I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the release build hash, we had to go through a full acceptance test. As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. As a result there were a hole pile of bugs that we (and customers) ended up just living with.
On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious.
> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not.
Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks between iterations (and possibly more after it leaves your shop) that takes a one year effort and turns it into about 1.5. So the program office decides you should do one big release each year, which also ups the risk because a lot of testing that would catch bugs isn't done until the end in that big 6-week test effort. Oops, now your 1 year + 6 week effort just got turned into 1 year + 6 week + (unknown rework time) + 6 weeks. Probably 2 years.
cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work. If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family.
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
Surely the dev wasn't able to merge that one-line code fix causing 6 weeks of testing without any other eyes on it and without someone else's PR-like approval...right?
Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue.
I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.
This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion.
It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.
The obvious answer is that the more bugs you batch up, the higher the chances the next build fails - this is why CI became a thing, small iterative changes are safer and lead to greater throughput
CI doesn't mean doing all the tests all the time though. The expensive tests still wait until there's a major reason to run them. I had the same question as the parent and I still don't quite see why this can't work.
The bureaucratic development process sounds like Autosar in automotive. I am not surprised that newcomers from USA and Chinese auto companies are able to completely dominate in software because Autosar based development has been like giving a birth to a hedgehog. Slow and painful.
> one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact
Roll back the change? Also, fix the approval process - no way that should have been approved.
Generally speaking that is risk management, an unavoidable engineering tradeoff. In lower stakes situations, for example a critical application or server for a small office, we let low-impact bugs accumulate: Imposing risks, and therefore eventual costs, to avoid minor workarounds and low-impact bugs is poor engineering and risk management.
Engineering and all risk management includes tradeoffs. It's easy to criticize the downside of the tradeoff - the same people criticize the reverse decision when the server (or drone) crashes - when someone is not responsible for both sides of it, when they are not accountable for their words when the outcome occurs.
That's speaking generally. It's also poor risk management to be overly safe. I don't know about the parents' situation. But drone crashes (risking humans), mission failure, $50 million losses, and associated downtime (including delays) and labor costs, seem like high costs that are worth some pain to avoid.
I don't really understand how any of this contributes to "defense". Sounds like "offense" to me. Just patrolling the skies over non-white countries and launching missiles at weddings. The reason the Pentagon invests so heavily in this kind of technology is our wars are so indefensible, they can't convince Americans to sacrifice blood in any quantity for other people's natural resources.
There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal. I guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheaper alternatives also.
My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?
There is a group in South Florida who stand watch over turtle nests on the beach to ensure the hatchlings make it to the ocean instead of instinctively moving towards the street lamps or the bright hotels. I would use drones to hover over the nests to detect if the turtles hatch so people don't have to stand there.
> The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.
$7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.
> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
(Your share of overall defense spending is ~1,000x higher, of course.)
I wish political leaders would express it that way. And you need to include the time factor: $10/year for 10 years differs from $20 for a one-time event. And somehow figure in capital accumulation (as opposed to e.g., consumables) and depreciation. But there are clear, effective ways to communicate it: 'I propose each American spend an average of $80/year for 50 years on this fighter jet program'. 'This moon mission will cost everyone $5/year for 2 years.'
To nitpick a little, I think your math is off: There are 350 million Americans, but we need to exclude most children, elderly, etc.
Now you know why there is war. We have war because the U.S. is failing. Just look at the reversal of the 10 and 30 y bonds over the last 20 years. All the free money that was given to the oligarchs killed our economy.
Or we can go even further with the fun thought exercise, by spreading the cost even more: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the usa.
I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsessed with destroying some super important target to win, like they did with killing Iran leaders only to find out that new leader replace the perished.
The same with the other stuff, they have super important radar and super important ships that need to be defended and a failure creates irreplaceable loses.
Iran on the other hand, just like with their super important leaders lost all its “super weapons” like destroyers and the drone ships and yet again brought USA to its knees.
Maybe USA has more fundamental problems, not just drones. Maybe the problem is the obsession of wonderweapons for destroying wondertargets.
It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him.
Maybe the desire for concentration of power and seeing everything through that lens is the issue?
The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.
The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country.
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
> If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine
This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.
Its like 2 dogs fighting, the US wants to win a display of dominance and have the other dog concede defeat - but if instead the other dog is prepared to die, now its a fight to the death and in fights to the death usually both sides die, even if one is stronger. The mentality of "we will just punch them till they capitulate" shows the US mentality, they're not in an existential struggle and they aren't ready to face one.
Don't overlook the "the people of this foreign land are yearning to be free of their current rulers, and just need a little help from their neighborly U.S. armed forces" trope. I think there are plenty of people who actually believe it.
The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.
Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).
The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.
The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
There is quite a good book on the various problems with the US Military, and its hegemony leading to losing the arms race in missiles, and its various industry problems by Andrei Martyanov - naturalized US citizen, former Soviet military officer. Loves America, hates what its turned into, and marvels at the delusion of our military. MIC bloat is discussed here, as well as our fake financialized economy - which is not an indicator of being able to win wars.
I have only read the first book, and it was nice and humbling experience to me as an American.
> The Defense Innovation Unit notice called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapons payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying with a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles—or 8,000 nautical miles on a one-way strike mission—while executing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the US military
I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.
The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.
Yeah, it's about requirements. The Ukraine war has shown that fast-iterating MVPs are better in many battlefield situations. The saying that militaries end up preparing for the prior war instead of the next, comes to mind.
True, but I think the US requirements are indeed different. Ukraine must repel invading forces in their own country -> lowish range, mass produced, not necessarily precision strike.
US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter.
Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.
Right, I can see the need for both, but that suggests to me that they could differentiate the sensor package + loiter drone significantly from the shahed clone (which, given that it is a one-way trip, has a very similar operational radius)
Does one really need to bring along 2,500 kg of ordinance, when we can launch another $50,000 shahed-equivalent at whatever hard targets the loitering drone locates?
Always fighting the last war. But wait until you see how the next generation of our drones fails in a future war!
Being less flip, the pull quote suggests (per my bias) our drone design is as much influenced by how much shit contractors can sell to put on a drone as it is by tactical needs. The kinds of targets that would require one ton of explosive are fixed sites that have been specifically hardened against attack. You'd hope some modern McArthur would look at the situation and say, "Screw it, we will just go around those sites and bomb the hell out of their supply lines with tiny drones", but what the hell do I know?
The defense industry has spent the last 40+ years grooming the DoD into thinking it costs $30mil/unit to produce missiles and drones. They should have rejected any of the bids, but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA, they don't have to answer to any sort of efficiency or profitability.
These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
> A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners
That's just a byproduct of propping up the military industrial complex; have to have conflicts to justify giving the primes sole-source cost+ contracts so they can meet their quarterly EPS targets.
Everything on your list but VA benefits and defense are very regularly called into question. Even VA benefits are questioned pretty regularly, but that tends to be put down pretty quickly.
From what I know, the 'defense' industry has their production cleverly across all 50 states so that they're seen as one of the few sources of stable employment for most, sadly.
It's not actually that many people in the grand scheme at ~1.1 million according to the CRS, but it is spread out very effectively so that massive cuts can be directly felt by any chosen House representative or senator. It's partially a capacity preservation system as well, for defense a nation wants to be able to produce a significant portion of it's military hardware needs in a war domestically and you need to keep those industries alive somehow against cheaper foreign producers so you have the Berry Amendment that requires clothing etc purchased by the DoD to only use US made materials.
And yet so much of the spending goes to big ticket items benefitting defense contractors while things that actually benefit the soldiers (better armor, better VA hospitals) go by the wayside.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.
An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.
You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.
between these extremes there are, parent posits, some efficiencies to be had. Do you agree that its at least possible to get a cheaper solution thats 90% of the way there? Ukraine seems to do pretty well for themselves on this front, and several other countries around the world are no slouches either. Even iran themselves do quite well. Sure their drones dont have the fanciest optics or whatever, but when looking at a cost per millitary effectiveness standpoint, are five redundant drones with worse optics better than one big one? what about five hundred vs one? five thousand? The same logic goes for most of the components.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
It's kind of funded by the demand for dollars due to whole world needing dollars to trade with them. So that it's not the USA and Americans paying all that interest in inflation due to money printing
The last balanced budget was in 2001 and it was passed by a Republican controlled House and Senate [0]. Clinton somehow gets complete credit for it, even though the executive branch doesn't directly control the budget and congress controls the power of the purse.
This statement implies a misrepresentation of how these kinds of supply chains work.
These are captured markets, there is no competition. The bar is set high, or specifically, so that small players cannot compete, and this is done by extensiive relationship management at all levels, and heavy marketing.
