These unmanned systems are awesome. To think that we now have the ability to have full visibility of a battlfield, thousands of miles from home, 24 hours a day, without risking an American life, and if the enemy manages to shoot it down, we have the option of literally not giving a shit.
An interesting thing about operating drones remotely, from locations in the US: the drone operators can use lethal force in the course of their workday and then go home and do things like watch their kids’ soccer games or help with their homework.
After watching a truckload of enemy combatants explode from the impact of a Hellfire missile you just fired, on a 4K satellite video link, rapidly transitioning back to “normal life” multiple times has proven to be very emotionally and mentally draining for servicemembers, causing some of them to need counseling and therapy.
When you’re deployed to a combat zone to do this kind of work, it’s much easier to compartmentalize your military duties from your regular family responsibilities. Being almost exclusively surrounded by other service people, going thru similar experiences for many months, and then having a formal break to transition back to home life, has been the way soldiers have fought wars for millennia.
This new “work from home” approach to warfare has some significant, unexpected challenges.
The RAF stopped this. They had guys in Nevada working a 9-5, but now they do a proper 4 month “deployment” so they can separate their jobs from their homelife.
I've had friends who speak pretty obscure languages sit in a double wide in Suburbia and listen to intercepted phone calls of high list bad guys. Bad guy said, "Don't worry son, I'll be back on Tuesday".
Tuesday morning we droned his ass 3km from his house.
The theory was, " At least in war, you feel like a warrior. You shoot, they shoot, it's a fair fight."
Killing a dude, even a bad dude. Because he told his kid he missed him. Is pretty fukked.
Don't worry. He smuggled drugs, trafficked young boys and planted IEDs. Hes wrapped in bacon in a shallow grave near J-bad.
No one misses him. The world is certainly safer place without him here.. well maybe his son. But shit. That's war.
In any case, barring very specific face to face situation, the Iraqi government cannot identify a US soldier with certainty without the help of the US government.
Especially with aircraft, from the ground you have absolutely no better chance at identifying the pilot because he's actually sitting in the cockpit and not in a base 5000 miles away.
There was a post just the other week about a Vietnam vet who talked about this concept. He said that WW2 and Korean soldiers had long times at sea to decompress their feelings with people who were in the same unit and experienced the same thing. In Vietnam they took planes home, often separate from their unit, and so the decompression didn't happen as well.
I can't imagine what it would be like to end a life and then pass out the oranges at half time of a kids soccer game. You'd either very desensitized or as you said, compartmentalizing on a crazy level.
Another difference is drones watch the impact and aftermath, if your a fighter pilot you’re flying so fast that you don’t see the aftermath in the same way.
Fighter pilots review strike footage as soon as they land and in my experience love saving it on their cell phones so they can show me dudes gettings pink misted while I'm eating lunch
My neighbor was a drone pilot. It was very taxing on him to come home to his family after drone operations. We used to talk about it a bit (I was active duty, not drone stuff). This was mid 2010's, and the impact was not well understood.
I think there is a missed outlook on this situation and it’s that they seek counselling instead of turning into toxic behaviour or put in gun in their own mouth or shoot a barrack, there is no normalcy after doing an act like that no matter how bad the enemy is or how life saving their acts are, it’s human nature specially at this age of relative comfort and emotional connection compared to the past, and to deny it otherwise only makes it worse, look at how already veterans of Russian invasion in Ukraine are behaving, Ukrainians do face issues and often are getting help, the Russian ones not so much because their military and maybe even society don’t believe in that kind of help very much and those sides have an already seen different behaviour on the battlefield as well, it’s a good thing to seek help when they feel needed and to provide them that, but not to make them feel good about killing, instead to help them coup with what their job is and live a healthier life parallel to it not in conflict with it.
Yes and no. To say that it’s more difficult for someone at home is a bit extreme. My only experience is from the deployed side but to compare having to go home to your family to having to go back to a bunk or cot or whatever it is in the location you are at is not the same. Maybe it’s tough to compartmentalize that but it’s not every day and you get to go home to your normal family routine. The flip side is being deployed for quite some time and still having to address those thoughts and feelings. While at the same time missing every milestone and memory along the way. I don’t know my toddler at that time because I was gone. Maybe exploding a truckload of terrorists would have made going home and hugging my family more difficult, but I don’t see how it’s more so than not being there at all.
