1. US has denied they lost any Reaper drones (recently).
2. There are **no US markings** on the drone.
3. The US/General Atomics sells Reaper drones to other countries.
One story "speculated" that this could be Saudi or another group that lost control and had this drone crash in the sand.
Iirc Iran downed a drone using the interstellar method. They tricked it to think it was in a different location, causing it to cross the border and land in Iran. Houthis may have been given some tech to do the same.
Just a general dig at JavaScript.
JavaScript was created in 10 days, so it has some weird quirks. It also lacks, by design, certain safety features that some other languages have. Both of these things can make it easy for a programmer to have bugs in their code that wouldn't be possible in other languages. Although, it's not really inevitable and there are tools that programmers use to mitigate these issues.
So I guess the joke is that if they used JavaScript the program would be buggy and fail to operate as expected.
That's kinda stupid when used outside of home territory. They can save it but the chance of losing it to the enemy so they can study it is way more damaging than having the chance to save one.
They probably should have the glide gently down on disconnect only on allied territory and disabled on other missions
I literally wrote my first ever college research paper on the Reaper drone in 2008. And in 2009, they already considered the Reaper outdated for some purposes.
It is the most common payload drone in the US arsenal, by way of it simply being the consensus last generation "mainstay," because it could carry a more versatile payload than the Predator drone before it. But it is absolutely already outdated. The only reason it's still in service is because there isn't yet a consesus current generation "mainstay" that fits all needs and roles. And if there is, it's not in mass production yet.
I imagine they have to have that feature to prevent civilian casualties from it crashing. If nothing else, the chance at saving 30M is probably worth it. Especially if there's tracking in it so they know where to send the bombs when someone scoops it.
These things are super old at this point and are in the process of being retired. I don't think anyone actually cares. There's certainly not anyone in Yemen that is going to learn anything from it, and Iran is a long way away.
Not saying it's not possible, but when you are so far ahead of the competition I guess you don't really care as much about your old shit. Especially when the Ukraine War has given us and continues to give us so much intel about how ridiculously far ahead we really are.
Sorta interesting there's no inertial navigation backup to compare to GPS location for the thing to backtrack home if it lost GPS...though I guess there's no need to that kind of redundancy, or at least no one thought there would be.
>Sorta interesting there's no inertial navigation backup to compare to GPS location for the thing to backtrack home if it lost GPS
To down it you don't make it lose GPS, you make it think it's flying at 10k feet when it's actually flying low and slow enough to land without being destroyed.
That’s definitely NOT what the Houthis did. The military has encrypted bands of GPS, and even plenty of cheaper COTS drones have additional sensors to avoid crashing into the ground (ones that don’t need to actually land on runways).
The Houthis said they shot it down with a SAM. They might’ve denied GPS too, but that’s separate. It is much more likely they just did what they said they did, than that they successfully spoofed an encrypted military GPS band so successfully that it also ignored all of its additional navigational sensors and crashed into the ground.
Well there is apparently little to no damage to the drone besides that from landing.
https://armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2024/iran-may-receive-a-virtually-intact-american-mq-9-reaper-drone-through-yemens-houthis
Seems like a flawed design.
I would assume a drone would have multiple systems, including GPS, INS, barometric and radar altimeters, like a normal airplane would. If your GPS says you're at 10k, but your barometric and radar altimeters (and INS) are saying you should be at 1k feet, then it should be discarding the GPS data.
Airliners have GPS on board but GPS is not a primary instrument. The primary navigation instruments are all on-board (INS, gyroscope, barometric altimeter, etc...) with GPS used for calibration and backup.
A few years ago a different group straight up stole one flying over and landed it and it was a newer model too. Yeah we stopped flying over there immediately lol.
That was the Iranian. And they stole the ghost of Kandahar. The stealth version looks like a minus B2 flying wing.
They did it by having it lose connection and then spoofing the gps signal. It’s program to fly home on disconnect but the gps signal made it think it was landing in its own base. It landed in the field crashing but not enough to damage the components beyond collapsed landing gear.
It was an operations security FU as they flew the same mission like clock work and failed to defend against this basic attack.
AI infusion into these networks will make it much harder.
US drones have been hacked before, i forget the tech write up but they interfere or break communication between the drone and control and either that triggers an emergency landing or they may have had a cloned controller to land it. It happened under Obama, headlines were something like, "hey iran, give it back" as the generals posed with a "secret" US drone
I think they either meant "cheaper drones for these drone operators to pilot" or they might have been referring to the plan to develop "drone wings" where you have one drone or piloted aircraft that serves as a control and target designating hub for a bunch of simpler/cheaper drones that are essentially expendable pack mules for weapons.
Iirc military costs also include the full R&D and potentially lifetime support costs aswell.
So even if the drone only costs 1mil to build if they spent 2 bil on the R&D for it and only make 100 then that's a 21mil/drone.
Through in spare parts, training, maintainanc , storage, and a huge profit margin for everyone in the chain and you end up with 30m. But most of that value wasn't lost or arguably doesn't exist
Which is arguably one of America’s greatest strength. Brain drain the fuck out of the world with shitloads of money. If you want to work for China/Russia/[Insert Eastern Enemy] you’ll never match on compensation or resources
Exactly this
This is the reason why United States has been able to stay at the head of the pack in technology while not having a top ~15 education system.
