The most surprising thing here is that the US was previously only spending $225 Million on drones when it’s been fully apparent for the past decade(s) that drones were the future of warfare.
What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era.
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.
In the book "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works), the authour talks about the behaviour of the military officers. Spy planes weren't seen as valuable/important to the typical officer who was looking to get promoted to higher levels versus the typical sexy fighter jets or bombers.
Just as in any group, there are certain positions that are more prestigious/desired than other positions. Typically the prestige increased the more people that they supervised or valuable pieces of equipment (expensive tanks / fighter jets) in their group.
Then there are other positions with lower prestige / desirability - think support/logistics (unless your org's main revenue stream is support/logistics).
This has little correlation to the effectiveness/impact of the group.
Those who worked well with the current strategies / standard operating procedures, can't see/don't want to see how new technology can be used to operate more effectively.
Imagine how army officers treated those who wanted to use airplanes in the period from World War I to World War II.
> they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore
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'm not familiar with a stealth meant for even when you have to park it sometimes. If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure. If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.
The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
> If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure
If your opponent has drone dominance, you neutralize that advantage with anti-drone kit and then build your own advantage. Part of that will be drones. But part will be heavier, more sophisticated platforms. (Which will eventually pilot themselves, but aren’t drones since they aren’t cheap.) You can’t win a war only playing defense.
> someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd
Their high technology destroys your industry while you wait. This is strategy as old as the Bronze Age.
> If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.
If someone has high dominance, they can probably afford to take 20% of that capability and divert the funding to low dominance as well. The reverse will not necessarily be true: if you have low dominance does not mean you have the capability to go high.
> The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
The US generally does not lose militarily: it has 'lost' because they didn't have a strategic goal, or decided that their goal was no longer important.
The US could have stuck with South Vietnam just like it stuck with South Korea (to this day, in 2026), but decided to stop. There's no reason why they couldn't kept with it, and we have a North/South Vietnam like we have a North/South Korea.
That is the present situation with Iran: the US has/is trounced Iran military, but the problem is that the Administration cannot answer the question "What is the purpose of this war?". Hegseth is dunking on "elite" colleges and wanting a "warrior army", but one thing colleges do is things like teach von Clausewitz. You know, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."
The US managed to stick with Iraq a little longer, through the insurgency and then against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and now Iraq has elections:
There was enough of a civil culture in Iraq that wanted a system of government to keep it going. There seems to not have been enough a civic culture in Afghanistan to sustain a similar government and to fight against the Taliban. Militarily the US was doing just fine against the Taliban.
Ehhh, tanks are the cavalry of the tank era. Cavalry did not go away, it changed from its namesake horses to armoured battle vehicles but its task remains more or less the same. Drones and 'cheap-ish' ballistic missiles can make life harder for the mentioned expensive high-tech weaponry until cost-effective counter-measures are widely available. For drones that'll probably end up being directed energy weapons - lasers and the likes - while ballistic weaponry can (for now) be countered by moving out of their (ballistic) path. Eventually aircraft carriers will probably be replaced by multiple drone carriers, that may happen sooner or later depending on how the current fleets end up performing in coming conflicts.
It didn't make sense to physically stock up on them before. It was mostly research, prototyping, comms infrastructure, software for swarms, AI piloting, ground control, etc. The next phase of building factories and manufacturing tooling/capabilities is a little bit concerning.
Simple DJI style drones employed en masse in Afghanistan would have been helpful for a variety of tasks.
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.
>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.
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.
Combat in Ukraine is, as I understand it, somewhat like WWI with long lines of contact that only shift slowly. So you have a good idea that if you point your drone in a given direction, you'll find an enemy tank or trench.
For Afghanistan it seems like high-flying, capable, armed drones were a better option for that type of conflict.
i mean mon ami drones were employed heavily in Afghanistan
just not DJI suicide drones, and not on the squad level
in 2006 those would have been great but the tech wasn't there the way it is in 2026.
but in 2016 the US had eyes on everything. the difference is that the US had an occupation -- hearts & minds -- and couldn't just JDAM everything that moves, which is the SOP in Ukraine
This should be a massive wakeup call to anyone who believes the ~$500B-1T per year "defense" tax burden placed on U.S. citizens for the last 20 years is keeping them safe.
