This was particularly interesting in regards to the US military not being at the bleeding edge:
The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000.
It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities).
Related:
Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.
"It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving"
This has nothing to do with keeping up with the intel from the conflict. This is entirely the product of our manufacturing issues. Manufacturing drove our success in WW2. Now we can't even manufacture low cost low(ish) tech drones at 1/10th the volume of potential adversaries.
> “Vendors in the United States would laugh at us,” Hichwa said. American-made radios could cost $10,000 when he needed something for $30. The founders realized they’d have to build components themselves and seek suppliers outside the defense industry. Instead of using computer chips common in military equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, Neros used chips designed for parking meters at $1 each.
By the time your certification process represents 99.7%+ of your total costs, there's a chance it's hurting you more than it's helping.
It helps Lockheed Martin by preventing 21-year-olds from waltzing into the Pentagon and selling weapon systems to the DoD, allowing them to capture 300× more value than if they were subject to market competition.
Elon did the same thing with SpaceX. If you don’t need five 9s (for whatever the certification is measuring) and can get by with three — you can often save 10x on cost.
Counterpoint, the US has better other systems. Such as the 1st,2nd,3rd largest air forces in the world.
Lots of Ukrainian commanders would happily trade FPV drones with grenades attached for mortar teams with lots of ammo and effective aircover.
Modern militaries need drones, but the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play.
Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones. Of course the US has a far larger air force if you count by dollars rather than by airframe count, but if that's because they're buying US$10k milspec chips when US$1 parking meter chips would work just as well, that and a fiver will get you a cup of coffee.
An F-16 costs US$200 million and can be destroyed by a US$500 FPV drone with a grenade attached, as Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.
Surely you are correct that commanders would happily trade one FPV drone for one properly equipped F-16, even without the mortars. But it isn't clear that they would trade 400,000 FPV drones for the F-16, and that's the trade actually on offer.
The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war, probably because they don't work very well yet; that's why the Ukrainians are dinking around with FPV. The US Army has never faced even the kind of FPV drone war we're seeing in Ukraine. Their materiel has, though, since they shipped a lot of it to the Ukrainians, and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are trying to keep their tanks off the front lines when they can, and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.
Think about mortars more. If you can be close enough for a drone 1-2km, then mortars should be what you're thinking about.
Mix a targeting drone with a vehicle mounted mortar team and they can have faster rounds on target and get of the X quicker than drone teams. And nets don't stop mortars.
200M will by a lot of that and can be fielded in a very flexible way.
Mortars miss; suicide drones don't. And even the crappiest combat FPVs outrange mortars at 10+ km. The second drone gets through the net. And I wouldn't be surprised if US mortar rounds cost more than Ukrainian drones. But certainly they are synergistic, and tanks and IFVs are also widely fielded on both sides of the war.
The obvious thing to do is to guide your mortar rounds with canards mounted slightly forward of the center of gravity, but the distance between "obvious" and done has a lot of rotting corpses in it.
Ultimately I think this is true, but you can't overlook any aspect, and it seems the US overlooked drone potential. Thus far it hasn't cost them.
A disparate drone swarm taking out power distribution stations (I don't know what they're officially called) all over the country would be devastating. Lessons from https://cybersquirrel1.com/.
(I think there's an 'imagination' and/or 'perspective' limitation when you're already the gorilla. You think like a gorilla, you're unable to think like a parasite)
Agreed. The military will certainly need smaller drones to support squads or platoons, and to perform a variety of functions on the battlefield. But, I think drawing too many and too specific of lessons from Ukraine/Russia is bad.
It's tough to imagine a scenario where the US is so bogged down on a front line that a few miles of range on a Ukraine style FPV drone is going to be a critical weapon, especially if this scenario also requires that the US not be able to perform SEAD, destroy GPS jamming, or hit the target with JDAM/Hellfires/ETC.
