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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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)?
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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#...
For Afghanistan it seems like high-flying, capable, armed drones were a better option for that type of conflict.
... and it only cost $225M.
(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...)
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.
This has been the case in wars of attrition since the Civil War. It took between then and WWII for the message to land.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_...
https://www.defensebudget.org/en/country/united-states
The VA budget alone is over $400B, and the intelligence budget is _classified_.
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.
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 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.
Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.
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.
I am not concerned with trivia like GPAs or suspensions. Student capability is inherent to their genetics.
The Soviet system created brilliant scientists for a fraction of the US system.
https://defence-blog.com/china-places-massive-order-for-kami...
https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-...
>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.
True. An increase to $1.5T by the looks of it.
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/politics/3882126-pentag...
Someone really wanted to name a department DAWG.
We will see how it works out for them.
All future and present conflict is fundamentally based around drones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very soon, "good enough" robotic autonomous infantry will exist which will make soldiers in the 21st century look as outdated as cavalry.
...all the more reason to reduce spending on them.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-sons-powerus-drone-intercep...
Do you really need to go past that. They're like a "trump" card for the grift economy.
This is... UNAMERICAN!!!
p.s. This comment is sarcasm. For the unmitigated reality, please refer to your 1950s "duck and cover" propaganda...