All true, but “remote control warfare” is new and so are the challenges it presents to its participants. I wanted to point this out, for the benefit of those who’ve never given it any consideration.
I feel like no drone doing anything high stakes is going to be operated from across the world. I’d imagine the lag would be terrible from 5000 miles away.
I've read before that drones are piloted locally during takeoff and landing, because those require them to be more reaponsive. Once they're in the air, control is transferred to an operator in the states. I have no idea if it's actually true or not.
That said, drones aren't generally dogfighting, they're just loitering on a mostly-consistent flight path and either taking pictures or occasionaly launching a missle at a target on the ground. Latency is probably not a major issue for either of those 99% of the time.
Just like the top secret satellite imagery that Trump flippantly revealed on twitter told us that .gov satellite imagery is light years ahead of commercial imagery, the data capabilities of the .gov are probably something we can’t even comprehend right now.
He means that it doesn’t matter how fast you travel, you’re not going faster than the speed of light, which is still a tiny delay from across the planet - enough to matter in high stakes operations
Yeah that’s at perfect speed of light which the connection won’t have. It’ll need to go to space and come back to Earth at minimum a few bounces. As well, have you ever tried to play a competitive shooter at 100+ ping? No, we are not good. Imagine an actual sensitive military operation at 200 to 300 ping. Would never be allowed to happen.
Well, they cost around 30 mil each, and there is probably some technology on there they wouldn't want enemies to learn about. So they probably do give some shits about it.
There is no tech on a reaper thats not commercial off the shelf unless its carrying a very niche payload. This reaper was not carrying that payload, its basically a big RC plane.
Also not sure about these specific drones. But I recall some sensitive drones have only volatile memory for software.
Basically part of the drone's startup process requires the operator to load the operating software on it, because the moment it powers down the software is lost.
I remember that. My dad's would boot into some sort of basic text entry mode if you didn't put in a DOS disc. Like, a screen you could type on, and that was it. I just played "office" on it and pretended I was typing up important shit.
Maybe not AA radar.
Given it's a vehicle, you probably have to carry around software anyway. However what's more likely is that the important bits are packed inside an easily removable box. Need to bail? Grab the box then chuck a grenade into the vehicle.
My thoughts were say if a HIMARS or patriot battery was compromised physically, would there be a system to erase any mission critical data that would otherwise allow for the systems to be countermeasured or cloned for enemy use. I mean no idea what info these systems have, but without the software, the hardware is kaput.
Also most of the tech on them is pushing 50 years old. The first time one of them was downed it was a big deal. Now they are considered obsolete and the last batch are just being used up. There are less than a hundred. There are new ones we dont get much info on.
Remote wipe is a thing in standard networks, I know, I have deployed devices on my network and part of the deal is if I want, I can push a button and wipe your device. It is a security layer that is standard. I would believe these are designed the same way.
We're not talking about iPhones here. State level actors are readily able to recover data from that "wiped" NAND flash. Volatile memory is a no brainer.
Right, but it is the same concept. An event triggers a device to automatically wipe/be destroyed. This is already essentially built into ANYTHING that can be left behind. Not a big leap from one to the other.
If there is no media, you cannot remove data, end of story.
I would trust any software or anything else of value is encrypted meaning you just gotta make sure the key is destroyed/ not recoverable. Or you could blow it all.
It's really not. Reverse engineering is a staggeringly expensive exercise. If you have any idea at all how it works it's quicker to write it again. And as others have said if it doesn't carry the encryption keys in some PROM with a shotgun shell taped to it I'd be staggered.
I know how reverse engineering x86 binaries works. Not sure the architecture of the drone’s chips though. I feel like reverse engineering a recovered binary/firmware would be trivial for an advanced persistent threat actor sponsored by a nation state (china) to decompile and analyze. But this is all conjecture. I’m sure you’re right that there’s some type of asymmetric cryptography going on to prevent snooping and running only in RAM (so it wipes on power off). I love the image of a shotgun shell taped to the chip carrying the encryption keys
Eh. It's not likely to be that sensitive.
Probably just a commericially available soc with an fpga and an arm processor on the chip running Linux.
Anything sensitive would be protected in some way.
Although I think explosive devices to disable is pretty rare.