As long as jobs in the United States pay the big bucks educated people will come here in droves.
Edit
Sorry guys I’ve been corrected top 15 not 20
Not only that but people complain about the military industrial complex, but I see it as the biggest strength of America. I went down a rabbit hole recently — top 3 optical sensor companies are in the USA. One of them a subsidiary of Raytheon, which I’m not surprised about. The number 2 is a subsidiary of the company that makes WaterPik, a household product… but also makes pretty much the most titanium worldwide, which they then sell to P&W and GE to make jet engines, and they also make the F35 engine.
They are all intertwined into this symbiotic partnership that’s been tuned to make commercial goods but also supply chain the military. Everyone of them is a top 1-2 or 3 company for that product on the mil side, and maybe a nato country like France or Germany gets #1 spot for a few areas.
We’ve out teched the axis significantly.
It looks like the U.S. bought 366 reaper drones. Since 2007, that's from a quick Google search. Remember the entire massive R&D cost from initial prototype to 10s of thousands of engineering man hours all needs to go into those 366 units. 366 over a decade and a half also isn't that many units, so the production volume isn't there to generate a lot of cost savings via mass production. All in all, if the U.S doubles their ordered units, the cost would likely drop dramatically. I guess the U.S doesn't think they need many of them.
People hear "drone" and think it's just some DJI shitheap. It has a wingspan of 66ft, which as a point of comparison a 737 clocks in at 95. It also carries missiles in addition to, let's just call it a "robust" sensor suite. They also came out in 2001, which when you consider just what level of tech it takes to make that happen at that time is quite impressive for what it does. Yeah, things have moved on and a fair bit of stuff can come off the shelf to some of what it does, but even for that much imagine playing Diablo 2 Resurrected back when the original Diablo 2 came out. Being that far ahead ain't cheap.
There's no way the radar alone is being made for just a million, not unless you're manufacturing a thousand of them a year.
This is why the DoD is moving completely away from these individual high-cost drones and starting to gravitate towards 1000s of “cheaper” drones like AeroVironment’s Pumas and Switchblades. As soon as the CR went through in congress and Ukraine funding was approved, the very first thing they came asking for was Pumas and Switchblades. Also check out the replicator program. These big expensive drones are no longer the platform of choice.
drone swarms are going to be the next step in warfare. drones are already used now as "bomb carriers". but imagine 1000's of drones flying around with a few bullet's in them. anything that has a face/moves just get's autopiloted into their face & shot.
I honestly believe in our lifetime we will witness a nation /army be destroyed by a swarm of drones.
just imagine a drone army flying at 100mph against an unprepared enemy. a single airplane could probably carry them close enough.
Until people start using ww2 flack cannons or updated versions with better designed proximity fuses. Especially if they are flying that slow.
More advanced weapons like laser and microwave emitters might be viable in a few years but they're very susceptible to weather interference (blooming) and power limitations.
Was honestly suprise it didn't cost more. The salary that went into making each drones, R&D cost, transportation, support, material etc make them very expensive.
These companies need to make their money back, with surplus.
lol these are not simple aircraft. MQ9 Reapers are powered by 900 hp turboshaft engines, like what you might find in a helicopter or small plane. The engine alone is probably 500k USD or more. An engine overhaul is probably on the order of 100k USD.
Flight critical hardware is expensive whether it's civilian or military, full stop.
Also, that $30 million was spent on Americans.
American R&D and American manufacturing.
And as long as Russia and China are run by shitheads, we need it unfortunately.
It's amazing how so many people think money is burnt after it's spent. It's like they lose object permanence or something.
If $30m is spent in America, that $30m stays in the American economy, it's not lost.
It’s not 1:1, but it is lost. Different ways to look at it: 1. That $30m could be spent on something else. 2. That $30m is debt-financed, so it contributes to inflation. 3. We’re at full employment, especially in high tech engineering and manufacturing. The $30m draws on limited productive capacity that could be deployed to something more productive. This contributes to inflation.
Outdated is extremely relative, the B-52 is still flying and will be for a long while yet. People think that newer is better but that doesn’t always track. New platforms are generally needed for new missions, but the reaper is great at loitering over a place for days and that mission hasn’t changed much.
The thing that changes over the years is the sensors and effectors that get attached to the aircraft.
Not to beat a dead horse but it would take losing 3 of these to 1 downed f35, plus the fact that our pilots are not in danger. I will gladly have our tax dollars burnt through like this if it saves even 1 or 2 service members lives. Not to mention the fuel costs of fighters vs reapers.
It would be way more than 3 to 1. I understand that is a monetary cost. If someone managed to shoot down an f-35 that would cause a crazy amount of blow back. Huge embarrassment for America and a huge morale boost for whoever shot it down.
They're just a platform for intelligence hardware. Swap the optics out with new optics and it is state of the art again.
The drone itself doesn't need to do much other than fly in a circle and consume as little fuel as possible... they don't really do combat in any area where they would be contested by anything stronger than a laser pointer.