It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.
Even in the face of glaring evidence form Ukraine the system is slow to react.
Shaheds are used for years and the US just let their gear sit out in the open in the Gulf.
You could provide 'irrefutable evidence' to a political system of some fact, it's not hugely helpful.
The system does not change until the power dynamics do - aka Iran destroyed gazillions in US gear and some senior level people are 'demanding answers'.
Defence contracts are an 'inside game' it's extremely political.
Only when people are in a rush do they start to look at outside agencies to find the best gear for the problem they need to solve 'right now'.
Most government agencies cant even pick a different vendor for toilet paper. I cannot imagine the politics involved for trying to supply weapons. All those stories on Flock cameras and being insecure etc is politics at play. Companies know the government will take a decade or more to change vendors, if ever.
Correct, now let's also talk about US government-funded [research, healthcare, education, construction, foreign aid, intelligence, infrastructure, entitlements]
Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.
Will be quite interesting what the end evolution of this will be.
I think high direct movability (like droping a few meters or shifting left/right) might be the next bigger thing for these. Easy enough to add, will make it even harder for air defence missiles catching them.
Besides, the air defence missiles are a lot more expensive than what a drone does.
And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else?
How much payload do you need anyway? Like imagine oil refinery: how much kilo of c4 do you need? I don't think that much.
Or imagine a formation of drones with small payloads and starting to crash in one house wall like into putins palace or the white house.
Makes sense, drone technology has come an insane distance since these were developed.
Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
They could obviously have foreseen the current failures in 2015. It is irrelevant, since the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Generals who routinely give theatrical performances for the cameras want the big toys for their districts.
The goal in Iran is also not to win but to keep the Gulf monarchies, the EU, Japan and China down by means of a low intensity forever war.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of establishing the military-industrial complex [1]. We are seeing the fruits of that now that despite an annual budget over $1T the US has been militarily defeated by Iran (and Afghanistan). We build $13B aircraft carriers that don't work [2].
Defense contracting is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. This is what unfettered cost plus contracts looks like. We ridicule the Russian military for their insane levels of corruption (eg paying for tanks that never get built and the generals pocketing the money) but really the same thing has happened here. The things get built but they don't work and the entire industry is built around hiring former Pentagon people who specialize in procurement.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the US military's past equipment was legendary. The M1 rifle and M4/M16 family were cheap, reliable and effective. The Jeep was legendary for its reliability. The original M1 Abrams tank is widely considered the best tank the military ever built. If you listen to anyone in the military they'll tell you the vehicles are constantly broken down, hard to repair, expensive to maintain and outright dangerous.
Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on roads, schools, bridges, hospitals and trains, things that would actually benefit people. We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?
And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase.
This is also why I laugh whenever anyone pushes the idea that China is the Big Bad [tm], for two reasons. First, they don't have to be. We just want their to be a scary enemy to justify all this. Second, if they were, they would destroy us because it would ultimately come down to military industrial capability and we would lose. Orders of magnitude lose.
> And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase
Yeah, this is mind-boggling. The requested increase is roughly the size of the entire 2004 military budget. 2004, when we were fighting two separate ground wars.
There were close to 200k US troops on the ground in combat theaters in 2004. We're proposing to add a "2004 US military" to our military. The unnecessary wars we will start with this capacity[1] will cause havoc in unpredictable places.
US should be split up so it can't do any more damage to the world. Americans can't be trusted with putting that much power in the hands of a few people anyway.
It's disappointing how often the public gives a silent thumbs up on military spend. Okay I'll grant most US citizens would have preferred Trump hadn't gotten into this war.
But most talk is about the $$ cost of this war, how little Trump has to show for it, and price of gasoline & groceries.
Instead (for US citizens), the talk should be about what else could have benefitted from those $$, and now isn't because it'll be used to re-stock weaponry. Think healthcare, infrastructure, education, research, etc etc.
Ignore that we funded the taliban and warlords for the next 50 years with 1.9 billion in vehicles, machine guns, small arms, night vision, and explosives?
We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.
guess what, Iran will hold the gulf hostage regardless if US is there or not
exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban
regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters
you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses
btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?
at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point
While I am critical of Ukraine being in talks to join the EU (which IMHO it shouldn't), I am quite happy that we in EU kind of have built good relationships with Ukraine - military drone construction knowledge and expierience will become a key technology field, as cooperations between Ukraine and Europe after the war (however that will look like) will probably strengthen europes defense capabilities.
