Drone Delivery for Defense

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Interesting read