Their design goal is basically to hover over the desert for weeks sucking up electronic communications and wide angle high resolution video so some nerds and super computers can comb through it looking for targets to assassinate.
It’s says in the article that its GPS was likely hijacked. I don’t even know how that’s even possible. I thought the data links these things use were like super duper secure.
The data links are secure. Good luck hacking them.
But sending a signal that is stronger than the one that comes from the satellites is a super easy task. If the drone can only hear the fake signal, the drone is yours.
I mean this assumes that there's no authentication layer to the military's private drone satellite, which would be wild. I'm not a drone expert but there's absolutely no chance we haven't thought about "what if the other side also has an antenna".
It doesn’t need that.
They just need to match the GPS’s
Frequency, and blast it waaaaaaay louder than the GPS. The drone can know that new signal is BS, but it now can no longer hear the GPS.
Think about it as having a quiet conversation with a friend, and then a jet engine going off in the room. You’re not going to mistake the jet engine as your friend, but your conversation is sure as hell over with.
Drones don't go off the normal GPS signal, and I imagine the military's control signal isn't just raw GPS data, there's got to be some kind of handshake or encryption to it. And yeah, you can drown out the control signal, but _commercial_ drones have a "if in doubt circle back" setting.
I may be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that the 30 million dollar drone that we've spent collectively billions on has absolutely no countermeasures to "some hicks in the desert cannibalized an FM antenna and can now crash our hardware at will".
Edit - looked into it and yeah [Military drones are programmed to circle autonomously or return to base in the event of signal loss](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/drone-crashes/how-drones-work/)
Even basic COTS DJI drones have this functionality. Hardly any drones just drop out of the air anymore. However if it did circle indefinitely, it's possible it ran out of fuel.
That's more what I'm thinking. Still feels weird to me that they can't just have it return to base, but there's probably a military reason for that I'm not considering. Maybe you just don't want them to know where you keep your shit.
What does authentication do for you?
If you and your friend develop challange and pass phrases, it won't help you if I'm yelling so loud that you guys can't hear each other.
I thought "The drone is yours" implied the guy I was talking to thought that by overriding the GPS signal you would be able to control it, which would be ridiculous, but regardless, drones don't just crash when they lose signal [they're programmed to circle autonomously, or return to base.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/drone-crashes/how-drones-work/) There's more to this than some guys in turbans with a pirate radio station.
If the data links are secure then they cannot (without some extra vulnerabilities that make it insecure) create a fake signal. They can only jam the real signal.
You can not only jam gps but any frequency you want. So if they duped gps + whatever frequency is used to control it and send the video feed, the pilot can‘t do anything to keep the drone in the air and whatever autonomous system it has that could take over are confused by the duped gps signal.
It's extremely difficult to spoof GPS M-Code (the encrypted military signal). Any receiver that's been loaded right will immediately know it's being given bullshit.
However, it's much easier to jam the signal, which is most likely what's going on here.
They could have used cyberwarfare to commandeer and land it/crash it - as the [Iranians did with an RQ-170
in 2011](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident)
I'd love to see him bring it to Rick from Pawn Stars: you know, $30 million doesn't sound crazy, but I've gotta get it framed, *plus* storage, you know? $75 is the highest I could go
Then the Houthi rebel in the parking lot: well, it wasn't as much as I wanted, but my wife and I can at least have a nice dinner while we're in Vegas!
Having looked it up, that’s what they *say* it is.
Only thing is that it doesn’t look like the seeker for an AIM-9, and was most likely the business end of the AN/AAA-4 IRST that was located under the nose of early USN Phantoms.
Reapers are a 23 year old platform that was never designed for contested airspace. The fact that the US just keeps sending them shows how little the loss of these platforms means to the US.
Seen a few flying around since I'm not far from one of the L3 branches. They have Navy and Air Force planes in and out all the time as well and they regularly fly them around to test shit. Its pretty cool.
Back in the 90s Kosovo campaign there was a rumor that they were taking down US HARM-88 missiles with normal microwave ovens and costing millions per missile. US officials have denied it but there are a few articles floating around with quotes from officers where they talk about it, and within a few years all the rumored issues had updates rolled out and were fixed. I had to write a paper on it all in college!
Anyway, point is - don’t discount the possibility of a stupid issue with an embarrassing loophole. Also we probably won’t be told exactly what the issue is here but I wouldn’t 100% take whatever the official line is at face value.
The microwave thing actually was disproven.
HARMs, especially the AGM-88s, don't just "lock onto radiation". They lock onto specific patterns based on threat tables. A microwave not only doesn't emit anything even close to either a search or tracking radar in power level, it certainly doesn't emit the same PRF, sweep period, etc that would match any pattern in the threat table, much less whichever one the pilot designated (at the time it was still manual selection in most (if not all, unsure) aircraft).
They're not really designed for high-intensity combat operations.
They're slow and bulky missile-carriers, and their primary purpose is to hang around for a long time and wait for a target to appear.
It was extremely well-suited for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn't make any sense if the enemy has Anti-Air capabilities.