I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the release build hash, we had to go through a full acceptance test. As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. As a result there were a hole pile of bugs that we (and customers) ended up just living with.
On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious.
> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not.
Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks between iterations (and possibly more after it leaves your shop) that takes a one year effort and turns it into about 1.5. So the program office decides you should do one big release each year, which also ups the risk because a lot of testing that would catch bugs isn't done until the end in that big 6-week test effort. Oops, now your 1 year + 6 week effort just got turned into 1 year + 6 week + (unknown rework time) + 6 weeks. Probably 2 years.
cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work. If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family.
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
Surely the dev wasn't able to merge that one-line code fix causing 6 weeks of testing without any other eyes on it and without someone else's PR-like approval...right?
Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue.
I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.
> visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process
See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.
I would guess that DoD procurement rules have more to do with it than Congress, but perhaps Congress defined DoD procurement rules.
Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.
This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion.
It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.
Why would those fixes not be batched up? So fix 20% of those and do one round of testing?
The obvious answer is that the more bugs you batch up, the higher the chances the next build fails - this is why CI became a thing, small iterative changes are safer and lead to greater throughput
True, but if each run of CI takes 6 weeks then you're going to vastly hamper development.
CI doesn't mean doing all the tests all the time though. The expensive tests still wait until there's a major reason to run them. I had the same question as the parent and I still don't quite see why this can't work.
This is why Ukraine is making equivalent tech now for 1/10th the price. It's great to see.
All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.
Hopefully making the real horrors of war visible to the public/world will make war less frequent. Alas...
It's always been pretty horrific. We just didn't have bodycam livestreams invented during trench warfare times.
Depends on who's on the receiving end.
I agree. Nightmare fuel.
The bureaucratic development process sounds like Autosar in automotive. I am not surprised that newcomers from USA and Chinese auto companies are able to completely dominate in software because Autosar based development has been like giving a birth to a hedgehog. Slow and painful.
> one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact
Roll back the change? Also, fix the approval process - no way that should have been approved.
Generally speaking that is risk management, an unavoidable engineering tradeoff. In lower stakes situations, for example a critical application or server for a small office, we let low-impact bugs accumulate: Imposing risks, and therefore eventual costs, to avoid minor workarounds and low-impact bugs is poor engineering and risk management.
Engineering and all risk management includes tradeoffs. It's easy to criticize the downside of the tradeoff - the same people criticize the reverse decision when the server (or drone) crashes - when someone is not responsible for both sides of it, when they are not accountable for their words when the outcome occurs.
That's speaking generally. It's also poor risk management to be overly safe. I don't know about the parents' situation. But drone crashes (risking humans), mission failure, $50 million losses, and associated downtime (including delays) and labor costs, seem like high costs that are worth some pain to avoid.
I don't really understand how any of this contributes to "defense". Sounds like "offense" to me. Just patrolling the skies over non-white countries and launching missiles at weddings. The reason the Pentagon invests so heavily in this kind of technology is our wars are so indefensible, they can't convince Americans to sacrifice blood in any quantity for other people's natural resources.
Drones can be used for both offense and defense. For example the usage of drones in Ukraine can be classified as defense.
They are white [1].
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisi...
They certainly look white to me.
Are Spanish people white or Hispanic according to those definitions?
'Original peoples' is an interesting phrase. Neanderthals? Beaker people?
A single category for everyone from Pakistanis to Japanese is weird.
I think they meant Caucasian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
If safety is extremely important, why there were bugs in the first place? Surely these should have been caught before code would get into main, no?
There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal. I guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheaper alternatives also.
My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?
There is a group in South Florida who stand watch over turtle nests on the beach to ensure the hatchlings make it to the ocean instead of instinctively moving towards the street lamps or the bright hotels. I would use drones to hover over the nests to detect if the turtles hatch so people don't have to stand there.
What would you do?
Side note: The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.
So $1 billion is about equal to 4 hour hours of government spending.
> The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.
$7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.
Yikes, that is a lot.
Would have been nice to do that in Lebanon so that woman could still be alive.
$3 is still too much and I would rather it go towards paying the debt down.
> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.
(Your share of overall defense spending is ~1,000x higher, of course.)
