I'm sure that by now, most of my readers are aware of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's directive to the US armed forces to expand and enhance their use of drones (i.e. unmanned combat vehicles, aerial or otherwise). He set three objectives:
Our mission is threefold. First, we will bolster the nascent U.S. drone manufacturing base by approving hundreds of American products for purchase by our military. Leveraging private capital flows that support this industry, our overt preference is to Buy American.
Second, we will power a technological leapfrog, arming our combat units with a variety of low-cost drones made by America’s world-leading engineers and Al experts. Drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race. Modem battlefield innovation demands a new procurement strategy that fuses manufacturers with our frontline troops.
Finally, we’ll train as we expect to fight. To simulate the modern battlefield, senior officers must overcome the bureaucracy’s instinctive risk-aversion on everything from budgeting to weaponizing and training. Next year I expect to see this capability integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars.
There's more at the link.
That sounds great . . . but it contains a number of pitfalls that have bedeviled US arms development for decades. Far too often, designers have "gold-plated" their work, adding in expensive features and capabilities that are not essential to the task originally envisaged. They protest that they will need such capabilities in the future - but what they're doing is making the base product so expensive it may not be affordable, and so complex that maintenance and training take up far too much time to be operationally effective. As a case in point, consider that the F-35 has still not been declared fully operationally capable, despite having been launched as the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program in 1993 - almost 32 years ago!
In contrast, I remember South Africa's weapon development programs. They were run on very tight budgets, to meet clearly defined operational needs, and little or no "gold-plating" was allowed. A cardinal principle was that any weapon had to be "soldier-proof", because soldiers were guaranteed to break anything that was in the least fragile or delicate. Wherever possible, the engineers who designed and/or would produce the weapon were expected to actually take pre-production prototypes into the combat zone in northern Namibia and southern Angola, to test them under real combat conditions. This tended to concentrate their minds wonderfully, and avoided too many esoteric flights of design fantasy. I had cause to be grateful to those hard-headedly practical engineers on more than one occasion.
"Approving hundreds of American products for purchase by our military" risks buying a lot of stuff that may or may not be needed. I'm sure that right now, the salespeople at every defense firm in the country are racing to write brochures and produce slick TV ads for their products, in the hope that they can seize part of this spending cornucopia.
As for "a technological leapfrog, arming our combat units with a variety of low-cost drones made by America’s world-leading engineers and Al experts" . . . I distrust that sentence profoundly. There's an old saying: "Fast. Cheap. Easy. Pick any two." A fast technological leapfrog can doubtless be achieved, but it won't be cheap, and it's unlikely to be easy. Furthermore, America no longer holds the world lead in engineering and AI experts. Ukraine is probably top dog right now, with Russia not far behind - and they're doing it the South African way, keeping things simple, innovating one step at a time, and making sure that their designs are practical and effective. A rush to throw money at the problem won't necessarily produce anything better for the USA.
I applaud Mr. Hegseth's enthusiasm for this project, but I think he's expecting a lot more than the US defense industry is capable of delivering at present. If a boat is "a hole in the water into which one pours money", to quote an old tongue-in-cheek definition, this "drone dominance" project may come to resemble that far more closely than one might wish.
Peter
9 comments:
If the designers and salesmen of the anti-drone systems had to as they did in South Africa ACTUALLY go out to our Proxy War Ukraine and USE IT in the Field against live drones....
THAT would help a lot.
I volunteer butter boy Lindsey to be first. After all fair is fair, He's volunteering all of us into a war directly against Russia.
Without fail ALL "weapons programs" rapidly devolve into a line of corporate pigs swilling at the trough of taxpayer dollars.
You aren't wrong, but much of the problem comes from the government acquisition community. They have a bad habit of adding requirements for every conceived scenario the munitions might face, however unlikely. And they don't much care how impossible it makes the design. For the most part the contractors are forced to meet the given requirements or the GS mafia will find another contractor who will.
I believe that there are currently two US companies supplying drones to DoD - Neros and Anduril. Neros has a contract with Ukraine and is sending them 1000 a month while they ramp up production. Anduril is more of the gold plated manufacturer style, and is also ramping up production. AV and Dragoon are in testing, but are having problems with EW conditions. There are also two Ukraine companies that are trying to export to the US, that should help with prices.
Very interesting question indeed, multifaceted it is beneath its murky surface.
Short answer, I don’t think we can.
We were unable to even slow down Obama when he set about making his largest civilian standing army by transferring belt fed machine guns, grenade launchers, MRAPS and a plethora of other excess military hardware to local police departments around the country.
There are far too many politicians who will profit from this through all the usual means. There are far too many companies in the military industrial complex which will profit from this through the usual means.
The media will paint the picture for the masses that we need all these gold plated drone accessories to enhance safety through their usual means. The extra jobs brought about by the manufacturing will be touted by those in political power as revitalizing the American workforce. The funds used to support the programs won’t come from cutting any existing programs, just borrowed from the same old usual sources further fueling inflation through the manufacture of more fiat currency which allows the government to run on a virtually limitless budget. The politicians have prevented the constitution to give themselves and their proxies virtually limitless power.
I feel they no longer care what we think.
I suppose we could vote them out and replace them with folks more aligned with our thought processes, however the lack of arrests and prosecutions arising from all of the billions in fraudulent transactions exposed by team DOGE as well as the lack of movement and even backtracking on certain file releases of late has me thinking differently on that as well.
TMF Bert
If that doesn't change, and soon, the USA's days are numbered. There are too many rising powers out there. Martin Armstrong's predictive model now shows the collapse of most of the Western governments by 2032. That does not give us much time to begin a correction.
At the university where I worked, we had a research foundation that did DARPA work. They designed ad developed remote controlled vehicles for government use using off the shelf hobby store parts. And they worked. And at a fraction of the cost of the dot.mil built stuff. As Dan said, "pigs spilling at the trough."
The real problem is the .mil inability to see different classes of drones. Some are recon platforms, including strategic, operational, and tactical varieties. Some (the newest) are interceptors. A few are mother ships (drone carriers). But the vast majority are expendable munitions.
This is, of course, an opportunity for the Army to add another officer branch. Creating dedicated units might just be the best idea, similar to artillery and air defense. Direct support and general support, with the ability to concentrate efforts as required.
...doing it the South African way, keeping things simple, innovating one step at a time, and making sure that their designs are practical and effective...
Same could be wished of the domestic automobile biz, by the way.
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