Apparently it wasn't until Ukraine+Iran that the most sophisticated and well funded military in the world realized that cheap drones and missiles weren't just the future but they are the present. We've been getting raked over the coals by these defense contractors and I'm guessing we probably have no idea how far down are pants actually are.
And the response: 1.5x the budget and unboard a new generation of corrupt defense contractors who will sell the american military and people more shit tier products at top dollar.
> Apparently it wasn't until Ukraine+Iran that the most sophisticated and well funded military in the world realized that cheap drones and missiles weren't just the future but they are the present.
As important as drones (short- and long-range) are in the current conflicts, it's not like Ukraine isn't using tanks or isn't asking for fighter planes (and non-cheap Tomahawk missiles).
It could also be that the tide is changing and we did have the security ROI until cheap drone tech emerged to push us to a new gen of warfare.
For example, there is still a stable petrodollar, there are 11 carrier battle groups and 70 nuclear subs out there, there is an experienced US military capable of force projection. These are a few random metrics from a casual observer, and we seem to get more out of spending than some rival countries.
It would cost less to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students in the US, but that might actually improve the country's future instead of blowing things up.
We spend drastically more money than this on education; it isn't even in the same ballpark. People get tripped up about this because the funding comes from different taxing bodies (most education funding is state and local) --- but all taxation is linked.
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.
Please don't compare the entirety of the US education system against an incremental fragment of military spending as though that isn't a completely bogus evaluation. We spend just as much on the war machine if not more.
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.
Put real numbers to this. We spend well over a trillion dollars on education.
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.
> We spend well over a trillion dollars on education.
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.
It is true. The number you're looking at doesn't include all military spending. For example, it doesn't include the nuclear weapons programs, intelligence programs, veterans affairs, ...
So when we consider school spending it's important to count every penny but when we consider military spending we can just neglect vast swathes of spending?
School meal funding would not cost more than $55bn or even close to $55bn. California’s program, subtracting initial implementation cost, was close to $1bn to feed ~10% of U.S. public school students 2 free meals per day. $55bn couldn’t fund a free school meal program indefinitely but I am sure the ongoing costs of the drone program could, this $55bn isn’t a one time cost.
If we took all the money we spent on war for 2 years, and diverted it to buying $10k electric cars, we could buy everyone in America an electric car, remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it ever again; let other countries fight it out for oil while we move on to bigger and better things.
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.
> remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it
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 the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin.
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.
Local refining is setup for refining heavier crudes. They can process sweet domestic crudes just fine at a technical level. It would be an economic loss due to underutilized stuff like Cokers, and likely at somewhat reduced overall throughput. Light crude is typically more expensive than heavy which accounts for much of the theoretical economic loss, but perhaps that will be inverted for some time if trends continue.
You would lose some of the bottom of the barrel products like asphalt and the high sulphur products sour crudes have as well, but I'm unsure of how impactful that would be in practice.
I'm certainly no petroleum engineer so I'm sure someone will be along to correct me - but I looked into this when I kept seeing this trotted out. You can definitely refine domestic light crude oils in local refineries setup for heavier crudes. The resulting products will simply be more expensive due to the refinery operating less efficiently. Self-sufficiency for fuel products at least is likely not a major concern for the US if the shit hits the fan for real.
Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.
This implies that only they have an interest in starting oil wars, but of course it suits the US to be able to inflict supply shocks on other countries. This is an ancient military strategy which the US has leveraged in the past, eg in the runup to WW2. Under the current administration however, it seems to be imposing them indiscriminately, hurting erstwhile allies as well as opponents.
Are there any times in recent memory where they didn't report record profits though? Maybe they posted record profits despite the war not because of it (I don't think I actually believe this, not who knows).
We had no need to fight Iran to begin with. We just did it as a bro move to support a buddy.
And it isn’t over oil it’s over Israel being sick of Iran funding groups that continuously launch rockets at their cities. (Which, frankly I get, but maybe not enough to crash the global economy)
> The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong.
