Idk, but I have talked to some people in the USAF and the stories I hear are discouraging. Also I hear that the cool US drone startups sent their stuff to Ukraine and were humbled, the FPV kamikaze designs that actually worked best at scale were mostly homebrew by volunteers. Also, in general, I have come to strongly suspect that classified US military R&D programs are wasteful boondoggles just like the nonclassified ones; the tech is probably pretty great in some sense but (a) takes several times longer to develop than SpaceX would take if they ever became a weapons manufacturer and (b) costs orders of magnitude more. Like, Boeing is responsible for some military R&D and also for the atrocious Starliner system. Why should we think they are doing a much better job for the military than they are for NASA?
Your original comment suggested that part of the problem is underinvestment by the US military. Underinvestment is a different problem than defense contractors like Boeing being slow and expensive.
Apart from that, the old defense contractors aren’t the only ones. Anduril seems to work both on drone defense and building drones. Palantir seems to do something drone related as well (but it’s less clear to me what they are doing exactly).
It might be that the key problem isn’t in spending more money but in reducing the bureaucracy and the criteria that the drones need to hit.
Both problems are severe. Not enough money is being spent on drone procurement, and what money is being spent is being spent inefficiently. I make no claim about which is worse.
Idk, but I have talked to some people in the USAF and the stories I hear are discouraging. Also I hear that the cool US drone startups sent their stuff to Ukraine and were humbled, the FPV kamikaze designs that actually worked best at scale were mostly homebrew by volunteers. Also, in general, I have come to strongly suspect that classified US military R&D programs are wasteful boondoggles just like the nonclassified ones; the tech is probably pretty great in some sense but (a) takes several times longer to develop than SpaceX would take if they ever became a weapons manufacturer and (b) costs orders of magnitude more. Like, Boeing is responsible for some military R&D and also for the atrocious Starliner system. Why should we think they are doing a much better job for the military than they are for NASA?
Your original comment suggested that part of the problem is underinvestment by the US military. Underinvestment is a different problem than defense contractors like Boeing being slow and expensive.
Apart from that, the old defense contractors aren’t the only ones. Anduril seems to work both on drone defense and building drones. Palantir seems to do something drone related as well (but it’s less clear to me what they are doing exactly).
It might be that the key problem isn’t in spending more money but in reducing the bureaucracy and the criteria that the drones need to hit.
Both problems are severe. Not enough money is being spent on drone procurement, and what money is being spent is being spent inefficiently. I make no claim about which is worse.