US ‘Drone Dominance Program’ Doomed by Pentagon’s Neo-Luddism, MIC Profiteering
$31 million US MQ-9 Reaper drone lies in a desert in Marib, Yemen after being shot down by Houthi air defenses.
Problems with the US military’s Drone Dominance initiative stem from a broad assortment of issues, the biggest of which is a “longstanding departmental cultural and institutional lethargy and a kind of neo-Luddism inside the Pentagon,” Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski, a former DoD analyst herself, told Sputnik.Commenting on reports of severe delays in drone procurement, even of the modest ~200k+ target set by the Pentagon through 2027, Kwiatkowski predicted that the program’s costs will continue to “rise, and its mission only partially and very slowly succeed, always behind the global rate of advancement, until the US imperial defense paradigm is abandoned for a real defensive approach.”The DDP “is just more old-think applied to the pre-existing acquisition and operational complex, and freedom to innovate is not only unlikely, but already too late,” she believes.
MilitaryTrump Imposes Tariffs on Drones and Drone Components14 August, 04:25 GMTOne key problem? The types of drones that have proven most effectively in modern warfare are cheap, which means “they are not profitable.”“Cheap, smart, AI-facilitated ammunition produced en masse, designed to be expendable and not to be maintained/repaired, face a system where profit drives innovation…where experimentation is out of favor, and where people that know what they must do are shut down by generals and admirals at the top who are beholden to the Military Industrial and Congressional Complex.”This includes everything from funding decisions based on congressional districting, to mandates for minorities or women-owned businesses’ use under federal subcontracting regulations.The military’s drone warfare paradigm is trapped in “90s and 2000s technology and attitudes” of costly, large, reusable fixed-wing platforms that carry out their missions and return to base, not expendable munitions.
US-Israel War on IranIranian Army Says Its Drones Targeted US Military Bases in Bahrain, Jordan — Reports24 July, 09:04 GMT