I wish political leaders would express it that way. And you need to include the time factor: $10/year for 10 years differs from $20 for a one-time event. And somehow figure in capital accumulation (as opposed to e.g., consumables) and depreciation. But there are clear, effective ways to communicate it: 'I propose each American spend an average of $80/year for 50 years on this fighter jet program'. 'This moon mission will cost everyone $5/year for 2 years.'
To nitpick a little, I think your math is off: There are 350 million Americans, but we need to exclude most children, elderly, etc.
Now you know why there is war. We have war because the U.S. is failing. Just look at the reversal of the 10 and 30 y bonds over the last 20 years. All the free money that was given to the oligarchs killed our economy.
Or we can go even further with the fun thought exercise, by spreading the cost even more: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the usa.
I’m no military expert by any means but US appears to be obsessed with destroying some super important target to win, like they did with killing Iran leaders only to find out that new leader replace the perished.
The same with the other stuff, they have super important radar and super important ships that need to be defended and a failure creates irreplaceable loses. Iran on the other hand, just like with their super important leaders lost all its “super weapons” like destroyers and the drone ships and yet again brought USA to its knees.
Maybe USA has more fundamental problems, not just drones. Maybe the problem is the obsession of wonderweapons for destroying wondertargets.
It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him.
Maybe the desire for concentration of power and seeing everything through that lens is the issue?
The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.
The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country.
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
> If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine
This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.
>Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board
The fact they unironically used Star Wars in their war memes was an amazing self-own.
Its like 2 dogs fighting, the US wants to win a display of dominance and have the other dog concede defeat - but if instead the other dog is prepared to die, now its a fight to the death and in fights to the death usually both sides die, even if one is stronger. The mentality of "we will just punch them till they capitulate" shows the US mentality, they're not in an existential struggle and they aren't ready to face one.
Don't overlook the "the people of this foreign land are yearning to be free of their current rulers, and just need a little help from their neighborly U.S. armed forces" trope. I think there are plenty of people who actually believe it.
Are you sure the claim is false?
Like almost everything, it's almost certainly false for some people. And almost certainly true for others.
It's almost like you can't paint an entire country with one brush?
The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.
Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).
The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.
Its the issue of the orange clown.
The USA Military was quite aware that killing Irans Leadership is not 'it'.
But Trump saw how well venezuela worked so that was it.
Yeah USA politics is not 4D Chess.
> Maybe USA has more fundamental problems
Yes we do, it is called imperialism. Now with a sprinkle of senile Fascism.
The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
There is quite a good book on the various problems with the US Military, and its hegemony leading to losing the arms race in missiles, and its various industry problems by Andrei Martyanov - naturalized US citizen, former Soviet military officer. Loves America, hates what its turned into, and marvels at the delusion of our military. MIC bloat is discussed here, as well as our fake financialized economy - which is not an indicator of being able to win wars.
I have only read the first book, and it was nice and humbling experience to me as an American.
https://www.amazon.com/Disintegration-Indicators-Coming-Amer...
Blog:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
Review:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/how-russia-views-...
> The Defense Innovation Unit notice called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapons payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying with a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles—or 8,000 nautical miles on a one-way strike mission—while executing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the US military
I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.
The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.
Yeah, it's about requirements. The Ukraine war has shown that fast-iterating MVPs are better in many battlefield situations. The saying that militaries end up preparing for the prior war instead of the next, comes to mind.
True, but I think the US requirements are indeed different. Ukraine must repel invading forces in their own country -> lowish range, mass produced, not necessarily precision strike.
US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter. Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.
Right, I can see the need for both, but that suggests to me that they could differentiate the sensor package + loiter drone significantly from the shahed clone (which, given that it is a one-way trip, has a very similar operational radius)
Does one really need to bring along 2,500 kg of ordinance, when we can launch another $50,000 shahed-equivalent at whatever hard targets the loitering drone locates?
If you look at us military procurement over the past 20 years you will find that many, many projects have been sunk because of this exact reason.
Always fighting the last war. But wait until you see how the next generation of our drones fails in a future war!
Being less flip, the pull quote suggests (per my bias) our drone design is as much influenced by how much shit contractors can sell to put on a drone as it is by tactical needs. The kinds of targets that would require one ton of explosive are fixed sites that have been specifically hardened against attack. You'd hope some modern McArthur would look at the situation and say, "Screw it, we will just go around those sites and bomb the hell out of their supply lines with tiny drones", but what the hell do I know?
In short: War is sell.