Having a Mavic or Mini drone that can perform recon, a small drone capable of delivering a grenade sized payload to hit entrenched targets, a larger drone that can offer BDA and recon for artillery/MLRS, or the "Loyal Wingman" airforce drones are all reasonable ideas. But I just don't see the US standing up a dedicated FPV regiment - it doesn't align with the rest of the force's composition or likely missions.
Essentially it's this dichotomy:
If we need to project force overseas, it's existing at the end of a massive chain of logistics, air/sea power and lift capability, and a lot of dollars. Whether the drone costs 500, 1000, or 10,000 doesn't really matter at that point because the soldier operating it and the logistics to get him there has already cost hundreds of thousands, and even a $50K drone-bomb is cheaper than the cost of the JDAM, F-35 flight time, pilot, and carrier that would otherwise be used to hit the target.
If instead we are fighting on the homefront, battling over tens of miles of heartland and building drones from parts scavenged from a bombed out Best Buy or imported from some imaginary, untouched part of the world (because what would the world's supply chain look like in this scenario??), all assumptions go out the window and the idea of mass-producing any armament at all is impossible.
Russia is dominating Ukraine in air forces by about 10-to-1. Yet Russia is using aviation only to lob guided bombs from far beyond the front line.
Apparently, air defense is good enough to make the aviation use too expensive too quickly. It's possible that the US can saturate the air defense by the sheer number of airplanes, accepting heavy casualties in return. But what if it fails?
The US military didn't lose. They had overwhelming tactical and technological superiority, 20:1 kill ratios, and consistently inflicted heavy casualties whenever they engaged the enemy directly.
Now that didn't translate into accomplishing the political war goals of nation-building, changing cultures, and counter-insurgency without massive troop presence; but that wasn't a failure of the armed forces.
What's that line: the US doesn't lose wars, it gets tired of them?
Yeah I think people are underestimating drones here.
There is a reason this administration is fast tracking drone production and easing up on procurement. Some stuff doesn't need super sophisticated systems with traditional processes to get off the ground quickly with a cheap swarm approach.
It's probably the only thing I can agree with this administration on.
With that said America would be doing both drone swarms and advanced missile systems where they are most effective.
Flak cannons are also really cheap to produce and use. But downing a modern fast jet with one is still hard to do. Especially when they can fire over the horizon.
The war in Ukraine looks like it does because Ukraine has had to fight with constant equipment shortages. It's not really the future of warfare that modern militaries are prepping for.
Good eye. It's plagiarized, too: the source they copied (without attribution) is this New York Times story[0], and you can diff the two texts yourselves, to see what AI did to it. (It's gross).
I've emailed the mods to ask them to replace the post's URL.
I pay attention to what my former country is doing to Ukraine and it is really bad. America's warfighting with drones is very clearly unprepared to what's currently on the cutting edge. Ukraine's strike on strategic aviation with drones transported via trucks to the edge of airports can very easily happen here, given the size of the country, relative ease of access to air force bases and ubiquitous trucks everywhere. I worry that only when that happens will there be meaningful impetus to do something. Until then the current idiots will continue to occupy themselves with owning the libs and beard size regulations.
A reminder that both Ukraine and Russia in the war use drones because they do not have the actual tools they want to use for that job
An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness.
Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets.
No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer.
By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction.
Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars.
Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare.
And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think.
There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming.
Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there.
This was particularly interesting in regards to the US military not being at the bleeding edge:
The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000.
It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities).
Related:
Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.
"It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving"
This has nothing to do with keeping up with the intel from the conflict. This is entirely the product of our manufacturing issues. Manufacturing drove our success in WW2. Now we can't even manufacture low cost low(ish) tech drones at 1/10th the volume of potential adversaries.
