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).
When the Republicans rule.
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.
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.
US want to project power far away from its shores -> long range, precision strike, long loitering time.
What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal.
Or we can spread a cost more, rather than less: Even $100,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter if you evenly distribute it across each atom in the universe. But that would be a silly thought exercise, kind of like dividing the cost by the number of living human creatures within the usa.
The same with the other stuff, they have super important radar and super important ships that need to be defended and a failure creates irreplaceable loses. Iran on the other hand, just like with their super important leaders lost all its “super weapons” like destroyers and the drone ships and yet again brought USA to its knees.
Maybe USA has more fundamental problems, not just drones. Maybe the problem is the obsession of wonderweapons for destroying wondertargets.
It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him.
Maybe the desire for concentration of power and seeing everything through that lens is the issue?
If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").
This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.
In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.
And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.
Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
Defense contracting is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. This is what unfettered cost plus contracts looks like. We ridicule the Russian military for their insane levels of corruption (eg paying for tanks that never get built and the generals pocketing the money) but really the same thing has happened here. The things get built but they don't work and the entire industry is built around hiring former Pentagon people who specialize in procurement.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the US military's past equipment was legendary. The M1 rifle and M4/M16 family were cheap, reliable and effective. The Jeep was legendary for its reliability. The original M1 Abrams tank is widely considered the best tank the military ever built. If you listen to anyone in the military they'll tell you the vehicles are constantly broken down, hard to repair, expensive to maintain and outright dangerous.
Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on roads, schools, bridges, hospitals and trains, things that would actually benefit people. We're bankrupting ourselves to enrich the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp and General Dynamics for what exactly?
And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase.
This is also why I laugh whenever anyone pushes the idea that China is the Big Bad [tm], for two reasons. First, they don't have to be. We just want their to be a scary enemy to justify all this. Second, if they were, they would destroy us because it would ultimately come down to military industrial capability and we would lose. Orders of magnitude lose.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
[2]: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/the-ford-class-is-not-th...
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
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.
These are captured markets, there is no competition. The bar is set high, or specifically, so that small players cannot compete, and this is done by extensiive relationship management at all levels, and heavy marketing.
It takes a situation like Ukraine to 'prove' to everyone that 'cheap things can work well'.
Even in the face of glaring evidence form Ukraine the system is slow to react.
Shaheds are used for years and the US just let their gear sit out in the open in the Gulf.
You could provide 'irrefutable evidence' to a political system of some fact, it's not hugely helpful.
The system does not change until the power dynamics do - aka Iran destroyed gazillions in US gear and some senior level people are 'demanding answers'.
Defence contracts are an 'inside game' it's extremely political.
Only when people are in a rush do they start to look at outside agencies to find the best gear for the problem they need to solve 'right now'.
exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban
regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters
you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses
btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?
at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point
freedomben•55m 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•48m ago
bad_haircut72•17m ago
tehjoker•44m ago
peyton•11m ago
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21211671-1997-revisi...
pjc50•43m ago
By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States.
pixl97•40m 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•29m 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•34m ago
cm2012•16m ago
yonaguska•13m ago
varispeed•15m ago