It's impressive how much hardware they've been able to develop.
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
I don't think we as laypeople should even attempt to draw conclusions from Ukrainian battlefields ourselves, seeing how strong the survivorship bias is.
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
One of the advancements against EW is having on-device mapping systems (this goes back to the Tomahawk in the 70s) so that the projectile can adjust its flight in the absence of GPS. This is what one of the real advances of AI promises to be - a vehicle that can identify and change targets fully autonomously. Will especially apply to unmanned underwater vehicles which (as far as I know) haven't been deployed but will surely change the dynamic on the seas
A 10% success chance seems incredibly effective. I would have estimated the chances quite a bit lower. Tanks are million dollar devices, which are expensive to replace and require significant training. If they can be effectively attacked by infantry without putting themselves in significant danger, that drastically lowers the value of a tank.
> More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal".
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
quadcopter manufacturing has been dramatically increasing over the last year to the order of 10k+/mo on both sides with no sign of slowing down (i believe it's actually much higher than this but can't find the source i saw a few weeks ago); your argument seems to butt up against this reality
Just remember that, unless your goal is just to kill everyone and scorch the earth, the aim of warfare is to occupy and control territory, which at some point necessitates humans to do the occupation. Nobody is yet trying to create permanent wastelands inhabited only by robots. It may become increasingly dangerous, but whether it's helicopters or some other means of transportation, you have to get humans into the land you're trying to take.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
>> Nobody is yet trying to create permanent wastelands inhabited only by robots.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
You don't have a historical or realistic understanding of warfare. The aim of warfare has always -- and will always be -- to break your enemy's will to fight. Sometimes that involves capturing and holding territory, but those are just "implementation details". In WW2 nuclear weapons were dropped on civilians and there was never any desire by the guys dropping those bombs to occupy territory.
This isn't really correct. Blue Force had already repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system and it was originally developed as a sparring partner for fighter jets (it was far more capable than just being a target).
Drones have changed warfare at a local tactical level. But your drones and smaller autonomous systems aren't helping if you have overwhelming firepower superiority, ie in Gaza drones haven't inflicted too much damage if you can just drop a couple thousand JDAMS and level out a territory.
Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
> We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
They're using drones as killbots against individual infantrymen, actively chasing them down rather than taking a lucky grenade drop. That changes everything about force deployment on the ground.
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
When you think about it, this is one area that Russia can't really compete in as well as western countries. Autonomous weapons will be the decider on any future battlefield minus nuclear weapons.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
> Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
The idea that everything would be small and with little momentum to overcome doesn't strike me as stable situation - someone might just start to throw (large) rocks from space, for example.
Is Anduril really that good? I am trying to figure out what is the potential of Anduril is. Their first phase product was in observability towers for border protection, then they made drone-ramming drones and now unmanned fighter jets.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development.
And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
There's definitely more than one problem with defense procurement, one of the biggest problems is simply having straightforward, acheivable goals in the first place and not fucking with them halfway through the process.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all.
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
> I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development.
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
It doesn't have to be good. What matters is that near peer adversaries see these developments and spend some of their resources on trying on R&D efforts to match ours. An arms race is a non-kinetic way to weaken your enemies before hostilities start. Unfortunately, AK-47s are cheap to produce at scale and our enemies have millions of people to give them to, so regardless of the fancy toys, the military still needs ammo, mines, grenades, rockets, bombs, and napalm to disable enemy soldiers at scale.
I worked there. Think: budget defense contractor and you'll be really accurate.
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Interesting perspective. Coming from the perspective of a non-US defence executive, I will have to say that failing demos are quite normal in defence applications. It happens, and you still win contracts, because the end client sees the value prop and trusts you to sort out the issues. Still nerve wrecking though.
I also worked at a new defense company that partnered with Anduril and other newer defense companies. It’s the same experience: unreliable software built week over week, thrashed by contract demands, and frankly mediocre engineers that make simple things complicated.
I think their biggest differentiator is the way they sell their products. They haven't made a habit of winning big research contracts, blowing past the budget, and then blowing past the original per-unit manufacturing price estimates.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
> I think their biggest differentiator is the way they sell their products.
