation. You absolutely need tens of thousands of drones i…

Yes, but that is simply because they don't have a better choice. Given the choice between a $200 DJI and a $100 homebuilt "killer" drone, you would probably want 2x of the killer drones. However, if your bottleneck is your manufacturing capabilities instead of your money, then you might be forced to use the DJI drones instead of the custom killers.

It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other.

DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on.

Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the video data is a significant chunk of the total personnel in this war.

Without having that, killer drones are not effective, since they are very short-lived, have very poor cameras and power characteristics. It is very difficult to find enemy with self-made drones.

So I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly into a cheap mass produced war-time surveillance drone with minimal effort.

The same goes for software - both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#72

Post by jdeibele »

tw04 wrote: post #43
pjc50 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember rightly, one of the successful attacks was a floating "drone" made of a small boat packed with explosives. Kind of a hybrid between the torpedo and the fireship, and quite hard to defend against at night. China has (checks wikipedia) three operational carriers, one very modern Fujian , the obsolete former training ship Liaoning , and Shandong , which appears to be halfway between the two, the first loca…

> During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude. And would have absolutely no way to reach that scale again. Or the equivalent in drone production, which is why it’s absolutely preposterous to take a hostile attitude towards our closest neighbors and trade and potentially put our geographical advantages at risk.

One of things that's a concern is the consolidation of industry into fewer and fewer bigger and bigger plants. Not only does that mean a bottleneck in one place is far worse, it also means that there's not the depth of experience available many places. There's a handful of production engineers rather than dozens. And there's not the same number of plants that can be converted from sewing machines to rifles or automobiles to tanks.

I was reading something that said militarily, the US is now in the same position that Japan was prior to WWII because we've outsourced so much of our production.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#73

Post by palata »

hkpack wrote: post #71
umbra07 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that is simply because they don't have a better choice. Given the choice between a $200 DJI and a $100 homebuilt "killer" drone, you would probably want 2x of the killer drones. However, if your bottleneck is your manufacturing capabilities instead of your money, then you might be forced to use the DJI drones instead of the custom killers.

It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other. DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on. Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the vi…

Hmm, I feel like you get back to "Ukraine needs everything it can get". Sure, but that's not my point.

For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right?

> I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly

It could potentially be repurposed relatively quickly if it was well designed. But what tells you it will be? Most software is not very well designed, and in the western drone industry it's particularly right, in my experience. If you subsidise a company to make military drones and they write bad software, you will still end up with a military drone ("the software is bad but it lasts 25min most of the time"). If you subsidise a company to make survey drones in the hope that their design will be good enough to be quickly ported to military needs...

> both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".

I highly doubt that. Civilian radios are easily jammed.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#75

Post by tim333 »

V__ wrote: post #5
xnx wrote: post #2

It's shocking to me the Secretary of Defense confirmation hearing only mentioned "drone" once, and that was not in reference to the future of warfare. Ukraine has made pretty clear that drones will play a huge roll in future major conflicts. It's crazy that we haven't already shifted major portions of the defense budget from legacy weapons systems (e.g. tanks) to drones.

I would be really interested in a deep analysis. Ukraine doesn't have air superiority and the war has evolved into trench warfare.. thus drones are a very usefull tool. But would this still be the case for a conflict with US involvement?

If you think of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, maybe not during the initial attack but once there were troops on the ground they would likely be vulnerable.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#76

Post by throwup238 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70
throwup238 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean lethality either. It’s hard to craft an argument here without doing a blog post length comment (that I’m hardly qualified to write) but even from the last week there’s evidence of Russian FPV drone use with very mobile forces: https://armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/co... I don’t know where you draw the line between static and dynamic/modern but IMO they’re clearly in the latter mode at…

> don’t know where you draw the line between static and dynamic/modern “Biddle identifies what he calls the ‘Modern System’ of combat (though I am going to treat it a bit more broadly than he does). In short, it’s a set of tactics and operational art that emerged out of the First World War and were refined in the European theaters (East and West) of the Second, to cope with the tremendous potency of industrialized fi…

While Brett Devereaux is excellent, he’s sharing a surface level, black and white definition suited to a blog post aimed at laymen, the kind that want to read about the siege of Gondor. Biddle’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle is a much more in depth treatment of the topic that is hardly that prescriptive.