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.
We spend $100 billion a year on SNAP, which goes primarily to feeding children and mothers. Why is it so important to you to structure the program in one way (providing kids lunches in school) versus feeding kids a different way (providing parents cash to feed their kids)?
But why, to answer your question? Because those studies show, among other thing, that a non-negligible number of parents, given cash, can't or won't use it to feed their kids.
Why should a system that's already designed for a fraction of the population be further beholden to an even smaller fraction of the population?
The SNAP system we have is good, and it's generous. The SNAP benefit for my family of five (two adults, three kids) would be $1,183 a month, which is about what we spend on groceries shopping at ALDI and LIDL. It's good to let parents choose how to use that money to feed their kids, instead of the government imposing a top-down, one-size-fits all system.
Why do conservatives hate doing anything for children so much? WTF. He gave you a clear answer which you just ignored so you could repeat your ideal of how things should work instead of addressing the realities of how they do. You are smart enough to understand the difference, but chose to give a BS reply.
It’s not liberal versus conservative. I’m a liberal on this. I support SNAP. It’s a generous benefit and that’s okay with me. We should give parents plenty of money to make sure their kids can eat.
Your position isn’t just liberal, it’s post-liberal. You’re saying that it’s not enough to have cash benefits that gives parents reasonable choices in feeding their kids. It’s not about having broad-based policies that work for the typical person in need. It’s a post-liberalism that’s obsessed with changing systems that work for normal people to cater to the most dysfunctional few percent of the population.
The parental effect only shows up for the immediate parents not grandparents. Hereditary causes would result in persistent effects. The cause is therefore not genetics but rather family environment. (See studies of children of immigrants)
Successful and wealthy parents support their children, giving them a calm and supportive environment in which to excel. (Poor parents who do that have high achieving children even if they themselves didn’t achieve at a high level).
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. The U.S. spends $100 billion a year on SNAP and $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. We just focus most of the money on cash benefits to parents of children rather than feeding kids at school.
Not sure whether you're intentionally spreading misinformation on this subject or not, but based on who I'm responding to it probably is intentional.
Anyways in contrast to "Kids are being fed". Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government. There is real evidence this improved during covid when the government did offer additional funding for school provided meals. The number of food insecure children is on the rise. And every year republican administered states make it harder to obtain and maintain SNAP and WIC benefits whether you qualify or not.
So no it's not an appeal to emotion because there is real data that disagrees with you, and no the kids arent universally being fed. I'm glad you and your family are so secure in your situation you can comfortably argue against children receiving meals on the internet. But for some of us any number of children going hungry for any reason is too many, it's not justifiable as "good enough" or "we spend enough" if there are still hungry children whom have no control of the situation themselves.
> Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government
What does that term mean? My dad spent his career working in maternal and child health internationally. The way experts define this in the field of child nutrition is based on objective numbers. How many calories are kids eating? What macronutrients are they getting?
Are you saying 14% of kids can’t afford to get the calories and nutrients that nutrition experts say they need? Because if that were true that would be shocking and would certainly justify your position. But I haven’t seen any data to support that.
I see drones as more of a side-affect to the new era of warfare we are in.
The more powerful your economy, the more autonomous weapons you can create and eventually deploy. Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military.
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.
Ukraine has shown that a drone factory can be made on any old building, it's not like they need huge machines. Would you carpet bomb all usable buildings? Cheap drones as a defensive weapon make war way more costly to the aggressor.
A Chinese drone manufacturer [Poly Technologies] has disclosed a massive government order for almost a million lightweight kamikaze drones, to be delivered by 2026
They refuse to spend less in other areas, which is the big reason why they haven't already solved the glaringly obvious drone problem. Not surprised they just want to throw more money at a new program instead of stepping on anyones toes in the other branches.
Misleading title: this article says it is seeking a budget increase, not that it's been approved
>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.
Yes it's totally insane to jump $500B, and no they cannot spend it in one year. Most of the money will go towards systems development and production spanning years. And lining the pockets of Trump bros.
We're seeing the total dissolution of Congressional control of spending and oversight. They'll get the money and spend it as they please.
