"Hugh Hewitt interviews tech guy" Topic

HH: Have you noted in both the Ukraine War and the Israeli War on seven fronts any particular innovation that you sit up and say wow, we need to do that at Palantir or in the United States?

SS: Well, the most important, there's probably two observations I'd offer you. The first is that the drone obsolescence life cycle in Ukraine is something like two to six weeks. So that tells you that it's not actually what is your capability today. It doesn't matter how exquisite it is if you can't change it. So we need to be measuring and practicing the first derivative of how quickly can we adapt our capabilities to the changing battlespace so that our capabilities are still relevant and still lethal. And that is a big mind shift. We thought, well, we can develop exquisite things, we can put them on the shelf, and they'll be just as exquisite and just as useful ten years from now. That world is gone. The second major lesson, people love to say isn't it amazing what the Ukrainians did. Despite not having a navy, they sunk half the Russian Black Sea fleet. And I think they've got it backwards. It's because they didn't have a navy, they were able to come up with entirely different force concepts that sunk half the Black Sea fleet.

link

The speed at which drones have evolved has been very fast. It does remind me of the development of the airplane in WWI. Every couple of months there was a new/improved plane to counter what the other side just built. We are seeing the same kind of thing with drone and counter drone operations and technology.

Mass is it's own quantity.
Most drones are made in Communist China.

Can a US Navy aircraft carrier group take out 10,000 drones? 100,000 drones, or a million drones that are attacking all at once? How many little drones can they put on a man made island and launch with a range of ten miles? They only have to go one way. Even carrying a small hand grenade could be a problem if you fly a few into the hanger deck.

Bunkermeister

Several threads have been posted in the past few months on TMP. I have commented several times on them. Examples were on drones that failed to win military contracts being transferred. So the S is not behind in done useage.
Decades ag the military ordered that no further use would be allowed for Chinese made thumb drives and other types of storage devices.
Now they are talking about banning the use of Chinese made drones by all levels of government agencies. I consider this a waste since most controllers are bought at common electronics stores.

One last thing is that most of the drones making a fuss over the NE had FAA approved running lights. Secret drones would not have that.

The Black Sea Fleet almost certainly sunk because of US assistance and intel. Because they didn't have a navy, they thought differently? Maybe, but not without help, is my guess, especially with targeting data.

I think it is also a mistake to think the US has been sitting around waiting for China and some others to fly past us in drone tech. I wonder how their laser weapons are coming along? We even designed our carriers with laser mounts while the weapons are still in development. The fact that we don't tell pundits all about our capacity does not mean we must have fallen far behind. The world's largest economy and military… has a few secrets.

Hope so, Tort!

Drones have created an inflection point like Whitehead Torpedoes in the 1800s. New tactics and weapons are evolving to deal with them. We live in interesting times.

Yes! The evolution of battleship guns and fire control, armor and shell penetration, big gun breech development, the end of sails included on steam warships, engines, engineering officers, turrets, steel, many more.

The torpedo resulted in the torpedo boat, with which smaller powers might threaten large ship navies, which then brought torpedo boat destroyers or destroyers as we know them now. In 40 years, modern navies were born…except for airpower, radar and nuclear propulsion. Sail was over, wooden ships gone.