The defense industry has spent the last 40+ years grooming the DoD into thinking it costs $30mil/unit to produce missiles and drones. They should have rejected any of the bids, but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA, they don't have to answer to any sort of efficiency or profitability.
These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense.
And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked:
"Don't you support our troops?"
And that'll be the end of that
Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
> A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners
That's just a byproduct of propping up the military industrial complex; have to have conflicts to justify giving the primes sole-source cost+ contracts so they can meet their quarterly EPS targets.
Everything on your list but VA benefits and defense are very regularly called into question. Even VA benefits are questioned pretty regularly, but that tends to be put down pretty quickly.
I think there is a lot of discord over medicare/medical, social security, and interest at least, but maybe I'm just in a bubble.
And let's not forget: the voters back them on this.
From what I know, the 'defense' industry has their production cleverly across all 50 states so that they're seen as one of the few sources of stable employment for most, sadly.
It's not actually that many people in the grand scheme at ~1.1 million according to the CRS, but it is spread out very effectively so that massive cuts can be directly felt by any chosen House representative or senator. It's partially a capacity preservation system as well, for defense a nation wants to be able to produce a significant portion of it's military hardware needs in a war domestically and you need to keep those industries alive somehow against cheaper foreign producers so you have the Berry Amendment that requires clothing etc purchased by the DoD to only use US made materials.
And yet so much of the spending goes to big ticket items benefitting defense contractors while things that actually benefit the soldiers (better armor, better VA hospitals) go by the wayside.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
> Killing people is just a side effect
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.
An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.
You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.
The modern (UA) take is to strap the warhead directly on the thing, make it just as big as needed and directly fly everything into the target.
If you insist on firing guided missiles at ground targets from a drone that returns to base you're never gonna be able to compete on cost.
between these extremes there are, parent posits, some efficiencies to be had. Do you agree that its at least possible to get a cheaper solution thats 90% of the way there? Ukraine seems to do pretty well for themselves on this front, and several other countries around the world are no slouches either. Even iran themselves do quite well. Sure their drones dont have the fanciest optics or whatever, but when looking at a cost per millitary effectiveness standpoint, are five redundant drones with worse optics better than one big one? what about five hundred vs one? five thousand? The same logic goes for most of the components.
> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
It's kind of funded by the demand for dollars due to whole world needing dollars to trade with them. So that it's not the USA and Americans paying all that interest in inflation due to money printing
> since the budget is never balanced
When the Republicans rule.
The last balanced budget was in 2001 and it was passed by a Republican controlled House and Senate [0]. Clinton somehow gets complete credit for it, even though the executive branch doesn't directly control the budget and congress controls the power of the purse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/106th_United_States_Congress
If you think you can produce them for cheaper, you could make yourself a lot of money and save taxpayers a lot of money by starting your own company.
This statement implies a misrepresentation of how these kinds of supply chains work.
These are captured markets, there is no competition. The bar is set high, or specifically, so that small players cannot compete, and this is done by extensiive relationship management at all levels, and heavy marketing.
It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.
Even in the face of glaring evidence form Ukraine the system is slow to react.
Shaheds are used for years and the US just let their gear sit out in the open in the Gulf.
You could provide 'irrefutable evidence' to a political system of some fact, it's not hugely helpful.
The system does not change until the power dynamics do - aka Iran destroyed gazillions in US gear and some senior level people are 'demanding answers'.
Defence contracts are an 'inside game' it's extremely political.
Only when people are in a rush do they start to look at outside agencies to find the best gear for the problem they need to solve 'right now'.
Most government agencies cant even pick a different vendor for toilet paper. I cannot imagine the politics involved for trying to supply weapons. All those stories on Flock cameras and being insecure etc is politics at play. Companies know the government will take a decade or more to change vendors, if ever.
Correct, now let's also talk about US government-funded [research, healthcare, education, construction, foreign aid, intelligence, infrastructure, entitlements]
Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.
Will be quite interesting what the end evolution of this will be.
I think high direct movability (like droping a few meters or shifting left/right) might be the next bigger thing for these. Easy enough to add, will make it even harder for air defence missiles catching them.
Besides, the air defence missiles are a lot more expensive than what a drone does.
And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else?
How much payload do you need anyway? Like imagine oil refinery: how much kilo of c4 do you need? I don't think that much.
Or imagine a formation of drones with small payloads and starting to crash in one house wall like into putins palace or the white house.
