Most hardware companies ship a product and then defend it for five years We change ours every month A user tells us something broke or something's missing. If we take it, it's in the product within thirty days. No release cycle, no block upgrade, no committee That's not a process we invented. It's what happens when the engineers are close enough to the people using the thing that nobody needs a meeting 🍒

Ukraine underestimated the threat posed by Russia's jet-powered Shaheds, says Roman Kostenko, secretary of parliament's national security committee. Ukraine is scaling domestically produced surface-to-air missiles, developing interceptor drones and adapting aircraft against the faster targets. Kostenko said a shortage of AIM-9 air-to-air missiles means Ukrainian pilots sometimes engage the drones with onboard guns at close range, risking damage to their aircraft from debris. #Ukraine

The fly controls an FPV drone in simulation, keeping it airborne at low altitude and actively dodging any obstacles it sees

❗️The Russians have started installing machine-gun positions directly on logistics trucks to protect them from drone attacks.

❗️A Ukrainian interceptor drone landed on top of a Russian Gerbera, flew along with it for some time, and then remotely detonated, destroying the target.

Drone defense is 100x more valuable to the United States than drone production. Much has been made of the Army ordering the disbandment of a Ukrainian-focused, lessons-learned drone battalion. While people are right to question the cessation of learning from the modern battlefield and whether that is a wise calculation, it is undeniable that the political employability of the modern drone fight is very low for the United States. What do I mean by political employability? You can have all the right technical solutions in the world, but if they are not politically employable and you can never functionally use them, it’s a wasted investment on behalf of the American taxpayer and a waste of time for our troops. The likelihood of America choosing to engage in a fight like Ukraine’s is hard to imagine. Operating in an environment where we lose 200+ Americans a day to drones is not a reality the American people are ever going to accept or underwrite. We will nuke our adversary before that happens, which is itself almost impossible to imagine. That is precisely why it is even harder to imagine America engaging in a Ukrainian-style, backs-against-the-wall fight, because under those circumstances, the impossible outcome becomes increasingly probable. However, the Army’s “back-to-basics approach” seems equally questionable. I don’t believe there is a “back to basics” approach for our military, because five years from now, I genuinely question the political employability of all conventional forces, across all branches. It is a real question whether forward-deployed forces will be considered political assets rather than political liabilities. With our current capability sets of high-cost, exquisite, low-depth munitions, I increasingly see them only as liabilities. As the United States ostensibly works to rebuild credible deterrence, Iran is currently teaching us that under protracted circumstances, the United States is functionally and credibly deterred. That fact is yielding poor outcomes that are not acceptable to me or to the American people. In the world that is to come, we have to be able to play a near-flawless defense over years before we can even think about playing a productive offense for months. That goes for abroad as well as at home. That means the name of the game for the United States is developing a new “back to basics” approach. The critical building block is low-cost drone and ballistic missile defense. Layered on top of that are low-cost, fully autonomous offensive systems. Notice the themes: low-cost and autonomous. Protecting people from the battlefield by removing them from the battlefield. The military and homeland defense we need is not what we have now. We can do this, but it requires a rapid departure from what we’re doing and the way we are doing it. We just crossed $40 trillion in debt. It’s time for hard and necessary decisions to be made in the Pentagon and in Congress: get rid of the hardware and thought philosophy that have not helped us win the last 30 years of war, and start acquiring politically employable hardware and developing the thought philosophy that will help us actually deter war over the next 30 years.