So they used to buy $250 drones? I can understand why US defense contractors can't meet that price point, but maybe somebody should stop treating drones as consumables.
This article misses the larger point. A drone costs $200. Why do missles cost $3 million? Yes, this is a cold war era missile. But with drones, the last thing we need is more cold-war era kit.
Imagine a theater of war with $100 million worth of $200 drones in it. That's 500,000 drones.
For every $1,000 drone bought from DJI, the military isn't buying a $10k+ drone from Raytheon or Lockheed-Martin. I'm sure that factors into this somehow ..
This is the real problem with drones. America is the richest country in the world. Therefore, it's in our interest to make war as expensive as possible, since we are well positioned to win a costly war. On the other hand, drones are cheap and getting cheaper. It's suicidal for us to invest our resources in lowering the cost of entry to war, and yet we do so blithely. When we are attacked by cheap $100,000 or $10,000 drones, who will we blame for not keeping the cost of a cruise missile up in the millions besides ourselves?
> No piece of autonomous weapons delivery hardware in the modern world exists with a price tag less than 100x that amount. Drones are simply too cheap.
The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.
Drones are not as cheap as you would think (, and I used to believe). Global hawks cost as much as U2s to operate, and much more to acquire;[1] predators and reapers are not cheap either, once you include the whole control system.[2]
Surely the cost of military drones (and the personnel to operate them) is many magnitudes more than Amazon is willing or able to spend on delivery drones.
The thing about drones is you can build them cheaply enough that it cost the enemy more to shoot them down than it costs to build more of them. Instead the military has decided to simply make fighter planes that don't need pilots but that's a separate issue.
You could jury rig as Cessna in an afternoon. The high costs of defense UAVs are almost wholly due to defense contracting rent seeking and a severe lack of competition. Drones do not cost what you think they cost. People are expensive. Robots aren't.
That is the big question here. How much can/should the US scale production. We know from several current wars the cheap drones are a big issue. So we need to come up with a solution. Can we develop a new anti-drone weapon system that is cheaper? Can we mass produce these missiles and thus get them much cheaper? Some other option I'm not aware of? Whatever, the fact is every half-competent wannabe general now knows that drones are cheap to build and expensive to defend against. The US needs to respond somehow or we will lose to them.
The USAF's and CIA's use of drones in the Middle East has sparked the imagination across all kinds of projects such as this one. But the reality is that military-style drones that can stay aloft for days are extremely expensive to purchase and to operate. The well-known Predator drone, for example, costs $4 million per airplane, and it requires a classified global satellite network, an uplink station manned with three operators, and a deployment crew with a forward operating station. It is only cheap when compared to the absurdly high cost of manned fighter jets and spy planes.
Comparing them to what is available for civilian use is a joke. Normally what you see are shaky line-of-sight quad-copters that can stay up for 20 minutes.
To be clear, what the Deputy Secretary implied was “less expensive than manned platforms,” not less expensive drones. The DoD has a cadre of existing “qualified” (incumbent) suppliers of drone systems, and these contractors will likely be the recipients of additional orders. It’s hard to break into that supply chain.
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