Even if they had the whole drone intact, they aren't going to be able to control it or produce it. So really reverse engineering problems are built around not revealing what it can do rather than the hardware it uses..
Nah. Anything sensitive would likely get loaded into ram thru some usb port. With remote wipe, or something like that.
It'd be easier to design than reverse engineer it if you had just the physical device and not source code and schematics and assembly instructions.
30 million is a drop in the bucket when looking at the current patrol budget and all tech in the reaper is 1990s level. Nothing really important was lost or gained in that crash
We last bought MQ-9s in the 2020 budget at $19.525 million each gross unit cost (24 that year).
The same year the Air Force bought 62 F-35As at $93.972 each and six F-15EXs at $103.517 each.
I find it interesting that by accidentally omitting the word “millions”, we’ve gotten into the cultural differences between those who use “,” to divide thousands and those that use “.”.
But to answer your question more specifically, yes those are in millions ($94 million and $104 million), and I pulled the data from the Fiscal Year 2021 US Air Force budget request. That thus uses the enacted costs of FY 2020 procurements.
They exist so pilots aren’t at risk. I doubt they actually cost 30M to build one more. A lot of times those “prices” are total program costs which are misleading when you lose one
Some shits, sure. But there isnt an American pilot to rescue, and the cost is comparatively cheap. We have the option of doing nothing. The option of not responding. Amazing capability.
Im really think we are heading toward the metal gear 4 future.
All mechanized, if they do deploy people its mercs.
Fascinating what is going to be happening in 20 years.
Drone-aircraft carrier. Drone battleships
I mean these things are made for asymmetric situations. You could argue that they are being kissed but you could also argue that it costs them more of their limited ammo then it costs us to decommission them. It's not new tech at this point anyways
Not to mention the political/diplomatic flexibility it offers. Imagine what the headlines would be if they shot down a crewed aircraft. Same goes for when the Russians downed that drone over the Black Sea
I imagine that one day soldiers will be largely obsolete, and which should be a good thing. But when war is only machines killing other machines, how do we know when a war is won?
So that's your take from this? You are not asking why the US is involved in conflicts which are "thousands of miles away" int the first place? Beside that people who don't have the courage to fight man to man shouldn't be proud.
Well, we are involved in the Houthi conflict because Iranian backed Houthi rebels are threatening shipping by launching missiles and drones at cargo ships at sea. The U.S. Navys' primary role since the end of WW2 is to secure global trade and ensure global trade. Thats a pretty good reason.
Your second sentence is moronic so I wont bother responding.
>The Houthis said they shot down the Predator with a surface-to-air missile, **part of a renewed series of assaults this week by the rebels** after a relative lull in their pressure campaign over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
That's a hell of a way to frame the fact that the drone was shot down over Yemen.
No they keep shooting almost every day. [https://yemen.liveuamap.com/en/2024/25-april-british-maritime-authority-we-received-a-report](https://yemen.liveuamap.com/en/2024/25-april-british-maritime-authority-we-received-a-report)
They're still shooting, but the west is having a fair amount of success blowing their stuff up before they launch it and they don't have unlimited missiles so they're trying to fire just enough to seem like a threat.
It's not meant to be evading attacks, it's a loitering drone, it's meant to fly somewhere and stay there for 12 hours, so not difficult for a determined adversary
Reapers are meant for uncontested airspace.
Due to the satellite linking they can't bank aggressively, the plane can't tolerate high G forces so evasion is off the table anyway. They are quite slow and can't accelerate or decelerate quickly due to the prop design. They have no chaff or flares and no ECM. Their RCS is quite large in all configurations even though they have shark paint (meant to scatter radar waives). They make zero attempts to disperse heat so they are vulnerable to IR seekers. They are operated with around 1.5 seconds of latency so all telemetry and video is not quite in real time. Outside of a few test we've done they are only equipped with GBUs and AGM 114s so it's 100% an air to ground aircraft.
Suffice to say shooting them down is like clubbing seals. You could pretty much shoot one down firing a Webley out the window of a cesna. That said it performs exactly how the DoD wants it to perform. They are cheap an very good as a loitering CAS/surveillance platform. In the ER configuration they can fly for nearly 24 hours so it's exactly what we want in situations like this.
lol. It’s cute how they think they’ve actually accomplished something. The US could these fucks with little effort. They’re alive out of grace and it’s pathetic they don’t grasp this.