Yep. Unfortunately in 2026 if you look in the news at the US government spending and see a very big number, it is probably self-dealing / corruption to the Trump family.
I'm not sure how true that is. Sure it's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now with both sides using them a lot, but my understanding is that has to due with the fact that neither side is able to get air superiority with conventional aircraft. The same reason Iran is using a lot of drones now. It doesn't seem like the US would be in a conflict where they don't have air superiority.
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.
Iranian drones have done nothing to prevent the US and Israel dropping gravity bombs en-mass over their capital right now. JDAMs and unguided munitions are still far cheaper for the explosion size than any drone today. That's not the situation in the Ukraine war on either side.
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.
I disagree. Iranian drones have taken out a lot of US sensing capabilities in the theater, from ground-based radars to AWACS planes, in addition to some logistical support like refueling tankers.
That has made US overflight of Iranian territory uch riskier than was expected at the beginning of the conflict, and it's notable that the US has continued to rely heavily on stand-off munitions.
What we're seeing in Ukraine suggests that drones cannot win the war for you, but they are essential for not losing it. And what we saw in Iran was that US air superiority is no longer a given. While the US had conventional air superiority, it was unable to neutralize the threat from Iranian drones.
you can keep looking at iran as the example - the US is uneilling to boots on the ground because even with air superiority, the drones are too dangerous
If only the regular folk could rise up and take back their tax money and spend it on something that collectively helps them like universal healthcare. It's so lucky for the crooks running the country that the regular folk haven't thought of that!
My only hope is that as we flippantly give hundreds of billions of dollars to defense, at some point in the near future a few hundred billion dollars for actual infrastructure or education won’t seem like all that much.
The most surprising thing here is that the US was previously only spending $225 Million on drones when it’s been fully apparent for the past decade(s) that drones were the future of warfare.
What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era.
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.
In the book "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich (former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works), the authour talks about the behaviour of the military officers. Spy planes weren't seen as valuable/important to the typical officer who was looking to get promoted to higher levels versus the typical sexy fighter jets or bombers.
Just as in any group, there are certain positions that are more prestigious/desired than other positions. Typically the prestige increased the more people that they supervised or valuable pieces of equipment (expensive tanks / fighter jets) in their group.
Then there are other positions with lower prestige / desirability - think support/logistics (unless your org's main revenue stream is support/logistics).
This has little correlation to the effectiveness/impact of the group.
Those who worked well with the current strategies / standard operating procedures, can't see/don't want to see how new technology can be used to operate more effectively.
Imagine how army officers treated those who wanted to use airplanes in the period from World War I to World War II.
I'm sure the defense contractors wanted to sell the expensive planes that require more maintenance rather than drones
jet planes require fancy R&D groups and custom builds
drones are commodity manufacturing
> they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore
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'm not familiar with a stealth meant for even when you have to park it sometimes. If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure. If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.
The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
> If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure
If your opponent has drone dominance, you neutralize that advantage with anti-drone kit and then build your own advantage. Part of that will be drones. But part will be heavier, more sophisticated platforms. (Which will eventually pilot themselves, but aren’t drones since they aren’t cheap.) You can’t win a war only playing defense.
> someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd
Their high technology destroys your industry while you wait. This is strategy as old as the Bronze Age.
> If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.
If someone has high dominance, they can probably afford to take 20% of that capability and divert the funding to low dominance as well. The reverse will not necessarily be true: if you have low dominance does not mean you have the capability to go high.
> The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
The US generally does not lose militarily: it has 'lost' because they didn't have a strategic goal, or decided that their goal was no longer important.
The US could have stuck with South Vietnam just like it stuck with South Korea (to this day, in 2026), but decided to stop. There's no reason why they couldn't kept with it, and we have a North/South Vietnam like we have a North/South Korea.
That is the present situation with Iran: the US has/is trounced Iran military, but the problem is that the Administration cannot answer the question "What is the purpose of this war?". Hegseth is dunking on "elite" colleges and wanting a "warrior army", but one thing colleges do is things like teach von Clausewitz. You know, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."
The US managed to stick with Iraq a little longer, through the insurgency and then against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and now Iraq has elections:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...
