The problem I have with the idea of subsidising small drones as a proxy for defense is that they solve very different problems: Making a small quadcopter that flies is now entirely solved: you take an open source autopilot, put it on some open source autopilot board, and that's it.
If you go further than that, successfully producing delivery drones means that they need to carry a payload safely to some destination, deliver the payload nicely (as in, smoothly leave a parcel on the ground), come back and be reusable. The drone flies by GPS, but doesn't really need a radio signal (ideally there is no operator, the drone just goes, delivers and comes back).
Killer drones are "one-way". They are defined by a lifetime of like 25min, ending up violently in a place where the operators care about maximising damage. They fly in war zones. Nobody really cares if some percentage of the drones falls from the sky or doesn't explode upon contact. They need to fly in GPS-denied mode, and they probably need a radio for the operator to select the target when the times comes. This has to be a military-grade radio that works in the presence of jamming to some extent.
Those are very different projects. Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
>>Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
Funny you should say that. The US had in 1938 a grand total of about 38 tanks. WWII started a few years later, and after converting prewar automobile factories to tank factories, the USA built more tanks than every other nation combined.
Pretty much the same thing happened for airplanes, as mentioned in the article.
US industrial production was literally the arsenal of democracy.
It is a LOT easier to convert commercial manufacturing base to military purposes than to start from scratch. So, yes, subsidizing commercial production to stay in-country is definitely good for mil readiness (and ultimately, the tank business).
Bomb and kamikaze drones based on civilian drones are already a reality though, Ukraine uses to defend itself. Don't know why you're talking as if that wasn't possible, when it's happening already.
Hmm maybe I'm not being very clear, I didn't want to write a 20 pages essay :-). I was saying that I don't think it's a particularly efficient way to approach defense.
My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.
If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today.
In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.
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 in the air all the time to support modern warfare.
And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.
“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.
I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.
And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary
They're not "based on civilian drones" other than using some basic software and electronics and design principals. Everything else is built around cheap and short lifetime.
While I agree with the ultimate conclusion of the article, that FAA regulations need to be modernized for commercial use of sUAS systems, it completely fails to analyze any of the other relevant dynamics facing the American drone industry. There are a plethora of American companies building drones for commercial and/or defense purposes (I work at one) but this article reads like the author knows only about the most publicized one and another company they heard about on a podcast. The article would benefit from an understanding of the
Probably the most major blocker for the authors dreams of swarms of millions of American military drones is the following: jet engines and rocket motors can be produced in the US profitably, the American economy just isn’t set up to build drones motors, props, etc. in an economically efficient manner. Because of this, the cost-optimized drones developed for the commercial sector will never be acceptable for the us military.
Secondly, the author seems to think that self-organized systems are a brand new innovation and would trivially port to a battlefield environment. However, these techniques rely on 5G connectivity and gps, whereas military sUAS systems need GPS-denied autonomy and the ability to communicate in a heavily jammed environment.
Unlikely. Ukraine does not have scale, manufacturing base and talent for that - right now it's mostly assembling drones from Chinese parts with very little innovation on top of that. People talked about AI swarms but very little of that materialized at the front line. Larger drones require satellite connections, advanced materials, etc - Ukraine does not have that either. I expect Ukrainian expertise in war drones will stagnate and become obsolete very quickly after the war.
The aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete, and I think most war strategists acknowledge that drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war. We haven't seen one of those sink yet, but well, Russia controls the historically strategic port of Sevastopol, and yet what's left of their Black Sea fleet has retreated to ports back behind Stormshadow range. Taiwan plans are definitely looking at cruise-missile-vs-airplane-range ratios.
So yes, drones and other unmanned munitions are game changers. I just wish the argument wasn't "increase civilian drones so we have a rich and vibrant military industrial complex ready for when we get to destroy things."
Then again, some of what the article is kinda saying is "if there's civilian applications for this, you don't need to have a military industrial complex (until you're forced to on a wartime footing, at which point you're not starting from zero)." Which is basically the strategic-importance argument that is keeping Boeing afloat these days...
> drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war
The notion of unsinkable carriers is mostly fiction. In WWII I think almost every CV America entered the war with (but 3, Enterprise, Saratoga and Ranger) was sunk by ‘44.