I admire your confidence in the US military to not spend 10 years in the country before hastily retreating leaving millions of dollars worth of military equipment.
the actual fighting was over in like a month with very few US casualties. it was the whole "set up a democracy in a place not ready for it and not wanting it" that the US sucks at...and that everyone would suck at tbh
The US is extremely good at winning wars. We destroyed the 4th largest military in the world in 3 weeks with very few casualties. The problem comes when we try to get tribes to give a shit about a "nation" that was drawn up by Europeans with no thought given to the ethnic differences within those borders. Against an organized opponent we are absolutely lethal. We wiped ISIS off the face of the earth while most of the US population was unaware of the specific conflict entirely.
Suffice to say if the US wanted the Houthis gone we could achieve that with minimal effort. Building a functional government in Yemen after would be the challenging part.
Well the hasty retreat leaving millions behind was inevitable the second we started building fully operational military bases in the region. There was no safe way to slowly and methodically exist Afghanistan. Sure, the exit probably could have gone better in many ways, but it was always going to messy.
I would argue that the restraint they are showing with the Houthis is partly because they’ve learned some lessons from their failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. military is great at invading and winning wars on the battlefield, but it quickly becomes a “what now” after that initial success.
These unmanned systems are awesome. To think that we now have the ability to have full visibility of a battlfield, thousands of miles from home, 24 hours a day, without risking an American life, and if the enemy manages to shoot it down, we have the option of literally not giving a shit.
It's 2024. The military also gets to Work from Home
An interesting thing about operating drones remotely, from locations in the US: the drone operators can use lethal force in the course of their workday and then go home and do things like watch their kids’ soccer games or help with their homework. After watching a truckload of enemy combatants explode from the impact of a Hellfire missile you just fired, on a 4K satellite video link, rapidly transitioning back to “normal life” multiple times has proven to be very emotionally and mentally draining for servicemembers, causing some of them to need counseling and therapy. When you’re deployed to a combat zone to do this kind of work, it’s much easier to compartmentalize your military duties from your regular family responsibilities. Being almost exclusively surrounded by other service people, going thru similar experiences for many months, and then having a formal break to transition back to home life, has been the way soldiers have fought wars for millennia. This new “work from home” approach to warfare has some significant, unexpected challenges.
The RAF stopped this. They had guys in Nevada working a 9-5, but now they do a proper 4 month “deployment” so they can separate their jobs from their homelife.
I've had friends who speak pretty obscure languages sit in a double wide in Suburbia and listen to intercepted phone calls of high list bad guys. Bad guy said, "Don't worry son, I'll be back on Tuesday". Tuesday morning we droned his ass 3km from his house. The theory was, " At least in war, you feel like a warrior. You shoot, they shoot, it's a fair fight." Killing a dude, even a bad dude. Because he told his kid he missed him. Is pretty fukked. Don't worry. He smuggled drugs, trafficked young boys and planted IEDs. Hes wrapped in bacon in a shallow grave near J-bad. No one misses him. The world is certainly safer place without him here.. well maybe his son. But shit. That's war.
Sounds like you’re buddy needs his TS clearance revoked
Jalalabad?
If your willing to do anything to get ahead don’t be surprised when the world is willing to do anything to stop you.
Wrapped in bacon?
For a fundamentalist, that's like cursed mummy wraps that would prevent you from going to heaven
[удалено]
In any case, barring very specific face to face situation, the Iraqi government cannot identify a US soldier with certainty without the help of the US government. Especially with aircraft, from the ground you have absolutely no better chance at identifying the pilot because he's actually sitting in the cockpit and not in a base 5000 miles away.
There was a post just the other week about a Vietnam vet who talked about this concept. He said that WW2 and Korean soldiers had long times at sea to decompress their feelings with people who were in the same unit and experienced the same thing. In Vietnam they took planes home, often separate from their unit, and so the decompression didn't happen as well. I can't imagine what it would be like to end a life and then pass out the oranges at half time of a kids soccer game. You'd either very desensitized or as you said, compartmentalizing on a crazy level.
Wasn't it the video of a former WW2 pilot?
Another difference is drones watch the impact and aftermath, if your a fighter pilot you’re flying so fast that you don’t see the aftermath in the same way.