There was enough of a civil culture in Iraq that wanted a system of government to keep it going. There seems to not have been enough a civic culture in Afghanistan to sustain a similar government and to fight against the Taliban. Militarily the US was doing just fine against the Taliban.
> like cavalry in the tank era
Ehhh, tanks are the cavalry of the tank era. Cavalry did not go away, it changed from its namesake horses to armoured battle vehicles but its task remains more or less the same. Drones and 'cheap-ish' ballistic missiles can make life harder for the mentioned expensive high-tech weaponry until cost-effective counter-measures are widely available. For drones that'll probably end up being directed energy weapons - lasers and the likes - while ballistic weaponry can (for now) be countered by moving out of their (ballistic) path. Eventually aircraft carriers will probably be replaced by multiple drone carriers, that may happen sooner or later depending on how the current fleets end up performing in coming conflicts.
It didn't make sense to physically stock up on them before. It was mostly research, prototyping, comms infrastructure, software for swarms, AI piloting, ground control, etc. The next phase of building factories and manufacturing tooling/capabilities is a little bit concerning.
Simple DJI style drones employed en masse in Afghanistan would have been helpful for a variety of tasks.
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.
>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.
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#...
Combat in Ukraine is, as I understand it, somewhat like WWI with long lines of contact that only shift slowly. So you have a good idea that if you point your drone in a given direction, you'll find an enemy tank or trench.
For Afghanistan it seems like high-flying, capable, armed drones were a better option for that type of conflict.
i mean mon ami drones were employed heavily in Afghanistan
just not DJI suicide drones, and not on the squad level
in 2006 those would have been great but the tech wasn't there the way it is in 2026.
but in 2016 the US had eyes on everything. the difference is that the US had an occupation -- hearts & minds -- and couldn't just JDAM everything that moves, which is the SOP in Ukraine
Took a war to realize this.
Took getting their asses handed to them in a war to realize this.
two wars
I think the surprising thing to me here is that there is a generation of children afraid of a clear blue sky because it means drones can see them..
... and it only cost $225M.
(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...)
Surely the 225M only covers tiny drones and not the Predators, Reapers, and the others employed in the GWOT.
I think we sorely miss people like Paul van Riper. I’m pretty confident he’d have seen their use and advocated for them years ago.
[dead]
They chose the wrong supplier. This was fixed. /s
This should be a massive wakeup call to anyone who believes the ~$500B-1T per year "defense" tax burden placed on U.S. citizens for the last 20 years is keeping them safe.
Apparently it wasn't until Ukraine+Iran that the most sophisticated and well funded military in the world realized that cheap drones and missiles weren't just the future but they are the present. We've been getting raked over the coals by these defense contractors and I'm guessing we probably have no idea how far down are pants actually are.
And the response: 1.5x the budget and unboard a new generation of corrupt defense contractors who will sell the american military and people more shit tier products at top dollar.
> Apparently it wasn't until Ukraine+Iran that the most sophisticated and well funded military in the world realized that cheap drones and missiles weren't just the future but they are the present.
As important as drones (short- and long-range) are in the current conflicts, it's not like Ukraine isn't using tanks or isn't asking for fighter planes (and non-cheap Tomahawk missiles).
* https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/europe/ukraine-sweden-gripen-...
On this general topic, the Baltic Defence Review channel just posted the video "1 Tank or 5,000 Drones: What Would You Choose?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJz5dva5qY
I'm not sure it's "either-or", but rather "both-and".
It could also be that the tide is changing and we did have the security ROI until cheap drone tech emerged to push us to a new gen of warfare.
For example, there is still a stable petrodollar, there are 11 carrier battle groups and 70 nuclear subs out there, there is an experienced US military capable of force projection. These are a few random metrics from a casual observer, and we seem to get more out of spending than some rival countries.
It would cost less to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students in the US, but that might actually improve the country's future instead of blowing things up.
We spend drastically more money than this on education; it isn't even in the same ballpark. People get tripped up about this because the funding comes from different taxing bodies (most education funding is state and local) --- but all taxation is linked.
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.