Taiwan should be building a lot of drones if they intend to fight. However, that's not the only possibility; recent shifts in US posture may encourage the "voluntary reintegration" local political faction, including the possibility of handing over TSMC intact.
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 locally built carrier. During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.
> 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.
They may have the manufacturing muscles but Ukraine has been able to develop and test their drones in live combat for years. There's nothing that propels technology forward as much as deadly necessity.
This sounds like it's dramatically under-estimating the Chinese engineers. If you take a drone today, like a DJI Mavic. Pretty much every single component of that drone is better than what we can do - at scale - in the West. It's not like we sent them blueprints and they mass produced the drones. Their technology is first class, arguably better than the West in the field of robotics.
Which is kind of interesting strategically. I was thinking Ukraine can't really afford to keep losing large numbers of soldiers and will probably try switching to drones to hold the Russians back. It's probably a technology that favours defenders over attackers as the defenders can work from hidden bunkers but the attackers have to move above ground.
It’s not being talked about much outside of military analyst circles but those small drones have significantly changed the logistics of modern warfare possibly more than anything in the 21st century. Before, with cover and conceal warfare, armies had to deliver massive firepower to even have a chance of hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military, with ever more expensive precision munitions to make up for that fact. Now a small drone can drop a grenade and do the same amount of damage at similar distances between combatants. It makes a huge difference when a combat engineer slash drone pilot can carry 20kg of drones and small explosives into the battlefield as part of a small team instead of manning an entire artillery unit.
I think it’s better to look at it as a spectrum and Russia’s place on it differs based on time and place. They don’t have the air superiority to carry out the kinds of operations the US could and what seems like a suboptimal command structure but they are getting increasingly more organized, especially as the war drags on and they develop/acquire more adaptions like the Shahed drones or glide bomb conversion kits. IMO the biggest thing getting in their way is the desperate human wave tactics that hamper their ability to grow a veteran core that could actually organize the combined arms.
This reads like a piece of defense propaganda. "Undoing the 1990s decision" - should we really return the US defense industry to cold-war levels? The world has changed, and the threat of outright war with the US is dramatically lower than 4 decades ago. Yes, China is an adversary, but to say that it's an existential threat to the US the same way the Soviet Union was is absurd.
Nobody takes Trump's comments seriously. Possibly not even Trump.
Putin is in a hot war right now. Xi seems to be actively preparing for one. The chance of the US sitting aside a military invasion of Taiwan seems very low to me.
Claims that other people are propagandizing are ridiculous with zero evidence, that’s some FUD BS. Make a better argument against OP if you’re so sure.
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.
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, but I don't think that's the way forward. It needs to be known that we've absolutely mastered them.
You know, kind of like the Chinese have done with their drone shows at the Olympics and similar events.
> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it...
What would you call the Reapers and such? The US has a massive fleet of large, armed drones, remotely operated, and quite a few are capable of being armed.
True. This is a very different class of drone. What is the defense against an adversary who releases a thousand quadcopter style drones against a US aircraft carrier?
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?
The major threat is SAM and other anti air. Maybe the US's stealth or long range cruise missiles would be enough to knock down and keep down the opponents anti air coverage but it's not guaranteed. Neither side has been able to gain safe access to the skies in this whole conflict, modern AA is just able to cover such a wide area it's hard to get ground assets close enough to strike.
> Maybe the US's stealth or long range cruise missiles would be enough to knock down and keep down the opponents anti air coverage but it's not guaranteed.
That's what those capabilities are designed to do ("SEAD"), but they're very expensive. And so strategic that the US wasn't willing to let the Ukranians have any.
Of course yeah, the main thing is they've not really been tested in a while against OpFor radar or AA so I have some reservations about it actually working long term. The last time they really tested at all was 2003 during the second Iraq war. Even if they can knock out dedicated AA manpads could still pose a significant threat they haven't had to encounter in a while.
If they work like they should on paper and can keep the opponents pinned to the ground under US air supremacy it'll be great but there's always that little doubt that it will work as well against a more evenly match opponent like a theoretical US v Russia/China when it's not punching down so far.
I'm pretty sure the US had drones before Ukraine occurred. The US does invest in drones. Maybe they will more, but we're probably a little way away from them assuming the role of tanks any time soon.
"Drone" gets used to cover a lot of things; full aircraft sized Reaper/Predator drones down to toy-sized quadcopters. It's the latter which Ukraine has been developing, including a unique solution to ECM: the fiber-optic drone.