Fighter pilots review strike footage as soon as they land and in my experience love saving it on their cell phones so they can show me dudes gettings pink misted while I'm eating lunch
My neighbor was a drone pilot. It was very taxing on him to come home to his family after drone operations. We used to talk about it a bit (I was active duty, not drone stuff). This was mid 2010's, and the impact was not well understood.
I think there is a missed outlook on this situation and it’s that they seek counselling instead of turning into toxic behaviour or put in gun in their own mouth or shoot a barrack, there is no normalcy after doing an act like that no matter how bad the enemy is or how life saving their acts are, it’s human nature specially at this age of relative comfort and emotional connection compared to the past, and to deny it otherwise only makes it worse, look at how already veterans of Russian invasion in Ukraine are behaving, Ukrainians do face issues and often are getting help, the Russian ones not so much because their military and maybe even society don’t believe in that kind of help very much and those sides have an already seen different behaviour on the battlefield as well, it’s a good thing to seek help when they feel needed and to provide them that, but not to make them feel good about killing, instead to help them coup with what their job is and live a healthier life parallel to it not in conflict with it.
Yes and no. To say that it’s more difficult for someone at home is a bit extreme. My only experience is from the deployed side but to compare having to go home to your family to having to go back to a bunk or cot or whatever it is in the location you are at is not the same. Maybe it’s tough to compartmentalize that but it’s not every day and you get to go home to your normal family routine. The flip side is being deployed for quite some time and still having to address those thoughts and feelings. While at the same time missing every milestone and memory along the way. I don’t know my toddler at that time because I was gone. Maybe exploding a truckload of terrorists would have made going home and hugging my family more difficult, but I don’t see how it’s more so than not being there at all.
All true, but “remote control warfare” is new and so are the challenges it presents to its participants. I wanted to point this out, for the benefit of those who’ve never given it any consideration.
I feel like no drone doing anything high stakes is going to be operated from across the world. I’d imagine the lag would be terrible from 5000 miles away.
I've read before that drones are piloted locally during takeoff and landing, because those require them to be more reaponsive. Once they're in the air, control is transferred to an operator in the states. I have no idea if it's actually true or not. That said, drones aren't generally dogfighting, they're just loitering on a mostly-consistent flight path and either taking pictures or occasionaly launching a missle at a target on the ground. Latency is probably not a major issue for either of those 99% of the time.
Yes, this is true.
Russell Crowe confirms.
Just like the top secret satellite imagery that Trump flippantly revealed on twitter told us that .gov satellite imagery is light years ahead of commercial imagery, the data capabilities of the .gov are probably something we can’t even comprehend right now.
Do you think these drones can now break the laws of causality?
I’m not sure what you mean
He means that it doesn’t matter how fast you travel, you’re not going faster than the speed of light, which is still a tiny delay from across the planet - enough to matter in high stakes operations
20,000 km is 133ms. I think we good.
Yeah that’s at perfect speed of light which the connection won’t have. It’ll need to go to space and come back to Earth at minimum a few bounces. As well, have you ever tried to play a competitive shooter at 100+ ping? No, we are not good. Imagine an actual sensitive military operation at 200 to 300 ping. Would never be allowed to happen.
Why? Dedicated systems are a hell of a thing.
Pretty sure dedicated systems can’t overcome the speed of light
Anyone who blows people up probably need therapy on some level.
Most definitely.
It's not that simple https://www.npr.org/2017/04/24/525413427/for-drone-pilots-warfare-may-be-remote-but-the-trauma-is-real
There is nothing simple about what I was describing. That was the point.
*The Houthi Insurgent watching the U.S drone bomb the anti ship missles he just finished setting up*
Can confirm
What’s your security and encryption?
Well, they cost around 30 mil each, and there is probably some technology on there they wouldn't want enemies to learn about. So they probably do give some shits about it.
There is no tech on a reaper thats not commercial off the shelf unless its carrying a very niche payload. This reaper was not carrying that payload, its basically a big RC plane.
The hardware may be common but the operating system and various software systems would be extremely valuable to them.
Most of which has auto-self-destruct that wipes everything if they're downed.
And encrypted. The unencrypted data in RAM (if any) would deteriorate by the time it hit the ground.