Russia gets all their drone parts from China same as Ukraine not sure as assembling them is “making them”
I found this one interesting:
> “Vendors in the United States would laugh at us,” Hichwa said. American-made radios could cost $10,000 when he needed something for $30. The founders realized they’d have to build components themselves and seek suppliers outside the defense industry. Instead of using computer chips common in military equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, Neros used chips designed for parking meters at $1 each.
By the time your certification process represents 99.7%+ of your total costs, there's a chance it's hurting you more than it's helping.
It helps Lockheed Martin by preventing 21-year-olds from waltzing into the Pentagon and selling weapon systems to the DoD, allowing them to capture 300× more value than if they were subject to market competition.
Elon did the same thing with SpaceX. If you don’t need five 9s (for whatever the certification is measuring) and can get by with three — you can often save 10x on cost.
But the parking meter chips are still made in China...
Counterpoint, the US has better other systems. Such as the 1st,2nd,3rd largest air forces in the world.
Lots of Ukrainian commanders would happily trade FPV drones with grenades attached for mortar teams with lots of ammo and effective aircover.
Modern militaries need drones, but the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play.
Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones. Of course the US has a far larger air force if you count by dollars rather than by airframe count, but if that's because they're buying US$10k milspec chips when US$1 parking meter chips would work just as well, that and a fiver will get you a cup of coffee.
An F-16 costs US$200 million and can be destroyed by a US$500 FPV drone with a grenade attached, as Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.
Surely you are correct that commanders would happily trade one FPV drone for one properly equipped F-16, even without the mortars. But it isn't clear that they would trade 400,000 FPV drones for the F-16, and that's the trade actually on offer.
The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war, probably because they don't work very well yet; that's why the Ukrainians are dinking around with FPV. The US Army has never faced even the kind of FPV drone war we're seeing in Ukraine. Their materiel has, though, since they shipped a lot of it to the Ukrainians, and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are trying to keep their tanks off the front lines when they can, and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.
Think about mortars more. If you can be close enough for a drone 1-2km, then mortars should be what you're thinking about.
Mix a targeting drone with a vehicle mounted mortar team and they can have faster rounds on target and get of the X quicker than drone teams. And nets don't stop mortars.
200M will by a lot of that and can be fielded in a very flexible way.
Mortars miss; suicide drones don't. And even the crappiest combat FPVs outrange mortars at 10+ km. The second drone gets through the net. And I wouldn't be surprised if US mortar rounds cost more than Ukrainian drones. But certainly they are synergistic, and tanks and IFVs are also widely fielded on both sides of the war.
The obvious thing to do is to guide your mortar rounds with canards mounted slightly forward of the center of gravity, but the distance between "obvious" and done has a lot of rotting corpses in it.
Ultimately I think this is true, but you can't overlook any aspect, and it seems the US overlooked drone potential. Thus far it hasn't cost them.
A disparate drone swarm taking out power distribution stations (I don't know what they're officially called) all over the country would be devastating. Lessons from https://cybersquirrel1.com/.
(I think there's an 'imagination' and/or 'perspective' limitation when you're already the gorilla. You think like a gorilla, you're unable to think like a parasite)
Agreed. The military will certainly need smaller drones to support squads or platoons, and to perform a variety of functions on the battlefield. But, I think drawing too many and too specific of lessons from Ukraine/Russia is bad.
It's tough to imagine a scenario where the US is so bogged down on a front line that a few miles of range on a Ukraine style FPV drone is going to be a critical weapon, especially if this scenario also requires that the US not be able to perform SEAD, destroy GPS jamming, or hit the target with JDAM/Hellfires/ETC.
Having a Mavic or Mini drone that can perform recon, a small drone capable of delivering a grenade sized payload to hit entrenched targets, a larger drone that can offer BDA and recon for artillery/MLRS, or the "Loyal Wingman" airforce drones are all reasonable ideas. But I just don't see the US standing up a dedicated FPV regiment - it doesn't align with the rest of the force's composition or likely missions.