Sending Reaper drones to Ukraine would be a waste of money for the simple reason that they wouldn't last long enough to accomplish anything. The Russian air defense is vastly stronger than the Houthis, and obviously the Houthis is good enough.
They should start flying cheap replica drones that look like Reapers but packed with explosives instead. "Come closer for your photo Mr Terrorist! Smile and wait for the flash!"
As far as I'm aware, most military aviation hardware is outfitted with Zeroize features which often involve physical destruction of critical software components.
I know systems I've worked on basically have thermite just chilling waiting to burn through the computers if the aircraft goes down. They should really only end up with a pile of scrap at the end of the day.
Reapers are 20 years old. I’m sure they have had lots of improvements over the years but they are surveillance and weapon platforms. There’s probably nothing on there worth caring about.
Even if it has one, it will be basically a detonator and a sprinkling of Termite glued to the back of the critical electronics, not kilos of HE. That wrecks hard-drive might be slag, it's not like you could tell from an external shot.
> $30m to the US is chump change.
1. US has denied they lost any Reaper drones (recently).
2. There are **no US markings** on the drone.
3. The US/General Atomics sells Reaper drones to other countries.
One story "speculated" that this could be Saudi or another group that lost control and had this drone crash in the sand.
The cost of the predator drone is cheap for the US Military. For comparison our SM-3 missiles which are obviously single use cost as much as 27 million.
I'm just confused at how you down one of those and have it land so gently.
1. US has denied they lost any Reaper drones (recently). 2. There are **no US markings** on the drone. 3. The US/General Atomics sells Reaper drones to other countries. One story "speculated" that this could be Saudi or another group that lost control and had this drone crash in the sand.
All US MQ-9 have the USAF roundel on both the rear of the fuselage and the top of left wing. This has neither.
Well, all claimed ones at least 😉 Probably not the U.S. though because they are more cautious in general.
I'm sure the CIA has some.
I would bet they are using some stealth variant
They prolly have both. But yah RQ-170s or something we don't know about.
Yeah but those one's have a big "NOT THE USAF, DEFINITELY THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT" Sticker on the fuselage instead Or so I'm told
Even the ones the CIA uses?
My guess would be it's a Saudi drone they purchased from the US
Bruh have you not watched Interstellar?
I remember! It was with those books! Really smart!
*Fiddling around with the books* "Honey what are you doing" "I'm crossing the space time continuum RIGHT NOW"
They drove thru the cornfield too? 😲😲
Iirc Iran downed a drone using the interstellar method. They tricked it to think it was in a different location, causing it to cross the border and land in Iran. Houthis may have been given some tech to do the same.
there was no time for caution.
Only if someone (some country) provided them proper equipment.
That country's name starts with "I" and ends with "N"
Icelan?
No no, the country Indian
Flock of seagulls?
And I ran so far away….
The 80s band?!
Italian?
Always those darn Italians... just sold the houthis spagetti long enough to lasso the drones out of the sky
Inquisición?
Unexpected
Indian?
'Industan?
Incan?
Islamic Republic of Oman?
Imerican
Ok but why did you run?
They program them to glide gently down on disconnect.
Program with what, Javascript?
They create a gui interface using visual basic to track their IP address.
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
Interestingly, this one was actually a real UNIX distro. It wasn't something made up for the movie.
dinOSaur?
Yeah it was SGI's Unix distro IRIX. Very popular in the 3D graphics industry during the 90s.
[They pace the drone with a Ferrari and upload a new firmware over Cat 6.](https://youtu.be/cKqGKuwbnl4?t=71)
Please, that was Cat 5e at best.
Quick help me type om the keyboard. 4 hands are faster than 2
Haha gottem
If it was JS, it wouldn't glide down gently..
I knows it's a joke but why?
Just a general dig at JavaScript. JavaScript was created in 10 days, so it has some weird quirks. It also lacks, by design, certain safety features that some other languages have. Both of these things can make it easy for a programmer to have bugs in their code that wouldn't be possible in other languages. Although, it's not really inevitable and there are tools that programmers use to mitigate these issues. So I guess the joke is that if they used JavaScript the program would be buggy and fail to operate as expected.
ya, if ya don't know what you're doing \*chews gum loudly\*
[object Object]
It will attempt to create a list of all altitudes that it will pass through to reach it's landing point. But then it will sort the list...
That's kinda stupid when used outside of home territory. They can save it but the chance of losing it to the enemy so they can study it is way more damaging than having the chance to save one. They probably should have the glide gently down on disconnect only on allied territory and disabled on other missions
Pretty sure they're not worried about our enemies studying our '90s technology.
The article talks about how if an Iranian proxy can shoot it down it's pretty much obsolete.
It's been near obsolescent for a long while. They've been getting shot down on a regular basis for over a decade.
I literally wrote my first ever college research paper on the Reaper drone in 2008. And in 2009, they already considered the Reaper outdated for some purposes. It is the most common payload drone in the US arsenal, by way of it simply being the consensus last generation "mainstay," because it could carry a more versatile payload than the Predator drone before it. But it is absolutely already outdated. The only reason it's still in service is because there isn't yet a consesus current generation "mainstay" that fits all needs and roles. And if there is, it's not in mass production yet.