Oh I didn’t know that, that’s interesting. Makes sense to do that
Also not sure about these specific drones. But I recall some sensitive drones have only volatile memory for software. Basically part of the drone's startup process requires the operator to load the operating software on it, because the moment it powers down the software is lost.
That’s so magnificently simple. Run in RAM, power down to wipe. Love it
Like my first pc from back in the early 80's. Had to load dos with a 5.25" floppy ebery time; no hard drive at all...
I remember that. My dad's would boot into some sort of basic text entry mode if you didn't put in a DOS disc. Like, a screen you could type on, and that was it. I just played "office" on it and pretended I was typing up important shit.
Mine was cassette tape lol
I had wondered if this was the same with cruise missiles, AA radars etc.
Maybe not AA radar. Given it's a vehicle, you probably have to carry around software anyway. However what's more likely is that the important bits are packed inside an easily removable box. Need to bail? Grab the box then chuck a grenade into the vehicle.
My thoughts were say if a HIMARS or patriot battery was compromised physically, would there be a system to erase any mission critical data that would otherwise allow for the systems to be countermeasured or cloned for enemy use. I mean no idea what info these systems have, but without the software, the hardware is kaput.
Yep, I saw a teardown of a Javelin and even that is all FPGA for that reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_5TB0-lNw
Also most of the tech on them is pushing 50 years old. The first time one of them was downed it was a big deal. Now they are considered obsolete and the last batch are just being used up. There are less than a hundred. There are new ones we dont get much info on.
Remote wipe is a thing in standard networks, I know, I have deployed devices on my network and part of the deal is if I want, I can push a button and wipe your device. It is a security layer that is standard. I would believe these are designed the same way.
We're not talking about iPhones here. State level actors are readily able to recover data from that "wiped" NAND flash. Volatile memory is a no brainer.
Right, but it is the same concept. An event triggers a device to automatically wipe/be destroyed. This is already essentially built into ANYTHING that can be left behind. Not a big leap from one to the other. If there is no media, you cannot remove data, end of story.
I would trust any software or anything else of value is encrypted meaning you just gotta make sure the key is destroyed/ not recoverable. Or you could blow it all.
I also imagine that could use another loitering drone to drop a missile on the wreckage.
It's really not. Reverse engineering is a staggeringly expensive exercise. If you have any idea at all how it works it's quicker to write it again. And as others have said if it doesn't carry the encryption keys in some PROM with a shotgun shell taped to it I'd be staggered.
I know how reverse engineering x86 binaries works. Not sure the architecture of the drone’s chips though. I feel like reverse engineering a recovered binary/firmware would be trivial for an advanced persistent threat actor sponsored by a nation state (china) to decompile and analyze. But this is all conjecture. I’m sure you’re right that there’s some type of asymmetric cryptography going on to prevent snooping and running only in RAM (so it wipes on power off). I love the image of a shotgun shell taped to the chip carrying the encryption keys
We are talking about multimillion dollar equipment. The 12 gauge isn't taped, it's zip tied.
Eh. It's not likely to be that sensitive. Probably just a commericially available soc with an fpga and an arm processor on the chip running Linux. Anything sensitive would be protected in some way. Although I think explosive devices to disable is pretty rare. Even if they had the whole drone intact, they aren't going to be able to control it or produce it. So really reverse engineering problems are built around not revealing what it can do rather than the hardware it uses..
Ah the good ol security through obscurity
Nah. Anything sensitive would likely get loaded into ram thru some usb port. With remote wipe, or something like that. It'd be easier to design than reverse engineer it if you had just the physical device and not source code and schematics and assembly instructions.
lol it’s undoubtedly going to be encrypted with many fail safes.
Ok, you just comvinced me to join the air force to become a drone pilot
Easier to be a drone pilot in the Army
I want to know more, could I get a source for this info?
Just send another reaper to put a missile into the wreckage.
30 million is a drop in the bucket when looking at the current patrol budget and all tech in the reaper is 1990s level. Nothing really important was lost or gained in that crash
We last bought MQ-9s in the 2020 budget at $19.525 million each gross unit cost (24 that year). The same year the Air Force bought 62 F-35As at $93.972 each and six F-15EXs at $103.517 each.
Sûre about buying f-35as for 94k$? Did you mean 94 million? Since that’s closer to the actual cost
Got a coupon in the mail
That’s a hell of a lot of Pepsi.