Please don't compare the entirety of the US education system against an incremental fragment of military spending as though that isn't a completely bogus evaluation. We spend just as much on the war machine if not more.
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.
Put real numbers to this. We spend well over a trillion dollars on education.
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.
> We spend well over a trillion dollars on education.
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.
>"And we spend well over a trillion dollars on defense."
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_...
It is true. The number you're looking at doesn't include all military spending. For example, it doesn't include the nuclear weapons programs, intelligence programs, veterans affairs, ...
https://www.defensebudget.org/en/country/united-states
The VA budget alone is over $400B, and the intelligence budget is _classified_.
So when we consider school spending it's important to count every penny but when we consider military spending we can just neglect vast swathes of spending?
They're asking for 1.5B right now
If we’re putting numbers on things, what’s the number you’re putting on “pure, non-war-machine” defense spending?
The rough cost to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students in the US is $30b - so as the go says, less than $55b.
Capex becomes opex if the enemy is shooting your drones down or if you're using disposable drones to deliver fatal payloads.
School meal funding would not cost more than $55bn or even close to $55bn. California’s program, subtracting initial implementation cost, was close to $1bn to feed ~10% of U.S. public school students 2 free meals per day. $55bn couldn’t fund a free school meal program indefinitely but I am sure the ongoing costs of the drone program could, this $55bn isn’t a one time cost.
If we took all the money we spent on war for 2 years, and diverted it to buying $10k electric cars, we could buy everyone in America an electric car, remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it ever again; let other countries fight it out for oil while we move on to bigger and better things.
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.
> remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it
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 the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin.
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.
Local refining is setup for refining heavier crudes. They can process sweet domestic crudes just fine at a technical level. It would be an economic loss due to underutilized stuff like Cokers, and likely at somewhat reduced overall throughput. Light crude is typically more expensive than heavy which accounts for much of the theoretical economic loss, but perhaps that will be inverted for some time if trends continue.
You would lose some of the bottom of the barrel products like asphalt and the high sulphur products sour crudes have as well, but I'm unsure of how impactful that would be in practice.
I'm certainly no petroleum engineer so I'm sure someone will be along to correct me - but I looked into this when I kept seeing this trotted out. You can definitely refine domestic light crude oils in local refineries setup for heavier crudes. The resulting products will simply be more expensive due to the refinery operating less efficiently. Self-sufficiency for fuel products at least is likely not a major concern for the US if the shit hits the fan for real.
> The US is also the second largest oil importer in the world.
The US sells oil refinery services to the rest of the world. They "import" crude oil and then "export" the refined product.
US refinery capacity far exceeds its domestic oil production. What did you think they were doing with all that capacity?
This is not as simple as you present it, which is why we import about 70% of our jet fuel from South Korea.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.
This implies that only they have an interest in starting oil wars, but of course it suits the US to be able to inflict supply shocks on other countries. This is an ancient military strategy which the US has leveraged in the past, eg in the runup to WW2. Under the current administration however, it seems to be imposing them indiscriminately, hurting erstwhile allies as well as opponents.
If we don't need foreign oil, why are gas prices going up?
Oil companies reported record profits this week. Surely that’s unrelated?
Are there any times in recent memory where they didn't report record profits though? Maybe they posted record profits despite the war not because of it (I don't think I actually believe this, not who knows).
We had no need to fight Iran to begin with. We just did it as a bro move to support a buddy.
And it isn’t over oil it’s over Israel being sick of Iran funding groups that continuously launch rockets at their cities. (Which, frankly I get, but maybe not enough to crash the global economy)
Because the money is the most important thing being lost?
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong.
Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.
> The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong.
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.
We spend $100 billion a year on SNAP, which goes primarily to feeding children and mothers. Why is it so important to you to structure the program in one way (providing kids lunches in school) versus feeding kids a different way (providing parents cash to feed their kids)?
On one hand, studies on outcomes...
... on the other, your "way of life".
But why, to answer your question? Because those studies show, among other thing, that a non-negligible number of parents, given cash, can't or won't use it to feed their kids.
Why should a system that's already designed for a fraction of the population be further beholden to an even smaller fraction of the population?