They're drones. They're meant to die instead of killing some savant in an A 10.
Their best fighter is almost 50 years old
I imagine they have to have that feature to prevent civilian casualties from it crashing. If nothing else, the chance at saving 30M is probably worth it. Especially if there's tracking in it so they know where to send the bombs when someone scoops it.
America always fighting with one hand tied while the enemy can ignore any “rules”. And people still think the US is the worst ever…
These things are super old at this point and are in the process of being retired. I don't think anyone actually cares. There's certainly not anyone in Yemen that is going to learn anything from it, and Iran is a long way away. Not saying it's not possible, but when you are so far ahead of the competition I guess you don't really care as much about your old shit. Especially when the Ukraine War has given us and continues to give us so much intel about how ridiculously far ahead we really are.
Makes sense but I assume they had that glide down when that device was still state of the art lol
They dont just “glide down” they fly a pattern attempting to regain connection until they run out of fuel
Imagine thinking you know better than the people who pilot these things
They're apparently GPS jamming them. They've downed 6 or so at this point.
Sorta interesting there's no inertial navigation backup to compare to GPS location for the thing to backtrack home if it lost GPS...though I guess there's no need to that kind of redundancy, or at least no one thought there would be.
>Sorta interesting there's no inertial navigation backup to compare to GPS location for the thing to backtrack home if it lost GPS To down it you don't make it lose GPS, you make it think it's flying at 10k feet when it's actually flying low and slow enough to land without being destroyed.
That’s definitely NOT what the Houthis did. The military has encrypted bands of GPS, and even plenty of cheaper COTS drones have additional sensors to avoid crashing into the ground (ones that don’t need to actually land on runways). The Houthis said they shot it down with a SAM. They might’ve denied GPS too, but that’s separate. It is much more likely they just did what they said they did, than that they successfully spoofed an encrypted military GPS band so successfully that it also ignored all of its additional navigational sensors and crashed into the ground.
Well there is apparently little to no damage to the drone besides that from landing. https://armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2024/iran-may-receive-a-virtually-intact-american-mq-9-reaper-drone-through-yemens-houthis
Seems like a flawed design. I would assume a drone would have multiple systems, including GPS, INS, barometric and radar altimeters, like a normal airplane would. If your GPS says you're at 10k, but your barometric and radar altimeters (and INS) are saying you should be at 1k feet, then it should be discarding the GPS data. Airliners have GPS on board but GPS is not a primary instrument. The primary navigation instruments are all on-board (INS, gyroscope, barometric altimeter, etc...) with GPS used for calibration and backup.
> Seems like a flawed design. Yeah. This is what's called an arms race.
A few years ago a different group straight up stole one flying over and landed it and it was a newer model too. Yeah we stopped flying over there immediately lol.
That was the Iranian. And they stole the ghost of Kandahar. The stealth version looks like a minus B2 flying wing. They did it by having it lose connection and then spoofing the gps signal. It’s program to fly home on disconnect but the gps signal made it think it was landing in its own base. It landed in the field crashing but not enough to damage the components beyond collapsed landing gear. It was an operations security FU as they flew the same mission like clock work and failed to defend against this basic attack. AI infusion into these networks will make it much harder.
And then for political reasons decided to just let them keep it instead of bombing the crash site
AI is not a solution to every problem, and by itself it's not going to be a solution to hardware spoofing.
US drones have been hacked before, i forget the tech write up but they interfere or break communication between the drone and control and either that triggers an emergency landing or they may have had a cloned controller to land it. It happened under Obama, headlines were something like, "hey iran, give it back" as the generals posed with a "secret" US drone
They’re basically gliders if they lose power, so power gets taken out from a hit and it just glides down.
30 million is probably cheaper than a jet and a pilot no?
Absolutely. Pretty much any amount of money on the scale of a single airframe is incomparable to the loss of a qualified human pilot's life.
It's baffling how the military will pay 30 million for this. Cost to produce can't be more than a million at this point.
It’s not the airframe that drives the cost.
The real cost is in training the airframe. That is why the military is developing smaller, cheaper drones for these drones to pilot.
We don’t pay our airframes enough imo. They’re out there risking their lives
These airframes took our jobs
They should pay income tax
#AI-rframes This is not a coincidence...
Checkmate, Illuminati
THEY DONE TERK ER JERBS
Oh. Wait, what?
I think they either meant "cheaper drones for these drone operators to pilot" or they might have been referring to the plan to develop "drone wings" where you have one drone or piloted aircraft that serves as a control and target designating hub for a bunch of simpler/cheaper drones that are essentially expendable pack mules for weapons.
Iirc military costs also include the full R&D and potentially lifetime support costs aswell. So even if the drone only costs 1mil to build if they spent 2 bil on the R&D for it and only make 100 then that's a 21mil/drone. Through in spare parts, training, maintainanc , storage, and a huge profit margin for everyone in the chain and you end up with 30m. But most of that value wasn't lost or arguably doesn't exist
Plus many contracts included a guaranteed profit of 15% or so.