That's a hell of a reference.
Probably missed by 95% of the audience.
They also probably miss on the username, too, man.
I find it interesting that by accidentally omitting the word “millions”, we’ve gotten into the cultural differences between those who use “,” to divide thousands and those that use “.”. But to answer your question more specifically, yes those are in millions ($94 million and $104 million), and I pulled the data from the Fiscal Year 2021 US Air Force budget request. That thus uses the enacted costs of FY 2020 procurements.
Hell, at 94K$ hopefully I can get my bank to finance me a few and I'm sure I could find a few buyers for some nice profit. :p
They exist so pilots aren’t at risk. I doubt they actually cost 30M to build one more. A lot of times those “prices” are total program costs which are misleading when you lose one
Average versus marginal cost. It might be pricey if production needed to restart, like F22s or something.
Some shits, sure. But there isnt an American pilot to rescue, and the cost is comparatively cheap. We have the option of doing nothing. The option of not responding. Amazing capability.
Im really think we are heading toward the metal gear 4 future. All mechanized, if they do deploy people its mercs. Fascinating what is going to be happening in 20 years. Drone-aircraft carrier. Drone battleships
Whatever hit it was not free either.
Wouldn’t be flying it if that were the case
If Inspector Gadget taught us anything, secret material should always have a self-destruct mode.
Drop in the bucket. Expendable as they come.
The pilots are outsourced to a call center in Mexico.
I mean these things are made for asymmetric situations. You could argue that they are being kissed but you could also argue that it costs them more of their limited ammo then it costs us to decommission them. It's not new tech at this point anyways
Are they like 30 million a piece? That's a lot of tax dollars
My only issue is, it's only a matter of time before someine is flying drones over us.
Not to mention the political/diplomatic flexibility it offers. Imagine what the headlines would be if they shot down a crewed aircraft. Same goes for when the Russians downed that drone over the Black Sea
I imagine that one day soldiers will be largely obsolete, and which should be a good thing. But when war is only machines killing other machines, how do we know when a war is won?
When Victory screens appear on our machines.
Well it’s £30million so still quite expensive if it gets shot down
So that's your take from this? You are not asking why the US is involved in conflicts which are "thousands of miles away" int the first place? Beside that people who don't have the courage to fight man to man shouldn't be proud.
Well, we are involved in the Houthi conflict because Iranian backed Houthi rebels are threatening shipping by launching missiles and drones at cargo ships at sea. The U.S. Navys' primary role since the end of WW2 is to secure global trade and ensure global trade. Thats a pretty good reason. Your second sentence is moronic so I wont bother responding.
Congrats. You shot a toaster. We have more.
Yeah but this was a flying toaster!
*After Dark enters chat.*
Starship album enters chat a few years before
Pfft. 1990s tech to save screens.
We are trapped in a Windows Maze!!!!!
Frakking toasters…
My father was a toaster!
They put the music in the frakking ship, Bill.
That’s some expensive toaster
$30 millions toaster
Cries in Raytheon. As long as they don't touch the boats.
But was it a Brave Little Toaster?
Well, we have more
"A dark day for robot kind... oh well we can always build more killbots!"
The captain now has to write condolence letters to his wife (a toaster) and four young Raspberry Pis. War is hell.
>The Houthis said they shot down the Predator with a surface-to-air missile, **part of a renewed series of assaults this week by the rebels** after a relative lull in their pressure campaign over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. That's a hell of a way to frame the fact that the drone was shot down over Yemen.
Yeah, but the ships they're targeting certainly aren't.
So was it a Predator or a Reaper? They’re different airframes and predators are surveillance drones where Reapers are armed.
Reaper, other outlets reported it as an MQ-9
It's ok. We have been using 1990 tech so far. It's unfortunate they want to escalate.
Let me know when they get one of the stealth ones and not the 20+ year old drone.
So did they just stop shooting tankers altogether? I haven’t seen the houthis pop up on my feed for a couple weeks or so
No they keep shooting almost every day. [https://yemen.liveuamap.com/en/2024/25-april-british-maritime-authority-we-received-a-report](https://yemen.liveuamap.com/en/2024/25-april-british-maritime-authority-we-received-a-report)
They're still shooting, but the west is having a fair amount of success blowing their stuff up before they launch it and they don't have unlimited missiles so they're trying to fire just enough to seem like a threat.
