Comment by echelon
4 months ago
With cheap drones appearing to be critical to the future of warfare, is there a chance that the US will develop a domestic drone industry that rivals China's, or has that ship sailed?
4 months ago
With cheap drones appearing to be critical to the future of warfare, is there a chance that the US will develop a domestic drone industry that rivals China's, or has that ship sailed?
There's plenty of military drones companies, the US military has the budget for them. But now I'm wondering, who would win, 1,000 military drones or 1,000,000 consumer DJI ones?
"Quantity has a quality of its own". Consumer DJI Drones are useless in a fight (good only for reconnaissance or maybe crashing into military drones to disrupt them), but Russia is showing that drones can be made on the cheap (e.g. there was footage of a drone of theirs using a plastic soda bottle as the fuel reservoir) and still be disruptive.
DJI drones are ubiquitous on both sides in the Ukraine conflict. They have excellent cameras and long flight durations, which make them an ideal aerial observation platform. The battlefield is a very different place if you can't hide behind terrain and have to assume that if you can see the sky, then you can be seen by the enemy. These drones have drastically improved the effectiveness of conventional artillery, because you can seek out targets and get real-time reports on exactly where you shells are landing. Consumer/prosumer drones are vulnerable to jamming or being shot down, but they're also cheap enough to be essentially expendable. Ukraine are reportedly losing 10,000 drones a month, but that's a bargain for what they achieve on the battlefield.
DJI drones fitted with grenade-dropping mechanisms have been used extensively and still see some use, but DIY FPV drones are now the preferred offensive weapon, used in a kamikaze role as a kind of cheap guided missile. They're cheaper, faster and more agile than the DJI drones. A good FPV pilot can hit the weak spots on a moving tank, or fly through a narrow opening to hit troops sheltering in a bunker. They're invariably used with DJI drones in hunter-killer teams, with a DJI drone acting as a spotter for an FPV pilot.
The sound of a DJI drone is known to everyone on the front line and it means exactly one thing - that you need to find hard cover now. If you can hear it, then chances are that it has spotted you, the pilot has passed on your coordinates and a kamikaze drone or an artillery shell is already flying towards you. If you ignore it or take pot shots at it, then you're gambling with your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjsemcB7I9o (subtitles available)
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Why are they useless? Could they not carry a payload, and swarm their way past defenses that aren't equipped for "volume"?
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There's a coalition to supply Ukraine with a million drones (although that figure might be exaggerated) I'm guessing they'll be slightly cheaper than the Black Hornet ($100K+)
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/02/european-coalition-bids-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano
1,000 electronic warfare-hardened drones vs. 1,000,000 drones using simple, documented radio on ISM bands?
Exactly 0 of those 1,000,000 consumer drones will be flying in US operating areas.
At what distance do those jammers work?
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In what volume of space? You don't want them to be packed densely enough that the enemy can fire a buckshot in a random direction and shoot down two dozen drones.
It's an open ended question :). It's reasonable to assume both sides are intelligent and will do whatever it takes to win.
None of those are cheap FPV quadcopters, are they?
Maybe we should stop killing each other instead of banning drones.
Next thing will be assassinating people with their own phone by causing it to blow up next to their head.
The tool isn't the problem, the problem is that "we" still think killing each other is some sort of solution.
> Maybe we should stop killing each other instead of banning drones.
Wishful thinking. Always have, always will. War is even “legal”, think about that, no repercussions for NATO countries.
> Next thing will be assassinating people with their own phone by causing it to blow up next to their head
I don't know if this was an intentional reference or not, but that has definitely already been done (with a rigged phone). Plus the widespread use of phone position data for targeting.
> the problem is that "we" still think killing each other is some sort of solution
The problem is that violence works against everything except more violence.
Even then, violence works in that it decides a winner - one way or another.
It’s not like Japan or Germany were going to wave a white flag just because someone finally convinced them they were wrong.
Okay and how do we stop killing each other?
It's simple, you stop first /s
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Ban anyone over the age of 60 from politics. It’s all senile old men trying to kill each other with younger people.
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Building drones is very easy from a base requirement point of view.
And the components are easy to buy as most if not all have plenty of other use cases.