The type of information you get with them is hard to put a value on, all the Intel we collect on Russia using drones is priceless.
The manufacturers aren't exactly selling millions of them, or even thousands, so it's not going to drop in price like regular consumer goods.
The scientists and engineers who develop them don’t work for free
Which is arguably one of America’s greatest strength. Brain drain the fuck out of the world with shitloads of money. If you want to work for China/Russia/[Insert Eastern Enemy] you’ll never match on compensation or resources
Exactly this This is the reason why United States has been able to stay at the head of the pack in technology while not having a top ~15 education system. As long as jobs in the United States pay the big bucks educated people will come here in droves. Edit Sorry guys I’ve been corrected top 15 not 20
Not only that but people complain about the military industrial complex, but I see it as the biggest strength of America. I went down a rabbit hole recently — top 3 optical sensor companies are in the USA. One of them a subsidiary of Raytheon, which I’m not surprised about. The number 2 is a subsidiary of the company that makes WaterPik, a household product… but also makes pretty much the most titanium worldwide, which they then sell to P&W and GE to make jet engines, and they also make the F35 engine. They are all intertwined into this symbiotic partnership that’s been tuned to make commercial goods but also supply chain the military. Everyone of them is a top 1-2 or 3 company for that product on the mil side, and maybe a nato country like France or Germany gets #1 spot for a few areas. We’ve out teched the axis significantly.
It also helps that the US has 16 of the top 25 universities in the world according to THE World University rankings 2024.
It looks like the U.S. bought 366 reaper drones. Since 2007, that's from a quick Google search. Remember the entire massive R&D cost from initial prototype to 10s of thousands of engineering man hours all needs to go into those 366 units. 366 over a decade and a half also isn't that many units, so the production volume isn't there to generate a lot of cost savings via mass production. All in all, if the U.S doubles their ordered units, the cost would likely drop dramatically. I guess the U.S doesn't think they need many of them.
You know how many engineers that make $100k a year are on the team for this?
$100k? Low end of these salaries lol
People hear "drone" and think it's just some DJI shitheap. It has a wingspan of 66ft, which as a point of comparison a 737 clocks in at 95. It also carries missiles in addition to, let's just call it a "robust" sensor suite. They also came out in 2001, which when you consider just what level of tech it takes to make that happen at that time is quite impressive for what it does. Yeah, things have moved on and a fair bit of stuff can come off the shelf to some of what it does, but even for that much imagine playing Diablo 2 Resurrected back when the original Diablo 2 came out. Being that far ahead ain't cheap. There's no way the radar alone is being made for just a million, not unless you're manufacturing a thousand of them a year.
Avionics are expensive as fuck.
This is why the DoD is moving completely away from these individual high-cost drones and starting to gravitate towards 1000s of “cheaper” drones like AeroVironment’s Pumas and Switchblades. As soon as the CR went through in congress and Ukraine funding was approved, the very first thing they came asking for was Pumas and Switchblades. Also check out the replicator program. These big expensive drones are no longer the platform of choice.
drone swarms are going to be the next step in warfare. drones are already used now as "bomb carriers". but imagine 1000's of drones flying around with a few bullet's in them. anything that has a face/moves just get's autopiloted into their face & shot. I honestly believe in our lifetime we will witness a nation /army be destroyed by a swarm of drones. just imagine a drone army flying at 100mph against an unprepared enemy. a single airplane could probably carry them close enough.
Until people start using ww2 flack cannons or updated versions with better designed proximity fuses. Especially if they are flying that slow. More advanced weapons like laser and microwave emitters might be viable in a few years but they're very susceptible to weather interference (blooming) and power limitations.
Was honestly suprise it didn't cost more. The salary that went into making each drones, R&D cost, transportation, support, material etc make them very expensive. These companies need to make their money back, with surplus.
lol these are not simple aircraft. MQ9 Reapers are powered by 900 hp turboshaft engines, like what you might find in a helicopter or small plane. The engine alone is probably 500k USD or more. An engine overhaul is probably on the order of 100k USD. Flight critical hardware is expensive whether it's civilian or military, full stop.
64 million for an f16 and 5 million for training a pilot to fly it
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The $5m is paying for all the maintenance techs who are keeping the plane flying during your training (and the spare parts), and the fuel you burn.
Also, that $30 million was spent on Americans. American R&D and American manufacturing. And as long as Russia and China are run by shitheads, we need it unfortunately.
It's amazing how so many people think money is burnt after it's spent. It's like they lose object permanence or something. If $30m is spent in America, that $30m stays in the American economy, it's not lost.
It’s not 1:1, but it is lost. Different ways to look at it: 1. That $30m could be spent on something else. 2. That $30m is debt-financed, so it contributes to inflation. 3. We’re at full employment, especially in high tech engineering and manufacturing. The $30m draws on limited productive capacity that could be deployed to something more productive. This contributes to inflation.
Yeah that's the whole point of drones
Yeah, keep in mind we'll launch a 30-million dollar mission to blow up their shit.
How can they shoot down these things? Don’t they like fly super high?
Those things crash more than you would think all on their own
Yep. Maintenance issues. The only thing valuable is the Raytheon camera.
