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...
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.
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-...
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.
An unmanned fighter jet is a whole different ball game for them.
That said, I agree, we also need lots of cheap drones.
This hasn't been innovative in a military context since at least Desert Storm.
Actually a shared battlespace run by computers managing contacts and sharing the data with tens of platforms including sending specific intercept data to specific in air interceptors and relaying data those interceptors get back to the rest of the fleet and managing tasking for tens of different surface combatants to intelligently and efficiently task hundreds of incoming threats was rolled out to American fleets in the 1960s
Sure beats filling the sky with bombers and flattening a city overnight as was done in wwii.
It's not as simple as you say and it doesn't work currently as you say.
I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.If high tech superpowers went at each other full bore with H bombs we’d probably be LARPing Mad Max, but so far that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely. All leaders in all these powers know that any such exchange would be mutual and thus suicidal (MAD) so the only way it happens is if you get someone truly insane in power.
What has happened since the bomb was developed and what’s likely to continue are skirmishes and proxy wars. Drones are the modern weapon of such conflicts with Ukraine and the Israel-Iran skirmish being heavily drone based.
This is ugly because it’s often not the soldiers of the superpower puppet masters dying but those of puppet states, and drones allow more technological powers to beat up on less technological people like it’s a video game.
If nukes are used in conflict in this century it will probably be just a few in one of these conflicts, followed by an overwhelming condemnation.
But the silver lining is that since the bomb was developed the overall per capita number of humans dying in war globally has fallen dramatically. As long as we continue to avoid huge scale conflict this number will probably stay low. Without the bomb it’s likely that a WWII style conflict between the US and USSR would have erupted and killed many millions more.
Some argue based on this that the bomb was a peacekeeping invention. So far that’s been true but we will see how the future goes.
Sticks and drones?
You might disagree with the SJW fork attack on nix. But if you also disagree with the idea of Haskell powered death drones blowing up innocent little baby humans, then you might have incentive to support - or at least loudly ignore - the forking / sabotage / leftist troll op.
Me, I will take an Even More aggressive track: I honestly hope this turmoil leads to a better version of the nix syntax. Perhaps something much cleaner: A YAML based syntax that eliminates curly braces and the need for many nix functions.
Yes, I'm being a little evil >:]
And many old fighter jets retire as target drones, going on to fly unmanned for perhaps decades. New purpose-build designs might have lower operating costs but their purchase price will always be higher than slapping radio controls onto already-purchased jets.
Well the whole point is not to reduce headcount totally but reduce the amount of people put directly in harms way, for example a pilot flying in a direct combat scenario.
When it comes to fighter pilots, salary is irrelevant. The few pennies paid in salary is absolutely nothing compared to the millions of dollars a year it takes to train and maintain an active combat pilot. Those costs are at the center of nearly every discussion re military drone tech. An autonomous pilot, a computer program, doesn't need check rides. It doesn't need to re-qual its AAR ticket every month. And it doesn't retire or get promoted out after five years.
(I am aware that current autonomous piloting technology is very limited and can only accomplish a small subset of Air Force missions.)
Building an airframe strong enough to handle G forces beyond what a human can endure also comes at the price of greater weight and reduced range. It's not worth the trade-off.
Those aren't meant to fly high and send missiles at weddings on the ground, those are maneuverable wingmen for F-35s.
3 years ago this topic would be full of people protesting this. Pointing out the inhumanity, the potential for abuse, the hypocrisy, the dangers of desensitizing war. Censorship changed the game entirely.
We ought to worry that these will let General Ripper go rogue more easily or an adversary hack them, but I don't think this moves the needle at all one whether advanced AIs could be dangerous.
Both are by right wing Silicon Valley libertarians sucking on the government teat.
Palmer Luckey got kicked out of Meta for funding Trump ads, I don't think you can classify him as a libertarian lol
(though there are many other self-described libertarians who are even more right-wing-authoritarian, so maybe nitpicking isn't worthwhile)
The first time was a post about the latest Mark Rober video 'promoting' Anduril/military technology to a child/teen audience.
Do you mean with drone war, the usage of drones in a war (like they do in Ukraine and middle east) or a 'war' between manufacturers?
So many wars for profit. History knows best that there is no free lunch. But I suppose consuming propaganda without a critical thinking and effort for facts is good for the business. By the way Zala Aero is the current leader in this space. That's why Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure.
Yet, even that "failure" (I do agree that it failed) was still more successful than Russia's post-summer-2022 offensives.
I'm not following the war but thanks to your comment just read about them.
They are a subunit of Kalashnikov and the latest drone uses PET bottles for fuel tank and a plywood fuselage and a banal model airplane engine found at hobby shops.
It's almost like some 90s game designer is writing the plot for this.
My country is part of NATO. Nobody asked us. No referendum. No voting. Nothing. The political class is filling their pockets with money, while propaganda is beyond the level of USSR and Nazi Germany.
Some of us have military service behind our backs. Some of us lived under a communist dictatorship, and we know the smell of leftist bullshit.
Live in your tech bubble, but know that East Europeans see clearly who is the reason for this bloodbath. And when the time comes, we will not die for your corporations as Ukrainians.:)
The best thing that they could do would be to "import" a few dozen Ukrainian drone operators and engineers, people who have actively and directly fought against a near-peer US adversary, and let them design whatever they think will win the next war. But that won't make the current ghouls in the US the buttloads of money they are betting on, so that will never happen.
Weapons and bases aren't just about winning conflicts, they are about jobs (see Perun)