Small drones do not assume the role of tanks. Drones assume the role of WW1 aircraft: artillery spotters and very light bombing capability. They have this role there because both sides have SAM superiority over the other's airforce.
Drones solve the problem that combat aircraft are too expensive and too easy to shoot down.
There's things like the Anduril Bolt. They cost like 100x as much as devices the Ukranians are building from cardboard. Another major innovation is TOW style fiber optic control which is immune to electronic countermeasures. There's definitely a lot to learn, but sadly necessity is the mother of invention and not since WW2 has manufacturing cost really been a serious concern for US defense production. Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
> Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
I'm not sure if I'd be rooting for this eventuality.
I think the weakness of this argument is that “domestic American drones” will just be using parts, or entire drones, made in China
“Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.“
What is that supposed to mean? A drone has a lot of parts. I can make 2 1/2 drones a day if I have the parts.
The problem I have with the idea of subsidising small drones as a proxy for defense is that they solve very different problems: Making a small quadcopter that flies is now entirely solved: you take an open source autopilot, put it on some open source autopilot board, and that's it.
If you go further than that, successfully producing delivery drones means that they need to carry a payload safely to some destination, deliver the payload nicely (as in, smoothly leave a parcel on the ground), come back and be reusable. The drone flies by GPS, but doesn't really need a radio signal (ideally there is no operator, the drone just goes, delivers and comes back).
Killer drones are "one-way". They are defined by a lifetime of like 25min, ending up violently in a place where the operators care about maximising damage. They fly in war zones. Nobody really cares if some percentage of the drones falls from the sky or doesn't explode upon contact. They need to fly in GPS-denied mode, and they probably need a radio for the operator to select the target when the times comes. This has to be a military-grade radio that works in the presence of jamming to some extent.
Those are very different projects. Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
>>Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
Funny you should say that. The US had in 1938 a grand total of about 38 tanks. WWII started a few years later, and after converting prewar automobile factories to tank factories, the USA built more tanks than every other nation combined.
Pretty much the same thing happened for airplanes, as mentioned in the article.
US industrial production was literally the arsenal of democracy.
It is a LOT easier to convert commercial manufacturing base to military purposes than to start from scratch. So, yes, subsidizing commercial production to stay in-country is definitely good for mil readiness (and ultimately, the tank business).
Bomb and kamikaze drones based on civilian drones are already a reality though, Ukraine uses to defend itself. Don't know why you're talking as if that wasn't possible, when it's happening already.
Hmm maybe I'm not being very clear, I didn't want to write a 20 pages essay :-). I was saying that I don't think it's a particularly efficient way to approach defense.
My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.
If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today. In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.
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 in the air all the time to support modern warfare.
And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.
“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.
Thanks for explaining!
I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.
And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary
They're not "based on civilian drones" other than using some basic software and electronics and design principals. Everything else is built around cheap and short lifetime.
While I agree with the ultimate conclusion of the article, that FAA regulations need to be modernized for commercial use of sUAS systems, it completely fails to analyze any of the other relevant dynamics facing the American drone industry. There are a plethora of American companies building drones for commercial and/or defense purposes (I work at one) but this article reads like the author knows only about the most publicized one and another company they heard about on a podcast. The article would benefit from an understanding of the Probably the most major blocker for the authors dreams of swarms of millions of American military drones is the following: jet engines and rocket motors can be produced in the US profitably, the American economy just isn’t set up to build drones motors, props, etc. in an economically efficient manner. Because of this, the cost-optimized drones developed for the commercial sector will never be acceptable for the us military. Secondly, the author seems to think that self-organized systems are a brand new innovation and would trivially port to a battlefield environment. However, these techniques rely on 5G connectivity and gps, whereas military sUAS systems need GPS-denied autonomy and the ability to communicate in a heavily jammed environment.
I saw someone claiming drones are the biggest military invention since the stirrup!
The US would do well to start catching up on that technology.
BTW, I assume that when/if the Ukraine war ends, the Ukrainian drone industry will be the best in the world.
Unlikely. Ukraine does not have scale, manufacturing base and talent for that - right now it's mostly assembling drones from Chinese parts with very little innovation on top of that. People talked about AI swarms but very little of that materialized at the front line. Larger drones require satellite connections, advanced materials, etc - Ukraine does not have that either. I expect Ukrainian expertise in war drones will stagnate and become obsolete very quickly after the war.
The aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete, and I think most war strategists acknowledge that drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war. We haven't seen one of those sink yet, but well, Russia controls the historically strategic port of Sevastopol, and yet what's left of their Black Sea fleet has retreated to ports back behind Stormshadow range. Taiwan plans are definitely looking at cruise-missile-vs-airplane-range ratios.
So yes, drones and other unmanned munitions are game changers. I just wish the argument wasn't "increase civilian drones so we have a rich and vibrant military industrial complex ready for when we get to destroy things."
Then again, some of what the article is kinda saying is "if there's civilian applications for this, you don't need to have a military industrial complex (until you're forced to on a wartime footing, at which point you're not starting from zero)." Which is basically the strategic-importance argument that is keeping Boeing afloat these days...
> drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war
The notion of unsinkable carriers is mostly fiction. In WWII I think almost every CV America entered the war with (but 3, Enterprise, Saratoga and Ranger) was sunk by ‘44.
Russia has exactly one aircraft carrier that nearly sank of its own accord. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...
Taiwan should be building a lot of drones if they intend to fight. However, that's not the only possibility; recent shifts in US posture may encourage the "voluntary reintegration" local political faction, including the possibility of handing over TSMC intact.
It's not Russia's aircraft carriers I'm concerned about.
Russia's experience with drones vs. her guided missile cruisers has more than enough there to translate to more capable aircraft carriers.
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 locally built carrier. During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon... (interesting and varied history!)
> 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.
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.
Amazing that disposable drones can get fiber internet while residents of Silicon Valley can't!
I will take the other side of that bet.
> BTW, I assume that when/if the Ukraine war ends, the Ukrainian drone industry will be the best in the world.
I'd say it already is.
Don't forget China. China is way ahead everybody else when it comes to consumer drones and producing them at scale. Like way ahead.
They may have the manufacturing muscles but Ukraine has been able to develop and test their drones in live combat for years. There's nothing that propels technology forward as much as deadly necessity.
> They may have the manufacturing muscles
This sounds like it's dramatically under-estimating the Chinese engineers. If you take a drone today, like a DJI Mavic. Pretty much every single component of that drone is better than what we can do - at scale - in the West. It's not like we sent them blueprints and they mass produced the drones. Their technology is first class, arguably better than the West in the field of robotics.
Maybe shocked if China and even Russia didn't have the specs and designs for every Ukrainian drone.
Drone hardware in software are mature. Adoption is more matter of observing tactics and human interaction
[flagged]
Russia is still a long way off that.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>But look, Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.
That seems way off. See the recent euromaidanpress headline:
>Defense News: Ukraine plans 15-km unmanned “kill zone” along Russian front as drone production hits 4,000+ daily https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/02/defense-news-ukraine-...
Which is kind of interesting strategically. I was thinking Ukraine can't really afford to keep losing large numbers of soldiers and will probably try switching to drones to hold the Russians back. It's probably a technology that favours defenders over attackers as the defenders can work from hidden bunkers but the attackers have to move above ground.
It’s not being talked about much outside of military analyst circles but those small drones have significantly changed the logistics of modern warfare possibly more than anything in the 21st century. Before, with cover and conceal warfare, armies had to deliver massive firepower to even have a chance of hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military, with ever more expensive precision munitions to make up for that fact. Now a small drone can drop a grenade and do the same amount of damage at similar distances between combatants. It makes a huge difference when a combat engineer slash drone pilot can carry 20kg of drones and small explosives into the battlefield as part of a small team instead of manning an entire artillery unit.
> hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military
Would note that Russia’s failure to execute combined-arms manoeuvre-based warfare technically makes it a static fighting force.
I think it’s better to look at it as a spectrum and Russia’s place on it differs based on time and place. They don’t have the air superiority to carry out the kinds of operations the US could and what seems like a suboptimal command structure but they are getting increasingly more organized, especially as the war drags on and they develop/acquire more adaptions like the Shahed drones or glide bomb conversion kits. IMO the biggest thing getting in their way is the desperate human wave tactics that hamper their ability to grow a veteran core that could actually organize the combined arms.
