this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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On a side note, the video starts from "America want to buy thousands of drones to counter China as an opportunity for a game changing shift" - this is exactly what underdogs in every arms race ever said as they pushed some jeune ecole plans - and it was basically never right because those "new paradigms" were either cope from the start or the dominating opponent also quick catched the real shift and produced more and better of the new weapons. It's pretty interesting that USA military adopt loser speech and think patterns.
Exactly, if there's some new innovation that's actually effective then everyone will quickly adapt to it.
Especially you can already notice many countries to be very excited by cheap and fairly simple drones successfully used against very expensive vehicles. For example Iran being actually on the forefront of that tech now and embracing it with eagerness (to be fair, Iran had keen interest in drone warfare for years by now, so it's logical). Sure, in case of Russia it is effective because Russia have good military infrastructure, doctrine, logistics and support to base those on, but those still look like some measure of equalizer.
I agree, the drones Iran developed are a really good example of an innovation that's being rapidly adopted now.
If they thought it was that game changing would they really be talking about it?
Why not since everyone know that already. Ukraine war proven that not as much changed in the peer warfare since WW2 as Usians would like when they focused their military on imperializing much weaker states by the aerial warfare, but the mass drone usage is pretty much already acknowledged as the biggest change that came out of that war. And US analysts are probably burned by this since US previously concentrated on big and expensive drones being essentially unmanned planes, like the Reaper for example.
But they do have reasonable hope of this particular tool of warfare to turn to their favour since US is after all pioneer in aerial electronics. What they missed though is one key factor that makes that mass drone warfare effective, it the "mass" keyword, Ukraine, Russia and countries paying attention like Iran all are manufacturing those drones pretty cheap compared to their usefulness, but US MIC will never be able to do that. I mean sure they will make a lot of drones, but not nearly enough and every one of them will be overengineered and also US military will pay for it the usual multiple price.