The SNAP system we have is good, and it's generous. The SNAP benefit for my family of five (two adults, three kids) would be $1,183 a month, which is about what we spend on groceries shopping at ALDI and LIDL. It's good to let parents choose how to use that money to feed their kids, instead of the government imposing a top-down, one-size-fits all system.
Why do conservatives hate doing anything for children so much? WTF. He gave you a clear answer which you just ignored so you could repeat your ideal of how things should work instead of addressing the realities of how they do. You are smart enough to understand the difference, but chose to give a BS reply.
It’s not liberal versus conservative. I’m a liberal on this. I support SNAP. It’s a generous benefit and that’s okay with me. We should give parents plenty of money to make sure their kids can eat.
Your position isn’t just liberal, it’s post-liberal. You’re saying that it’s not enough to have cash benefits that gives parents reasonable choices in feeding their kids. It’s not about having broad-based policies that work for the typical person in need. It’s a post-liberalism that’s obsessed with changing systems that work for normal people to cater to the most dysfunctional few percent of the population.
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You are misreading the science.
The parental effect only shows up for the immediate parents not grandparents. Hereditary causes would result in persistent effects. The cause is therefore not genetics but rather family environment. (See studies of children of immigrants)
Successful and wealthy parents support their children, giving them a calm and supportive environment in which to excel. (Poor parents who do that have high achieving children even if they themselves didn’t achieve at a high level).
It’s not genetics it’s environment.
No, this is what twin studies are.
One twin raised in rich environment performs similarly to those in poor environments academically.
It's not, you just have a supremacist world view that requires alternative facts to stay coherent.
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. The U.S. spends $100 billion a year on SNAP and $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. We just focus most of the money on cash benefits to parents of children rather than feeding kids at school.
Not sure whether you're intentionally spreading misinformation on this subject or not, but based on who I'm responding to it probably is intentional.
Anyways in contrast to "Kids are being fed". Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government. There is real evidence this improved during covid when the government did offer additional funding for school provided meals. The number of food insecure children is on the rise. And every year republican administered states make it harder to obtain and maintain SNAP and WIC benefits whether you qualify or not.
So no it's not an appeal to emotion because there is real data that disagrees with you, and no the kids arent universally being fed. I'm glad you and your family are so secure in your situation you can comfortably argue against children receiving meals on the internet. But for some of us any number of children going hungry for any reason is too many, it's not justifiable as "good enough" or "we spend enough" if there are still hungry children whom have no control of the situation themselves.
> Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government
What does that term mean? My dad spent his career working in maternal and child health internationally. The way experts define this in the field of child nutrition is based on objective numbers. How many calories are kids eating? What macronutrients are they getting?
Are you saying 14% of kids can’t afford to get the calories and nutrients that nutrition experts say they need? Because if that were true that would be shocking and would certainly justify your position. But I haven’t seen any data to support that.
"Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?"
Why would i give you free breakfast, instead of increasing my profits ? /s
I see drones as more of a side-affect to the new era of warfare we are in. The more powerful your economy, the more autonomous weapons you can create and eventually deploy. Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military.
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.
> Manufacturing capacity and economic resiliancy are becoming far more important than a nation's ability to equip and train its military
This has been the case in wars of attrition since the Civil War. It took between then and WWII for the message to land.
It feels like the drone factories should be targetable and who controls that may control a war.
Ukraine has shown that a drone factory can be made on any old building, it's not like they need huge machines. Would you carpet bomb all usable buildings? Cheap drones as a defensive weapon make war way more costly to the aggressor.
Cheap drones have made war more expensive for people that care about where they inflict the damage.
A Chinese drone manufacturer [Poly Technologies] has disclosed a massive government order for almost a million lightweight kamikaze drones, to be delivered by 2026
https://defence-blog.com/china-places-massive-order-for-kami...
https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-...
Chinese leadership has instructed their military to be ready for all operations for reunifying with Taiwan by 2027.
I can only think of a short list of options a military could provide for that.
A million drones would feature high in any such plan.
They refuse to spend less in other areas, which is the big reason why they haven't already solved the glaringly obvious drone problem. Not surprised they just want to throw more money at a new program instead of stepping on anyones toes in the other branches.
