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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

The US army really doesn’t use enough cheap, small drones. All the drones we use are large and expensive.

Not at all. There are a number of small drones (field launchable by a single person) used for surveillance and delivering kinetic payloads.

This is one of many that are publicly acknowledged

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade

The RQ-11 is a hand launchable drone used by the US (among others) with more than 19k airframes having been delivered.

That says unit cost is $52,914. Not cheap by most standards. Yes, cheap compared to military aircraft, but the interesting changes around doctrine are happening at cheap enough to be disposable.

I think this might be considered disposable by military prices. Missiles, torpedoes etc are very expensive

I am aware that missiles and torpedoes are very expensive. Disposable drones are changing doctrine in ways that more expensive missiles and torpedoes do not.

Isn't that much, much cheaper than most missiles?

Yes. Disposable is different from “cheaper than most missiles”.

Cheaper than a missile, which are launched in the thousands in any operation, without any expectation that one specific missile will do any one specific thing, should be plenty cheap enough to consider each of these drones disposable.

The lived experience in Ukraine makes clear that there is a difference between disposable drones and contemporary missiles.

So you mean cheaper than the disposable missiles as well as the re-useable ones?

I used Polaroid cameras, which had disposable consumables. I find I use modern digital cameras in different ways.

...and that's for the smaller version!

The Switchblade has been a failure in the most recent conflict in Ukraine, the Ukrainians themselves have come up with much better and, more importantly, much cheaper alternatives.

I don't know why you would need "cheap small" drones when the US has the most advanced bombs on the planet.

You don't even need planes to launch them anymore. A HIMARS on the ground is enough and you get 150 km range.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Launched_Small_Diamet...

the main benefit probably lies within a 'saturation attack' aka overwhelming defenses by numbers. cheap drones are a gamechanger

I don’t know. Personel carried cheap disposable drone grenades sound very useful.

CIA is probably teaching the Ukrainians to build cheap, small drones and presumably they're building prototypes in a lab somewhere.

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