I don't understand your argument: what has DJI - a manufacturer of personal use drones - with the US military wanting to build weaponized drones in the US?
Curious what separates a military drone vs a drone used in war. Surely most of the improved flight capabilities would also be useful to consumers who just want to tool around on the weekends.
How long before these military specs filter into the consumer market?
Except you can totally use a DJI drone for war. I saw a video the other day of such a drone modified to drop airsoft grenades. Does not take much to replace it with the real thing.
There's plenty of military drones companies, the US military has the budget for them. But now I'm wondering, who would win, 1,000 military drones or 1,000,000 consumer DJI ones?
Of course DJI drones are used for conflict, however you have to circumvent the measures that DJI has taken to prevent this, DJI is not selling them for use in conflicts.
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 ..
They are 100% flying DJI drones on 1-way missions. Even a relatively expensive DJI drone costs less than an artillery shell. War is hell in many ways, not least of which is the sheer expense and resource consumption it demands.
Drones have an extensive use in defense industries and just because the west produces less consumer models doesn't mean the tech isn't there. It will take banning DJI for them to quickly see they're not as far ahead as you imagine. It will probably cost more to buy though.
No, the whole reasons for a drone war is that drones work very well in conditions where you can't safely land people on the ground to do things, or even operate manned aircraft without unreasonable risk of losses.
I don't really get the hype/fear surrounding drone warfare, at least not when it comes to combat. It sounds super scary to have these drones that can outperform pilots, until you realize that guided missiles are already able to destroy pretty much anything from tens of kilometers away already. It doesn't matter if pilots are slower than drones when they are able to fire off missiles before the drone even detects them.
The main benefit of drones is surveillance imo, since they can just circle an area for hours. For combat I think we will have pilots for the foreseeable future, they can react more quickly and have a better view of the situation than a drone operator. Also I would imagine having a pilot can also be useful if you don't want other countries shooting down your planes (or if you want to start a conflict) - Iran would have been much more resistant to shooting down a US predator drone if it was a manned aircraft instead. I don't really know though.
Armaments for the last war. I have no idea why anyone thinks the expensive-pilot-in-expensive-platform is going to survive the drone swarm paradigm shift.
it's hard not to forsee a future where entire wars are fought by sending millions of drones at each other. I can't decide if it's a dystopian nightmare or a much better thing than having humans slaughter each other. It's sort of the ultimate conversion of physical war to economic. The side that runs out of money to make more or better drones first will be the loser.
Probably optimistic though. I guess each side will always know that humans are the high value targets and that will dictate that whatever else happens they will still target them even if a proxy-war is being fought by the drones.
Drones are far from becoming the main way of warfare. That is science fiction, not reality. The small, cheap drones lack the range and sensors needed to fight in the Pacific theater, where aircraft carriers and submarines are the most effective platforms. And autonomous flight software is still very primitive, so any complex drone missions require remote piloting via satellite connections; those satellites are increasingly vulnerable to ASAT weapons.
Drone technology will continue to improve, but it's never going to be cheap to project power over long distances. The defense budget will continue to increase inexorably, until we hit a real fiscal crisis or just give up and decide to allow China to dominate.
No. DJI is a Chinese company. If it happens, the next world changing conflict after ww2 is war with China. You can bet your ass China will weaponize those drones if that happens, and that's a really big IF.
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