And they bought three new drones!
Misleading title: this article says it is seeking a budget increase, not that it's been approved
>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.
> this article says it is seeking a budget increase,
True. An increase to $1.5T by the looks of it.
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/politics/3882126-pentag...
Yes it's totally insane to jump $500B, and no they cannot spend it in one year. Most of the money will go towards systems development and production spanning years. And lining the pockets of Trump bros.
We're seeing the total dissolution of Congressional control of spending and oversight. They'll get the money and spend it as they please.
> Funding tied to the little-known Defense Autonomous Warfare Group spans procurement, research, training and sustainment
Someone really wanted to name a department DAWG.
Reminder: The Trump family has direct involvement in drone companies
https://apnews.com/article/trump-sons-powerus-drone-intercep...
Yep. Unfortunately in 2026 if you look in the news at the US government spending and see a very big number, it is probably self-dealing / corruption to the Trump family.
>Reminder: The Trump family
Do you really need to go past that. They're like a "trump" card for the grift economy.
But Hunter Biden said "the big guy" in an email - that's the corruption we need to be talking about!!! /s
They saw what’s happening in Ukraine and then got firsthand knowledge with the Shaheds.
Drones killing drones. No lives at stake any more. Like burning piles of money on the sidelines until one side runs out.
Surely that is better than burning piles of bodies?
Doesn’t seem anywhere near enough.
All future and present conflict is fundamentally based around drones.
I'm not sure how true that is. Sure it's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now with both sides using them a lot, but my understanding is that has to due with the fact that neither side is able to get air superiority with conventional aircraft. The same reason Iran is using a lot of drones now. It doesn't seem like the US would be in a conflict where they don't have air superiority.
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.
> The same reason Iran is using a lot of drones now. It doesn't seem like the US would be in a conflict where they don't have air superiority.
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.
Iranian drones have done nothing to prevent the US and Israel dropping gravity bombs en-mass over their capital right now. JDAMs and unguided munitions are still far cheaper for the explosion size than any drone today. That's not the situation in the Ukraine war on either side.
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.
I disagree. Iranian drones have taken out a lot of US sensing capabilities in the theater, from ground-based radars to AWACS planes, in addition to some logistical support like refueling tankers.
That has made US overflight of Iranian territory uch riskier than was expected at the beginning of the conflict, and it's notable that the US has continued to rely heavily on stand-off munitions.
Iran launched around 2k drones over the war. Ukraine uses around 200k/m.
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.
Right conclusion, but tho drones used are very different. Most of the drones Ukraine uses along the line of control are very short range.
What we're seeing in Ukraine suggests that drones cannot win the war for you, but they are essential for not losing it. And what we saw in Iran was that US air superiority is no longer a given. While the US had conventional air superiority, it was unable to neutralize the threat from Iranian drones.
A million suicide drones is far cheaper than 10,000 infantry.
Very soon, "good enough" robotic autonomous infantry will exist which will make soldiers in the 21st century look as outdated as cavalry.
you can keep looking at iran as the example - the US is uneilling to boots on the ground because even with air superiority, the drones are too dangerous
Still seems to be cyber warfare and mass social engineering.
The whole selling point of drones is that they are _cheap_. Spending billions brings you back to missile territory.
> All future and present conflict is fundamentally based around drones.
...all the more reason to reduce spending on them.
But, but... What about Tom Cruise... on the flight deck... with his bomber jacket!!!
This is... UNAMERICAN!!!
p.s. This comment is sarcasm. For the unmitigated reality, please refer to your 1950s "duck and cover" propaganda...
holy shit!
If only the regular folk could rise up and take back their tax money and spend it on something that collectively helps them like universal healthcare. It's so lucky for the crooks running the country that the regular folk haven't thought of that!
They had the opportunity but decided a president that would appoint Hegseth and two houses of congress from the same party was a better idea.
We will see how it works out for them.
My only hope is that as we flippantly give hundreds of billions of dollars to defense, at some point in the near future a few hundred billion dollars for actual infrastructure or education won’t seem like all that much.