Makes sense, drone technology has come an insane distance since these were developed.
Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
The Defense Innovation Unit was founded in 2015 and is full of SV interest groups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Innovation_Unit
They could obviously have foreseen the current failures in 2015. It is irrelevant, since the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Generals who routinely give theatrical performances for the cameras want the big toys for their districts.
The goal in Iran is also not to win but to keep the Gulf monarchies, the EU, Japan and China down by means of a low intensity forever war.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of establishing the military-industrial complex [1]. We are seeing the fruits of that now that despite an annual budget over $1T the US has been militarily defeated by Iran (and Afghanistan). We build $13B aircraft carriers that don't work [2].
Defense contracting is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. This is what unfettered cost plus contracts looks like. We ridicule the Russian military for their insane levels of corruption (eg paying for tanks that never get built and the generals pocketing the money) but really the same thing has happened here. The things get built but they don't work and the entire industry is built around hiring former Pentagon people who specialize in procurement.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the US military's past equipment was legendary. The M1 rifle and M4/M16 family were cheap, reliable and effective. The Jeep was legendary for its reliability. The original M1 Abrams tank is widely considered the best tank the military ever built. If you listen to anyone in the military they'll tell you the vehicles are constantly broken down, hard to repair, expensive to maintain and outright dangerous.
Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on roads, schools, bridges, hospitals and trains, things that would actually benefit people. We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?
And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase.
This is also why I laugh whenever anyone pushes the idea that China is the Big Bad [tm], for two reasons. First, they don't have to be. We just want their to be a scary enemy to justify all this. Second, if they were, they would destroy us because it would ultimately come down to military industrial capability and we would lose. Orders of magnitude lose.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
[2]: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-th...
> And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase
Yeah, this is mind-boggling. The requested increase is roughly the size of the entire 2004 military budget. 2004, when we were fighting two separate ground wars.
There were close to 200k US troops on the ground in combat theaters in 2004. We're proposing to add a "2004 US military" to our military. The unnecessary wars we will start with this capacity[1] will cause havoc in unpredictable places.
US should be split up so it can't do any more damage to the world. Americans can't be trusted with putting that much power in the hands of a few people anyway.
I know a few people who could have used some of that $1 Billion. I mean what is Musk and Altman going to do when they need to be bailed out?
It's disappointing how often the public gives a silent thumbs up on military spend. Okay I'll grant most US citizens would have preferred Trump hadn't gotten into this war.
But most talk is about the $$ cost of this war, how little Trump has to show for it, and price of gasoline & groceries.
Instead (for US citizens), the talk should be about what else could have benefitted from those $$, and now isn't because it'll be used to re-stock weaponry. Think healthcare, infrastructure, education, research, etc etc.
That's the real cost of wars like this.
Drones are only one piece of the puzzle. Once again ars is on the wrong side.
there's a better way for 100% savings
just completely exit like Afghanistan
and remember all this military hardware eventually ends up in the hands of police departments domestically, next decade is going to be wild
$21 TRILLION spent on militarization 2001-2021
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
imagine how much by 2031, at least double
ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off Venezuela at a million dollars a pop
> ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off
Oh. You should have started with this.
The fact that this person thinks the Afghanistan exit was a success should have let you know he is a crackpot well before the last sentence.
The Afghanistan exit was a completely predictable colossal failure, but it did mean we stopped lighting money on fire in Afghanistan.
Ignore that we funded the taliban and warlords for the next 50 years with 1.9 billion in vehicles, machine guns, small arms, night vision, and explosives?
>just completely exit like Afghanistan
We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.
guess what, Iran will hold the gulf hostage regardless if US is there or not
exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban
regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters
you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses
btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?
at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point
> regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
Sources please. The war initiated by US and Israel motivated Iran put pressure on the US by closing the strait and attacking the regional US allies.
Google: straight of hormuz 2026 closure timeline
Graciously, "if the US was there or not" is a reference to the US navy being near/in the straight of hormuz.
Another novel approach to saving money: stop fighting Israel's wars
Our country is a joke
While I am critical of Ukraine being in talks to join the EU (which IMHO it shouldn't), I am quite happy that we in EU kind of have built good relationships with Ukraine - military drone construction knowledge and expierience will become a key technology field, as cooperations between Ukraine and Europe after the war (however that will look like) will probably strengthen europes defense capabilities.