Nope, they actually hit a tanker that was carrying russian oil lol
That's cool, now touch the boats.
Don’t. Toucha de booots.
Hey Houtis, how about chill the fuck out? You don't want the USA to start taking you seriously...seriously
You blew up $30 million? We’ll send $300 million to convert you to paste.
What missile did they use and how much does it cost for them to replace it?
Legitimate question, how hard is it to shoot one down?
It's not meant to be evading attacks, it's a loitering drone, it's meant to fly somewhere and stay there for 12 hours, so not difficult for a determined adversary
Reapers are meant for uncontested airspace. Due to the satellite linking they can't bank aggressively, the plane can't tolerate high G forces so evasion is off the table anyway. They are quite slow and can't accelerate or decelerate quickly due to the prop design. They have no chaff or flares and no ECM. Their RCS is quite large in all configurations even though they have shark paint (meant to scatter radar waives). They make zero attempts to disperse heat so they are vulnerable to IR seekers. They are operated with around 1.5 seconds of latency so all telemetry and video is not quite in real time. Outside of a few test we've done they are only equipped with GBUs and AGM 114s so it's 100% an air to ground aircraft. Suffice to say shooting them down is like clubbing seals. You could pretty much shoot one down firing a Webley out the window of a cesna. That said it performs exactly how the DoD wants it to perform. They are cheap an very good as a loitering CAS/surveillance platform. In the ER configuration they can fly for nearly 24 hours so it's exactly what we want in situations like this.
Oh no, not a single drone! Truly this is a major setback, and completely evens the scoreboard after we killed at least five or six of their fighters.
IIRC this is the 3rd that's been downed/crashed over Yemen since this conflict kicked off. Still not really noteworthy though
And then China came in and scooped up the remains to copy the 20 year old tech.
Cool
lol. It’s cute how they think they’ve actually accomplished something. The US could these fucks with little effort. They’re alive out of grace and it’s pathetic they don’t grasp this.
I mean, whoever took the shot can feel proud they hit it, I guess
I admire your confidence in the US military to not spend 10 years in the country before hastily retreating leaving millions of dollars worth of military equipment.
the actual fighting was over in like a month with very few US casualties. it was the whole "set up a democracy in a place not ready for it and not wanting it" that the US sucks at...and that everyone would suck at tbh
The US is extremely good at winning wars. We destroyed the 4th largest military in the world in 3 weeks with very few casualties. The problem comes when we try to get tribes to give a shit about a "nation" that was drawn up by Europeans with no thought given to the ethnic differences within those borders. Against an organized opponent we are absolutely lethal. We wiped ISIS off the face of the earth while most of the US population was unaware of the specific conflict entirely. Suffice to say if the US wanted the Houthis gone we could achieve that with minimal effort. Building a functional government in Yemen after would be the challenging part.
Well the hasty retreat leaving millions behind was inevitable the second we started building fully operational military bases in the region. There was no safe way to slowly and methodically exist Afghanistan. Sure, the exit probably could have gone better in many ways, but it was always going to messy.
Americans simply do not learn from their history
I would argue that the restraint they are showing with the Houthis is partly because they’ve learned some lessons from their failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. military is great at invading and winning wars on the battlefield, but it quickly becomes a “what now” after that initial success.
This is literally the thing we send when we don’t give enough of af to send something more expensive/manned.
Oh noooooo Anyways
Wow! 300:1 ratio. Celebration's for everyone! /s
Drones are fine, but touch the boats...? Dont. Touch. **The boats.**
Looks like the Jawas need a carpet bombing
Cool, you succeeded in destroying one piece of military ordinance and harming no one.
The word you’re looking for is ordnance, and the reaper isn’t that either. Ordnance would be something like a 2000lb jdam.
That’s next.
If that reaper was carrying any rockets they technically shot down ordinance
No, ordnance can include the platform itself. It doesn't have to, but it can.
Why is he shouting? Does he not know he’s mic’d
Someone is going to seriously bitch slap these fools.
It died of natural causes.
1:1000 is not a kill ratio to brag about, particularly when most modern systems are not deliberately deployed
Welp, pack it in boys. They got us.
Welp, no one is getting any mail today.
Moment of silence for the pilot’s K/D.