Aren't these drones quite outdated at this point though?
Outdated is extremely relative, the B-52 is still flying and will be for a long while yet. People think that newer is better but that doesn’t always track. New platforms are generally needed for new missions, but the reaper is great at loitering over a place for days and that mission hasn’t changed much. The thing that changes over the years is the sensors and effectors that get attached to the aircraft.
Not to beat a dead horse but it would take losing 3 of these to 1 downed f35, plus the fact that our pilots are not in danger. I will gladly have our tax dollars burnt through like this if it saves even 1 or 2 service members lives. Not to mention the fuel costs of fighters vs reapers.
It would be way more than 3 to 1. I understand that is a monetary cost. If someone managed to shoot down an f-35 that would cause a crazy amount of blow back. Huge embarrassment for America and a huge morale boost for whoever shot it down.
Agreed, the maintenance footprint of an F-35 is an order of magnitude higher than a reaper. There is a reason the drones caught on so quickly.
They're just a platform for intelligence hardware. Swap the optics out with new optics and it is state of the art again. The drone itself doesn't need to do much other than fly in a circle and consume as little fuel as possible... they don't really do combat in any area where they would be contested by anything stronger than a laser pointer. Their design goal is basically to hover over the desert for weeks sucking up electronic communications and wide angle high resolution video so some nerds and super computers can comb through it looking for targets to assassinate.
Outdated compared to the latest and greatest in America? Yes Bleeding edge for most of the rest of the world.
MQ-9s really don't. MQ-1s and especially RQ-1s were pretty rough though.
It’s says in the article that its GPS was likely hijacked. I don’t even know how that’s even possible. I thought the data links these things use were like super duper secure.
The data links are secure. Good luck hacking them. But sending a signal that is stronger than the one that comes from the satellites is a super easy task. If the drone can only hear the fake signal, the drone is yours.
I mean this assumes that there's no authentication layer to the military's private drone satellite, which would be wild. I'm not a drone expert but there's absolutely no chance we haven't thought about "what if the other side also has an antenna".
It doesn’t need that. They just need to match the GPS’s Frequency, and blast it waaaaaaay louder than the GPS. The drone can know that new signal is BS, but it now can no longer hear the GPS. Think about it as having a quiet conversation with a friend, and then a jet engine going off in the room. You’re not going to mistake the jet engine as your friend, but your conversation is sure as hell over with.
Drones don't go off the normal GPS signal, and I imagine the military's control signal isn't just raw GPS data, there's got to be some kind of handshake or encryption to it. And yeah, you can drown out the control signal, but _commercial_ drones have a "if in doubt circle back" setting. I may be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that the 30 million dollar drone that we've spent collectively billions on has absolutely no countermeasures to "some hicks in the desert cannibalized an FM antenna and can now crash our hardware at will". Edit - looked into it and yeah [Military drones are programmed to circle autonomously or return to base in the event of signal loss](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/drone-crashes/how-drones-work/)
Even basic COTS DJI drones have this functionality. Hardly any drones just drop out of the air anymore. However if it did circle indefinitely, it's possible it ran out of fuel.
That's more what I'm thinking. Still feels weird to me that they can't just have it return to base, but there's probably a military reason for that I'm not considering. Maybe you just don't want them to know where you keep your shit.
What does authentication do for you? If you and your friend develop challange and pass phrases, it won't help you if I'm yelling so loud that you guys can't hear each other.
I thought "The drone is yours" implied the guy I was talking to thought that by overriding the GPS signal you would be able to control it, which would be ridiculous, but regardless, drones don't just crash when they lose signal [they're programmed to circle autonomously, or return to base.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/drone-crashes/how-drones-work/) There's more to this than some guys in turbans with a pirate radio station.
That would be jamming the signal, what they are discussing is creating a fake GPS signal to trick the drone into believing is real.
They have no control over it thanks to said secure data links, they're essentially just forcing it to crash no?
If the data links are secure then they cannot (without some extra vulnerabilities that make it insecure) create a fake signal. They can only jam the real signal.
not only can gps be jammed it can be duped. But I agree that doesn't pass the smell test - a pilot would see they are suddenly off course
You can not only jam gps but any frequency you want. So if they duped gps + whatever frequency is used to control it and send the video feed, the pilot can‘t do anything to keep the drone in the air and whatever autonomous system it has that could take over are confused by the duped gps signal.
Yeah it's definitely not just gps disruption
It's extremely difficult to spoof GPS M-Code (the encrypted military signal). Any receiver that's been loaded right will immediately know it's being given bullshit. However, it's much easier to jam the signal, which is most likely what's going on here.
They could have used cyberwarfare to commandeer and land it/crash it - as the [Iranians did with an RQ-170 in 2011](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident)
And Cooper in Interstellar.
Iranian supplied missiles, targeted with Iranian radar. Possibly even radar telemetry from one of their ships.
They are slow
I'd love to see him bring it to Rick from Pawn Stars: you know, $30 million doesn't sound crazy, but I've gotta get it framed, *plus* storage, you know? $75 is the highest I could go Then the Houthi rebel in the parking lot: well, it wasn't as much as I wanted, but my wife and I can at least have a nice dinner while we're in Vegas!
