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.
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.<p>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.<p>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
Took a war to realize this.
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..<p>... and it <i>only</i> cost $225M.<p>(source: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-congresss-briefing-drone-strikes/354548/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...</a>)
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>> <i>and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure</i><p>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.<p>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.
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.
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. We spend $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. It’s just that we’ve allocated primary responsibility for feeding kids to parents. Meanwhile, we have allocated the responsibility of blowing things up to the government, and not to parents.<p>There’s some subset of kids who fall through the cracks because their parents aren’t feeding them and existing school lunch programs don’t capture them. What’s your non-emotional argument for why spending government money to feed that donut hole population will improve society more than building technology to maintain the country’s military superiority?<p>The U.S. is the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world. The current allocation of responsibilities seems to be working pretty well!
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong.<p>Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.
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.<p>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.
"Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?"
<i>A Chinese drone manufacturer [Poly Technologies] has disclosed a massive government order for almost a million lightweight kamikaze drones, to be delivered by 2026</i><p><a href="https://defence-blog.com/china-places-massive-order-for-kamikaze-drones/" rel="nofollow">https://defence-blog.com/china-places-massive-order-for-kami...</a><p><a href="https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-chinese" rel="nofollow">https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-...</a>
And they bought three new drones!
Drones killing drones. No lives at stake any more. Like burning piles of money on the sidelines until one side runs out.
Misleading title: this article says it is seeking a budget increase, not that it's been approved<p>>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.<p>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,<p>True. An increase to $1.5T by the looks of it.<p><a href="https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/politics/3882126-pentagon-unveils-historic-15-trillion-defense-budget-featuring-golden-fleet-and-drone-dominance" rel="nofollow">https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/politics/3882126-pentag...</a>
> Funding tied to the little-known Defense Autonomous Warfare Group spans procurement, research, training and sustainment<p>Someone really wanted to name a department DAWG.
Doesn’t seem anywhere near enough.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Hmmm, this sentence appears to be a paradox? Is the US not fighting Iran right now?<p>Iran has a very weak air force and the US claims air superiority, yet Iran is using a lot of drones.<p>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.<p>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.
Iran launched around 2k drones over the war. Ukraine uses around 200k/m.<p><a href="https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55897" rel="nofollow">https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55897</a><p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>...all the more reason to reduce spending on them.
But, but... What about Tom Cruise... on the flight deck... with his bomber jacket!!!<p>This is... UNAMERICAN!!!<p>p.s. This comment is sarcasm. For the unmitigated reality, please refer to your 1950s "duck and cover" propaganda...
Reminder: The Trump family has direct involvement in drone companies<p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-sons-powerus-drone-interceptors-iran-missiles-1d8d858fdad5104a56e4438994093594" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/trump-sons-powerus-drone-intercep...</a>
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<p>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
holy shit!
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.