It's impressive how much hardware they've been able to develop.<p>Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.<p>They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".<p>We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-with-a-small-bizjet-engine-might-simulate-5th-generation-fighters-for-cheap" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-w...</a>
Is Anduril really that good? I am trying to figure out what is the potential of Anduril is. Their first phase product was in observability towers for border protection, then they made drone-ramming drones and now unmanned fighter jets.<p>I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.<p>Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?
Reading the comments here is giving me the disturbing realization that the war in Ukraine is extremely valuable to the US because the US gets to collect immense amounts of data to inform perspectives on how modern technology is revolutionizing warfare with minimal risk to American troops. And that's with technology in the hands of an extremely motivated ally against one of our top rivals. This opportunity doesn't come very often, and I can imagine there are a lot of parties interested in it persisting at least until the value in the observational data starts to tail off. Along with other concerns, this may be a reason to parcel out exactly what tech gets given to Ukraine at which times.
I'm hearing that dogfighting is a thing of the past because weapons systems operate at large distances anymore. Drones should do (at least?) three things well: dog fight, since they can make decisions in an instant and tolerate higher g-forces than a human can; prevent a human death if they get shot down; and be smaller/lighter/carry more/have greater range because they're not designed around carrying a pilot.<p>Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
This is for the next phase of the project that involves building flying prototypes. Later stages include mass production which could go to a Boeing or Lockheed. I wonder how much of the decision to give this to a smaller player is based on a desire to maintain diversity among defense contractors and the competitive advantages that come with.<p>In other words the US Military continues to be a successful centrally planned socio-capitlaist organization.
Go find any GUR operator in Ukraine and ask them what they think of Anduril<p>Their proprietary controller doesn’t work with TAK or qgc and they keep everything closed with no interop with the actual FPV or other systems in use daily<p>Unusable in actual war
Why General Atomics? They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted. They make the Predator and other current UAVs, which are all expensive and uninteresting:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_Systems" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...</a><p>In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.
I like Anduril, but it seems that their stuff is overcomplicated and expensive compared to what we see on the battlefield in Ukraine where hundreds of drones are downed daily.<p>An unmanned fighter jet is a whole different ball game for them.
I guess autonomous platforms are exciting to defense procurement and war planners because they can use them much more aggressively in theatre without risking expensive pilots. It's hard not to think of the recent reporting on the "Lavender" AI targeting system and how these two ideas combined will lead to more indiscriminate killing of civilians. What's the calculus for human American pilot lives to collateral civilian lives? 5:1 or 40:1?
Here's a fun thought.<p>You might disagree with the SJW fork attack on nix. But if you also disagree with the idea of Haskell powered death drones blowing up innocent little baby humans, then you might have incentive to support - or at least loudly ignore - the forking / sabotage / leftist troll op.<p>Me, I will take an Even More aggressive track: I honestly hope this turmoil leads to a better version of the nix syntax. Perhaps something much cleaner: A YAML based syntax that eliminates curly braces and the need for many nix functions.<p>Yes, I'm being a little evil >:]
They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The <i>vast</i> majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and an oldschool drone driven by a pilot in a trailer will be minimal.<p>And many old fighter jets retire as target drones, going on to fly unmanned for perhaps decades. New purpose-build designs might have lower operating costs but their purchase price will always be higher than slapping radio controls onto already-purchased jets.
It's hard to believe, but the times of "If I won't do it, someone else will." are back and it seems people forgot the lesson. It is my honest opinion that anyone who works on such weapons is a monster.<p>3 years ago this topic would be full of people protesting this. Pointing out the inhumanity, the potential for abuse, the hypocrisy, the dangers of desensitizing war. Censorship changed the game entirely.
How does a company like Anduril come out of nowhere to scale so fast, get so much money, and so many contracts in a very entrenched field of government defense contracts? Yes, they're bringing modern industry experience to these things, but I don't see that as enough to break through all the barriers that are there. How have they done it?
Man, Anduril must be spending a fortune on advertising right now. They've been on top of HN a few times recently and I've seen a bunch of advertorials about them popping up on FB.
I find it remarkable how the readers of this site are at the same time “worried about LLMs”, and totally enthusiastic towards what will inevitably become a no-human-in-the-loop Skynet. Sure, we’ll all get smashed with drones if we stop paying taxes or otherwise disobey, but at least our LLMs won’t accidentally praise Hitler or something.
If you haven't read Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez, it's quite good (especially the audio book) and is related to unmanned killing drones. Near future sci-fi.
Even though I never heard about Anduril before, this is now the second time in a day that I 'hear' about it.<p>The first time was a post about the latest Mark Rober video 'promoting' Anduril/military technology to a child/teen audience.<p><a href="https://lemmy.ca/post/19761360" rel="nofollow">https://lemmy.ca/post/19761360</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU</a>
The problem you have, dear Americans is called MIC.
Just quoting one of your presidents:
>“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”<p>So many wars for profit. History knows best that there is no free lunch.
But I suppose consuming propaganda without a critical thinking and effort for facts is good for the business.
By the way Zala Aero is the current leader in this space.
That's why Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure.