These things should cost less than a Toyota Camry.
I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).
Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense.
And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked:
"Don't you support our troops?"
And that'll be the end of that
just completely exit like Afghanistan
and remember all this military hardware eventually ends up in the hands of police departments domestically, next decade is going to be wild
$21 TRILLION spent on militarization 2001-2021
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
imagine how much by 2031, at least double
ps. they are still executing fishermen without trial off Venezuela at a million dollars a pop
Oh. You should have started with this.
We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.
And George Floyd was a saint with no fent in his system.
What compels people to advocate for the world's trash?
I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.
The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.
It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.
That budget and wealth transfer requires the US Dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. A lot of the killing has to do with ensuring it remains that way.
An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.
You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.
Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.
freedomben•33m ago
On a separate note, I'm curious as to whether AI is making an inroads in that space. I would imagine very minimal, if at all, but very curious.
hvb2•25m ago
tehjoker•21m ago
pjc50•20m ago
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
pixl97•18m ago
I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.
matwood•7m ago
See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.
general1465•11m ago