Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head.
In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an interception.
Meanwhile they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore or they’ll be sunk with hypersonic missiles.
The economics are crazy but even if you’re willing to pay, the capacity to build enough isn’t there either.
Drones + cheap antidrones + aircraft carriers + stealth aircraft looks like a solid high/low optimum. Anyone pitching an only-high or only-low strategy is leaving chips on the table.
I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA.
We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]
The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.
Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.
Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.
>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
The picture below is from 1995. [1]
By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.
[0] https://www.twz.com/6866/60-minutes-does-an-infomercial-on-d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator#...
For Afghanistan it seems like high-flying, capable, armed drones were a better option for that type of conflict.
... and it only cost $225M.
(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...)
The alarming part of this to me is that this heavily implies that wars will be decided more by who can successfully destroy their adversary's economy, than who can take and hold points of strength. Holding a city with an entrenched military doesnt matter much when there is still a factory deep in enemy territory producing the next wave of attacks. The incentives for targeting non-combatant civilians is rising at an alarming rate.
This has been the case in wars of attrition since the Civil War. It took between then and WWII for the message to land.
We also couldn't fully fund free school meals for this sum, this sum is an ambit claim by the administration not a budget, and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure. The (larger) school meal funding dollars would have to be paid regularly.
We're talking about an incremental fragment of the US military budget. It's fair to compare it to an incremental fragment of public wellness that would cost less and have profound impact.
> and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure
Oh, of course. You're right. I forgot that drones have zero operational costs and that military spending will decrease next year instead of increasing again and again and again like always.
Also recognize the falsity of attributing the entire defense budget to "the war machine". There are policy debates that could take you lower or (like this request) higher, but it's not like an order-of-magnitude thing.
And we spend well over a trillion dollars on defense. And yet the straight of hormuz is still closed, just like there are still children who don't have enough food and suffer for it. Comparing the total budget of one thing against a budget delta of another thing is wrong. Compare deltas of each and compare their benefits.
That's just not true; the US Military Budget for 2025 was (USD) $768 BB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
https://www.defensebudget.org/en/country/united-states
The VA budget alone is over $400B, and the intelligence budget is _classified_.
or we could continue spending all of our money on wars to get oil, fall further and further behind, and be living like the Flintstons in a few years while all the other countries that actually invested in useful stuff forge forward.
The US is the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin. They don't have a dependency on foreign oil. They are also the largest refiner of oil products in the world.
Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.
The US is also the second largest oil importer in the world. A true fact about oil is that it's not all the same, so lumping them all into a single category is a mistake when talking about production/refining/consumption.
> They don't have a dependency on foreign oil.
It does still, because local refining is optimized for a global market not domestic self-sufficiency. It would probably require a bit of the old "seizing the means of production" to change that, and the US is generally opposed to such things.
Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.
Please don't pretend that "school funding" is the same as feeding children or that we don't have established research showing a connection between school meal programs and improved academic performance and reduced student suspensions.
https://defence-blog.com/china-places-massive-order-for-kami...
https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-...
>The funding request, a dramatic surge from roughly $225 million a year earlier, signals a major shift in how the U.S. military plans to fight future wars, accelerating a move toward large numbers of lower-cost, AI-enabled systems.
The merits of this ask within this insane administration basically means nothing IMO. Hegseth could ask for cybernetic ponies with beer coolers and I wouldn't be surprised.
True. An increase to $1.5T by the looks of it.
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/politics/3882126-pentag...
Someone really wanted to name a department DAWG.
We will see how it works out for them.
All future and present conflict is fundamentally based around drones.
Now I would agree that the US military can still find uses for drones, and that many of the people it fights will have a large usage of drones, but I don't think it's fair to say all conflict will be based around them.
Hmmm, this sentence appears to be a paradox? Is the US not fighting Iran right now?
Iran has a very weak air force and the US claims air superiority, yet Iran is using a lot of drones.
I think your comment proves GP's point, regardless of traditional air power, drones will feature heavily in any conflict.
The US has used one-way "drones" since the 80s or earlier. The entire Gulf War in the early 90s featured a ton of tomahawk cruise missiles. The only real change is that the new shaheeds are way cheaper, slower, and smaller, but can be spammed in larger numbers.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55897
Either way the US needs way more drones instead of just expensive missiles/jets/boats/armor if they are going to face anyone serious like China.
Very soon, "good enough" robotic autonomous infantry will exist which will make soldiers in the 21st century look as outdated as cavalry.
...all the more reason to reduce spending on them.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-sons-powerus-drone-intercep...
Do you really need to go past that. They're like a "trump" card for the grift economy.
This is... UNAMERICAN!!!
p.s. This comment is sarcasm. For the unmitigated reality, please refer to your 1950s "duck and cover" propaganda...
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