"Ukraine's homegrown drones have become increasingly lethal, critical tools in war with Russia" https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-fedorov-drones-war-rus...
"Poland turns to Ukraine for drone warfare expertise after Russian weapons enter airspace" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/poland-turns-to-ukraine-f...
The US needs Ukraine to exist and not be annexed by Russia.
I like to think that there is core of career public servants inside the US government who take their jobs seriously and they perform it well. Whether decision makers take their inputs into account is a different matter.
That could have been taken for granted in every administration before this one.
2. If that's the case, why is the US trying to invest heavily into AI as well if we learned from Ukraine that AI controlled drones are shittier than human controlled drones?
Call me an idealist, but I think the priority in this conflict should be their sovereignty and the well being of the people over there. Otherwise it's just weird.
there is literally nobody in America who nurses that type of pride, quite the opposite, Americans have been unusually open to integrating foreign ideas from the beginning.
I mean I literally worked with a guy who got annoyed at the harmonized power cord I bought because it used IEC wire colors and "This is America where we use American wire colors, not that European shit. I taped the leads red white and blue!"
A clear example is NATO’s struggle to respond to Russian drone incursions. Recently, over 20 drones were launched into Polish airspace—yet only four were intercepted, at a cost of millions of dollars. The remainder crashed across Polish territory, highlighting serious gaps in air defense systems.
I think NATO is more important now than it has been in decades.
Instead of just shutting down, they dropped all their early supporters and pivoted to US military contracts. Their website is still full of out dated technology. Reading this headline is no surprise to me.
Also missiles already use AI to know where they are, so I'm skeptical that the headline is true.
It's materially different than "Generative AI" which is the current trend of AI hype, which is what I think the "AI" in the title is referring to.
> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.
So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.
> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.
So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.
I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.
In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.
says who? the US military is completely fine with mistakenly killing civilians
what if it misses a few locations where they are not?
(Origin works for me as well.)
What is according to your estimates the ratio for research funding for human-controlled and AI-controlled weapons in the US nowadays?
> fine with
In military theater it’s an important distinction.
But really, you just wanted to post a comment trashing the US. It didn’t add to the conversation.
Trump said that Russia is a paper tiger/bear, but Russia exposed that the West/EU is just as incompetent and NATO is basically useless without the support of the USA which is questionable. But I'm sure 100% NATO will get a chance to prove its worth, it will be interesting to see if it can meet the coming challenges.
I just said NATO is really important at the moment. It's a tool - an important tool - but that doesn't mean it's being wielded correctly. Is that the fault of the hammer or the fault of the Trump supporter holding it?
:)
I understand your skepticism, but here is an interview from April 2025 with the founder of VYRIY, a Ukrainian drone company: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/vyriy-founder-compares-accura... According to him, Russian drones are far superior. "In terms of [Ukrainian drone vs Russian drone] quality, well, like 10% vs. 80%. It’s not even comparable,” Oleksii Babenko sums up.
Also 99.99% chance the guy was making a joke.
Where did that number come from?
> Also 99.99% chance the guy was making a joke.
If you have no idea who this person is how can you even begin to make such an assumption? You are in fact 100% wrong.
Or perhaps an AI with a tactics/strategy prompt that watches the statuses/locations of several drones and coordinates their actions to achieve an overall objective? Does that sound like a military application that the military could be working on?
So these particular "AI weapons" would appear to be munitions.