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
Reading the comments here is giving me the disturbing realization that the war in Ukraine is extremely valuable to the US because the US gets to collect immense amounts of data to inform perspectives on how modern technology is revolutionizing warfare with minimal risk to American troops. And that's with technology in the hands of an extremely motivated ally against one of our top rivals. This opportunity doesn't come very often, and I can imagine there are a lot of parties interested in it persisting at least until the value in the observational data starts to tail off. Along with other concerns, this may be a reason to parcel out exactly what tech gets given to Ukraine at which times.
It's worth considering that while the equipment in use in the ukraine conflict is obviously relevant, the nature of the conflict is radically different from what the US would face. Ukraine is literally on Russia's doorstep, allowing Russia to send its units in and pull them back for repairs with relatively limited logistical strain. This allows it to use massive numbers of cold war surplus assets that would not be viable anywhere else on earth. Ukraine started the war with an extremely small air force and has received only very limited support in that regard, meaning it has spent the entire war without air control. This both limits Ukraine's capacity to use tactics which rely on air support and gives Russia the ability to operate its air forces in relative safety. US doctrine is completely based around air superiority. Ukraine had an extremely limited standing army and military industrial capacity prior to the war, and has relied heavily on non-professional troops who volunteered or were conscripted after the war started and received only moderate training, and it is dependent on foriegn support for advanced arms and munitions. The US has both the strongest standing army and the most advanced military industrial complex in human history. The issues Ukraine is struggling with now - pushing into areas Russian troops have spent months fortifying while having to conserve artillery shells, holding off an unending trickle of 60 year old soviet tanks, and having to jerry-rig long range drones to attack targets in Russia - are challenges that simply wouldn't exist if the US were fighting a war. If our goal was really to get useful data that would be applicable to US conflicts, we'd be giving the Ukrainians the means to fight the way we fight.
I agree Ukraine never had a chance against the far superior Russian military. The reason the US and NATO did not officially send ground troops, although many of their people are on the ground, is that it would trigger full war between NATO and Russia which would go thermonuclear. If that ever happened, Russia's larger and more advanced nuclear arsenal (ballistic missiles) would give it an advantage. Their large land mass, twice that of the US, would give them a better survival chance after the fallout.
You're mostly correct that the older tech is the bulk of what's been sent, but there have been lots of batches of newer tech that the US has delivered. [0]
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
Of course they are, but to me at least, it seems like their cost-benefit is very different from the US. I don't think the war is worth it to them just to learn more about warfare.
It was always going to be a terrible tragedy with Ukraine. Vlad committed something much worse than a crime, he committed a mistake (to paraphrase Talleyrand).
NATO+ countries aren't fighting him, they are using Ukraine as a proxy, while Vlad is fighting with his own army. NATO has been waiting nearly 80 years to attack Russia directly. They very motivated to make sure that Vlad continues making errors. As such, the longer this war takes, the better for NATO. And, unfortunately, the worse for Ukraine.
I think data collection is for sure one aspect, but I think Russian casualties is the largest motivator
I have been watching the warfare via several Telegram channels and observe how important drone warfare now is. I watched 5 $10M Abrams tanks destroyed by $500 FPV drones. Close combat on troops is also conducted with drones with remarkable precision. We don't know how much of the targeting and execution by Russia is automated verses manual, but many experts in this field agree that Russia's technical capability is at parity and sometimes exceeds NATO's such as hypersonic missiles.
I thought Russia's hypersonic missiles were a failure, with the Ukrainians shooting them down with 30 year old Patriot missiles? There were a lot of articles about it last year, here's one:
And to a new-ish company like Anduril, too! Palmer Lucky and Co founded it in 2017 which is baby years for a lead defense contractor on a major project like this.
IIUC this is the Wingman program for the F22 and F35 so these aren't "slow" drones like predators, these are going to be high performance jets. This is a serious contract!
I'm hearing that dogfighting is a thing of the past because weapons systems operate at large distances anymore. Drones should do (at least?) three things well: dog fight, since they can make decisions in an instant and tolerate higher g-forces than a human can; prevent a human death if they get shot down; and be smaller/lighter/carry more/have greater range because they're not designed around carrying a pilot.
Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
Dog fighting requires much more situational awareness from a sensor perspective. One reason the recent VISTA demonstration had the adversary feed its own position via data link to the autonomously flown plane.
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Unmanned fighters are a force multiplier, a single F-35 can coordinate its own squadron of drones (loyal wingman program). More ordnance, more coverage, more capabilities, more flexiblility, and less risk for lower relative costs.
I hate to be the downer here, but we said the exact same thing with the F4. And then the F4 got hosed over Vietnam. So we went back to having a gun onboard.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
I think the amount of space and weight a human and their required hardware need is pretty low on a jet. However the aerodynamics probably benefit a lot from not needing a high up bulbous cockpit with really good visibility
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
This is for the next phase of the project that involves building flying prototypes. Later stages include mass production which could go to a Boeing or Lockheed. I wonder how much of the decision to give this to a smaller player is based on a desire to maintain diversity among defense contractors and the competitive advantages that come with.
In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Probably overthinking. The Europeans signed deals with Helsing and Palantir recently for similar projects. That must have lit a fire under someones ass.
Go find any GUR operator in Ukraine and ask them what they think of Anduril
Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily
Why General Atomics? They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted. They make the Predator and other current UAVs, which are all expensive and uninteresting:
In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
Because that's how the government operates. Same with the initial COTS and Commercial Crew awards to SpaceX: it was paired with a similar contracts to Orbital and Boeing, to make sure that if the untested startup failed there would be a traditional contractor ready to take up the slack.
Hopefully this time the incumbent doesn't get paid twice as much for a worse outcome, as happened with Commercial Crew...
NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.
DoD wants a high level of confidence that your company will still be around and delivering the exact same product to the exact same specs 20 years from now. It's why startups are basically never the primes on defense acquisitions.
I assume andruil is doing the controller and consults on design, while GA largely does the aircraft. Building big aircrafts takes huge facilities, so it's not unreasonable to have a big incumbent doing this.
No, Anduril and General Atomics will work separately on competing prototypes and at the end likely only one of them will win a final order for production aircraft.
>They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted.
The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.
If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.
Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.
Optionality, even for a monopsony like the Defense industry, is good for the consumer (Pentagon). They still want suppliers to compete.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
Diversifying the economy is a pathway to winning wars. Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future. Other countries make these things much more efficiently because they don’t have lazy governments captured by old companies.
Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.
Competitive procurement is intentional US military method expressly for military purposes. Saying the DoD shouldn't care about it because it needs to win wars is a meaningless statement. Part of how it wins wars is by having effective equipment and part of how it has effective equipment is that it has a competitive process. Cultivating supplier diversity is intentional.
Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.
Readit News
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-w...
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
[1]: https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/mike-kofman-and-rob-lee-on...
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/unmanned-flying-te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
Recently they have been using them to drop spikes to slow vehicles which are then hit by a second set of drones.
At some point soon these drones will have specialised capabilities and will go out in swarms to autonomously figure out how to take down objects.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
The Army is somewhere in the middle.
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned?
We have a private war apparatus.
We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Oh, never change Hacker News. Got to love the casual breach of classified information.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
Is this article really equating Palmer Lucky to Oppenheimer?
Dead Comment
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2024-01-08...
NATO+ countries aren't fighting him, they are using Ukraine as a proxy, while Vlad is fighting with his own army. NATO has been waiting nearly 80 years to attack Russia directly. They very motivated to make sure that Vlad continues making errors. As such, the longer this war takes, the better for NATO. And, unfortunately, the worse for Ukraine.
I think data collection is for sure one aspect, but I think Russian casualties is the largest motivator
In what way would having the whole of Ukraine annexed like Crimea be better for Ukraine?
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/09/what-ukraines-...
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IIUC this is the Wingman program for the F22 and F35 so these aren't "slow" drones like predators, these are going to be high performance jets. This is a serious contract!
Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
[0] Clausewitz, drink!
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily
Unusable in actual war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...
In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.
The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.
If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.
Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
[0] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...
Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.
Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.