This reads like a piece of defense propaganda. "Undoing the 1990s decision" - should we really return the US defense industry to cold-war levels? The world has changed, and the threat of outright war with the US is dramatically lower than 4 decades ago. Yes, China is an adversary, but to say that it's an existential threat to the US the same way the Soviet Union was is absurd.
[deleted]
> And they (China) are explicitly interested in overturning the global order.
- Putin is actively taking Ukrainian territory by force
- Trump is threatening to take Greenland, Canada and the Panama canal by (economic) force
- Xi Jinping is threatening to take Taiwanese territory by force
Of all three, Jinping seems like the smallest threat to the "world order".
If you're talking about economic power, that's a different story but I wouldn't call them "adversary" in that context.
Nobody takes Trump's comments seriously. Possibly not even Trump.
Putin is in a hot war right now. Xi seems to be actively preparing for one. The chance of the US sitting aside a military invasion of Taiwan seems very low to me.
It's been, what, 10 years of Trump now. If you're not taking what he says seriously, you have failed to learn anything.
Claims that other people are propagandizing are ridiculous with zero evidence, that’s some FUD BS. Make a better argument against OP if you’re so sure.
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.
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, but I don't think that's the way forward. It needs to be known that we've absolutely mastered them.
You know, kind of like the Chinese have done with their drone shows at the Olympics and similar events.
> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it...
What would you call the Reapers and such? The US has a massive fleet of large, armed drones, remotely operated, and quite a few are capable of being armed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicles_in_th...
It's different from the consumer/small commercial drones being talked about here, but the US Military is pretty darn good at UAVs.
True. This is a very different class of drone. What is the defense against an adversary who releases a thousand quadcopter style drones against a US aircraft carrier?
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?
The major threat is SAM and other anti air. Maybe the US's stealth or long range cruise missiles would be enough to knock down and keep down the opponents anti air coverage but it's not guaranteed. Neither side has been able to gain safe access to the skies in this whole conflict, modern AA is just able to cover such a wide area it's hard to get ground assets close enough to strike.
> Maybe the US's stealth or long range cruise missiles would be enough to knock down and keep down the opponents anti air coverage but it's not guaranteed.
That's what those capabilities are designed to do ("SEAD"), but they're very expensive. And so strategic that the US wasn't willing to let the Ukranians have any.
Of course yeah, the main thing is they've not really been tested in a while against OpFor radar or AA so I have some reservations about it actually working long term. The last time they really tested at all was 2003 during the second Iraq war. Even if they can knock out dedicated AA manpads could still pose a significant threat they haven't had to encounter in a while.
If they work like they should on paper and can keep the opponents pinned to the ground under US air supremacy it'll be great but there's always that little doubt that it will work as well against a more evenly match opponent like a theoretical US v Russia/China when it's not punching down so far.
I'm pretty sure the US had drones before Ukraine occurred. The US does invest in drones. Maybe they will more, but we're probably a little way away from them assuming the role of tanks any time soon.
"Drone" gets used to cover a lot of things; full aircraft sized Reaper/Predator drones down to toy-sized quadcopters. It's the latter which Ukraine has been developing, including a unique solution to ECM: the fiber-optic drone.
Small drones do not assume the role of tanks. Drones assume the role of WW1 aircraft: artillery spotters and very light bombing capability. They have this role there because both sides have SAM superiority over the other's airforce.
Drones solve the problem that combat aircraft are too expensive and too easy to shoot down.
> Small drones do not assume the role of tanks
I'm not saying they do. I was replying to a comment.
There's things like the Anduril Bolt. They cost like 100x as much as devices the Ukranians are building from cardboard. Another major innovation is TOW style fiber optic control which is immune to electronic countermeasures. There's definitely a lot to learn, but sadly necessity is the mother of invention and not since WW2 has manufacturing cost really been a serious concern for US defense production. Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
> Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
I'm not sure if I'd be rooting for this eventuality.
No, I'm definitely not! But I can't imagine the US defense sector doing anything sensible otherwise.
I think the weakness of this argument is that “domestic American drones” will just be using parts, or entire drones, made in China
“Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.“ What is that supposed to mean? A drone has a lot of parts. I can make 2 1/2 drones a day if I have the parts.
Ukraine announced a two weeks ago that they built 2.5 million drones last year. Maybe that number got garbled somewhere?
Ukraine is producing way more that that: they're up to millions per year: https://thedefensepost.com/2024/10/03/ukraine-produce-millio...
Interesting read