Essentially it's this dichotomy: If we need to project force overseas, it's existing at the end of a massive chain of logistics, air/sea power and lift capability, and a lot of dollars. Whether the drone costs 500, 1000, or 10,000 doesn't really matter at that point because the soldier operating it and the logistics to get him there has already cost hundreds of thousands, and even a $50K drone-bomb is cheaper than the cost of the JDAM, F-35 flight time, pilot, and carrier that would otherwise be used to hit the target.
If instead we are fighting on the homefront, battling over tens of miles of heartland and building drones from parts scavenged from a bombed out Best Buy or imported from some imaginary, untouched part of the world (because what would the world's supply chain look like in this scenario??), all assumptions go out the window and the idea of mass-producing any armament at all is impossible.
This is exactly correct.
It's the same reason why US military doctrine worries very little about jamming.
If something is jamming, the tactical response is to destroy the jammer.
If someone is drone attacking you, the tactical response is to destroy the drone launches.
Russia is dominating Ukraine in air forces by about 10-to-1. Yet Russia is using aviation only to lob guided bombs from far beyond the front line.
Apparently, air defense is good enough to make the aviation use too expensive too quickly. It's possible that the US can saturate the air defense by the sheer number of airplanes, accepting heavy casualties in return. But what if it fails?
> the swarms that everyone gushes over aren't that effective when a 1000 pound gorilla like the US Army turns up to play
... maybe. maybe not. the same army lost against stubborn Afghan shepherds. and before that against Vietnamese farmers.
The US military didn't lose. They had overwhelming tactical and technological superiority, 20:1 kill ratios, and consistently inflicted heavy casualties whenever they engaged the enemy directly.
Now that didn't translate into accomplishing the political war goals of nation-building, changing cultures, and counter-insurgency without massive troop presence; but that wasn't a failure of the armed forces.
What's that line: the US doesn't lose wars, it gets tired of them?
A swarm of dirt cheap drones flying through the jet engines of a 10,000,000 dollar gorilla is an asymmetric answer.
Yeah I think people are underestimating drones here.
There is a reason this administration is fast tracking drone production and easing up on procurement. Some stuff doesn't need super sophisticated systems with traditional processes to get off the ground quickly with a cheap swarm approach.
It's probably the only thing I can agree with this administration on.
With that said America would be doing both drone swarms and advanced missile systems where they are most effective.
Flak cannons are also really cheap to produce and use. But downing a modern fast jet with one is still hard to do. Especially when they can fire over the horizon.
The war in Ukraine looks like it does because Ukraine has had to fight with constant equipment shortages. It's not really the future of warfare that modern militaries are prepping for.
I just can’t read AI articles anymore
Good eye. It's plagiarized, too: the source they copied (without attribution) is this New York Times story[0], and you can diff the two texts yourselves, to see what AI did to it. (It's gross).
I've emailed the mods to ask them to replace the post's URL.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/neros-military-d... ("The 20-Somethings Who Raised $121 Million to Build Military Drones" by Farah Stockman)
It's not paywalled, though, which makes it far better than the NYT link!
I pay attention to what my former country is doing to Ukraine and it is really bad. America's warfighting with drones is very clearly unprepared to what's currently on the cutting edge. Ukraine's strike on strategic aviation with drones transported via trucks to the edge of airports can very easily happen here, given the size of the country, relative ease of access to air force bases and ubiquitous trucks everywhere. I worry that only when that happens will there be meaningful impetus to do something. Until then the current idiots will continue to occupy themselves with owning the libs and beard size regulations.
We don't want them hiding drones in their beards!
> The Archer Strike platforms integrate with Kraken Kinetics Terminus strike payloads
No relation!
I think about where this is going to end up in 20 years and it terrifies me.
A reminder that both Ukraine and Russia in the war use drones because they do not have the actual tools they want to use for that job
An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness.
Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets.
No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer.
By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction.
Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars.
Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare.
And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think.
There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming.
Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there.