Edit: if you are so inclined, Commanding Military Power: Organizing for Victory and Defeat on the Battlefield by Ryan Grauer, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and Airland Battle by Robert Leonhard, and Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century by Jonathan House would provide a more rounded view of the academic debate. The latter is particularly relevant because it looks at Russia’s tactics in Chechnya.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#77

Post by olyjohn »

tim333 wrote: post #40
clvx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just baffled how Russia switched the frontline using fiber drones. It’s genius and worrisome at the same time.

Ukraine has them too. They both buy the fiber tech from China.

Rule of Acquisition #34. War is good for business.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#78

Post by hkpack »

palata wrote: post #73
hkpack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other. DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on. Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the vi…

Hmm, I feel like you get back to "Ukraine needs everything it can get". Sure, but that's not my point. For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right? > I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly It could potentially…

The reality is very different.

In practice, jamming of wide area is not a solved problem. It is easy to jam GPS because its signal is already weak, or a cell phone in a city, but it is very difficult to jam a drone in the sky which have a line-of sight to the antenna or a retranslation drone. Also all modern cheap drones have a way to switch frequencies if one gets jammed, and jamming all frequencies is also very very difficult.

You either need to have a very big powerful machinery - which is very easy to detect location of and send a HIMARS rocket. Or a huge number of smaller devices, which is impractical as you don't have power in trenches.

So in practice, drone jamming is only effective in the last 100-200 meters from the target (if it is a vehicle with power source) which doesn't really matters for surveillance drones as they do their job from the distance.

> Civilian radios are easily jammed.

In theory, in practice on the battlefield, when drones can switch frequencies on the go - very very difficult with the exception of the last hundred meters.

Because of this, modern killer drones now have a primitive "AI" to lock on the target on the last meters of approach.

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#79

Post by palata »

hkpack wrote: post #78
palata wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I feel like you get back to "Ukraine needs everything it can get". Sure, but that's not my point. For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right? > I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly It could potentially…

The reality is very different. In practice, jamming of wide area is not a solved problem. It is easy to jam GPS because its signal is already weak, or a cell phone in a city, but it is very difficult to jam a drone in the sky which have a line-of sight to the antenna or a retranslation drone. Also all modern cheap drones have a way to switch frequencies if one gets jammed, and jamming all frequencies is also very ver…

Thanks, that's interesting!

Re: Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

#80

Post by mopsi »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #60
moduspol wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. It boggles my mind that we still do aircraft flyovers at big football games. Those should be drones doing coordinated light shows--even in heavy winds, rain, and unfavorable conditions. Just to show that we've mastered it, and that we can do it easily even when there are no stakes. My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it, bu…

> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it I am confused. The US has massive fleets of military drones of every type and size that have been proven in combat environments. They literally pioneered the development of this type of military system and have been using them operationally decades before anyone else. Did everyone just fo…

Entire categories of drones are missing from the US arsenal, such as the ultra-cheap wire-guided ones that allow Ukrainians to fly 20 km into the enemy's rear, enter buildings, explore them from the inside, and leave behind presents or detonate immediately if they find any targets. Such drones can be seen at the start of this video, and at the very end too, when they are sneaking up to artillery and puncturing gun barrels: https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1893632328108220538

The US leads in larger drones, like the Global Hawk, which is the size of a regional airliner, can stay airborne for more than a day, and cover tens of thousands of kilometers in that time. The smaller and cheaper ones are just expensive toys, far behind what's seen in Ukraine in terms of actual usefulness. A cheap Chinese agricultural sprayer drone with equally cheap 3D-printed drum of infantry grenades or an anti-tank mine strapped to it outperforms most "military grade" commercial offerings like Switchblade that cost ten times as much and are good for only a single use, unlike the sprayer, which returns home after dropping its payload.

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