The Failure of American Drones, Jet Packs and the Bomber-Missle-Gap
This week's big story covers how US startups thought they would get the battle testing needed in Ukraine to be able to win big military contracts, only to be replaced by Chinese made drones.
Following a century long obsession with Jet Packs, DARPA is now close to an electronic flight option carrying a single person in and out of complex environments.
But first, Roberto J. González’s comments on the contemporary bomber-missile-gap:
The Big Story
The Hopes and Failures of American Drones in Ukraine
At first, it looked like the war in Ukraine was the perfect opportunity for US drone startups. It could have been the battle test they needed to be able to get the big military contracts. At the beginning of the war, Silicon Valley startups sent hundreds of their best drones to Ukraine to help fight the Russians.
In the beginning, the Ukrainians gladly accepted all the help they could get. But as it soon turned out, most small drones from US startups failed to perform in combat — they were glitchy and fragile in an electronic warfare context; they often couldn’t perform or even take off: they lost signal, fell out of the sky, they couldn’t carry heavy payload, and they were difficult to repair.
Ukraine instead found ways to get tens of thousands of drones as well as drone parts from China. These drones are not only more reliable, but they also come at lower price points - which is crucial since drones often just survive one flight and the Ukrainian forces are burning through about 10,000 drones a month. A homegrown drone lands at around $400 and an off-the-shelf Chinese drone, primarilyfrom SZ DJI Technology, at around $1000.
The American drone startups have raised 2.5 billion dollars in the past 24 months and without either the battle test or the hobbyist market, which China dominates, they will need to rethink what they are building.
Illustration of the inexpensive FPV (first-person view) drone, the most potent weapons in Ukraine.
Source: Reuters, retrieved on 25/04/2024.
Jet Packs and Pentagon’s Strive to Fly
In the 1967 film Thunderball James Bond escapes a scene by flying away from his enemies using the rocket belt. The inspiration for this scene came from the idea of flying warfighters, which has been a fixture of the American imagination since the early 1900s. In the 1960s several of these technologies were tested such as the Jet Belt, the two-man “POGO” flying platform, and the two-man “flying Jeep”. The development was funded by the military.
Back then, the results were too noisy, expensive and tactically underwhelming, but DARPA is now close to something that might work - in collaboration with five companies, they are developing electric flight options that are supposed to help take elite troops on complex missions.
The vision is a lightweight one-man flight system capable of operating at low to medium altitudes and ranges of up to five kilometres. These types of systems will make individual troops capable of independent flight without requiring a lift from transport aircraft to reach their target, enabling them to get a single US service member into and out of a contested environment quickly and quietly, without alerting potential enemies.
Bell aircraft engineer Harold Graham demonstrating the “Rocket Belt.” Source: Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images, retrieved from Fast Company on 25/04/2024.
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