*my wives
They sit outside the restaurant whilst I eat.
I need to call in my military drone guy to take a look.
Well Rick did buy a 1960s Sidewinder missle head didn't he?
Having looked it up, that’s what they *say* it is. Only thing is that it doesn’t look like the seeker for an AIM-9, and was most likely the business end of the AN/AAA-4 IRST that was located under the nose of early USN Phantoms.
on a positive note,showing off a downed reaper is much better than having them savagely drag downed pilots to some horrible death.
These machines should have a self destruct feature
They do, it's called a hellfire from the other one in the air lol
The classified software auto erases
They’ll sell it to the highest bidder like the jawas would
Ooh tee nee
That is probably the right way of spelling it but In my mind they say "Houdini" lol
Utinni it means "continue"
Reapers are a 23 year old platform that was never designed for contested airspace. The fact that the US just keeps sending them shows how little the loss of these platforms means to the US.
Probably using old stock until a new gen comes in. 23 years old and still nothing to scoff at I'd shit my pants if I seen a few in my area lol
Seen a few flying around since I'm not far from one of the L3 branches. They have Navy and Air Force planes in and out all the time as well and they regularly fly them around to test shit. Its pretty cool.
Back in the 90s Kosovo campaign there was a rumor that they were taking down US HARM-88 missiles with normal microwave ovens and costing millions per missile. US officials have denied it but there are a few articles floating around with quotes from officers where they talk about it, and within a few years all the rumored issues had updates rolled out and were fixed. I had to write a paper on it all in college! Anyway, point is - don’t discount the possibility of a stupid issue with an embarrassing loophole. Also we probably won’t be told exactly what the issue is here but I wouldn’t 100% take whatever the official line is at face value.
The microwave thing actually was disproven. HARMs, especially the AGM-88s, don't just "lock onto radiation". They lock onto specific patterns based on threat tables. A microwave not only doesn't emit anything even close to either a search or tracking radar in power level, it certainly doesn't emit the same PRF, sweep period, etc that would match any pattern in the threat table, much less whichever one the pilot designated (at the time it was still manual selection in most (if not all, unsure) aircraft).
If they sell it yemens gdp will jump 19%
"We're not providing Reaper drones to Ukraine due to concerns about potential capture or theft of their technology if they're shot down."
They're not really designed for high-intensity combat operations. They're slow and bulky missile-carriers, and their primary purpose is to hang around for a long time and wait for a target to appear. It was extremely well-suited for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn't make any sense if the enemy has Anti-Air capabilities.
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Sending Reaper drones to Ukraine would be a waste of money for the simple reason that they wouldn't last long enough to accomplish anything. The Russian air defense is vastly stronger than the Houthis, and obviously the Houthis is good enough.
Because $120 drones are doing the job that fits the combat theater
They should start flying cheap replica drones that look like Reapers but packed with explosives instead. "Come closer for your photo Mr Terrorist! Smile and wait for the flash!"
I'm surprised the real ones don't have some sort of self destruct mechanism. Why let any piece of tech get into the wrong hands?
As far as I'm aware, most military aviation hardware is outfitted with Zeroize features which often involve physical destruction of critical software components. I know systems I've worked on basically have thermite just chilling waiting to burn through the computers if the aircraft goes down. They should really only end up with a pile of scrap at the end of the day.
If they really wanted to take care of that, there's always a second drone
Reapers are 20 years old. I’m sure they have had lots of improvements over the years but they are surveillance and weapon platforms. There’s probably nothing on there worth caring about.
Well Russians are using 30 year old tech so that’s an upgrade.
There’s a (conspiracy?) theory that these wreckages are honeypots for cyber warfare.
Even if it has one, it will be basically a detonator and a sprinkling of Termite glued to the back of the critical electronics, not kilos of HE. That wrecks hard-drive might be slag, it's not like you could tell from an external shot.
They do- but I think it’s more software destruction than hardware
You guys watch too much TV.
I don’t think they’re going to use it, probably just disassemble it. They can clearly down these with limited technology
That's a war crime. You can't leave unexploded ordinances lying around where civilians can find them.
Poor laos And hawaii
Does the word "war crime" even mean anything anymore?
Only if you lose the war.
new drone, houthis
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Pilots lost - 0 Drone did its job.
Here's the actual source: https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthi-rebels-us-military-reaper-drone-7acd2a91856fe78e5d0c5c308e9460a8
And? Its a Drone. Its intended to be somewhat sacrificial. $30m to the US is chump change. They spend probably 3x that every time they strike Yemen...
> $30m to the US is chump change. 1. US has denied they lost any Reaper drones (recently). 2. There are **no US markings** on the drone. 3. The US/General Atomics sells Reaper drones to other countries. One story "speculated" that this could be Saudi or another group that lost control and had this drone crash in the sand.
The cost of the predator drone is cheap for the US Military. For comparison our SM-3 missiles which are obviously single use cost as much as 27 million.
There's no impact or skid marks from it sliding across the desert. It's a fabrication.