Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

The Bolt-M from Anduril is, David Hambling explains, a high-end American take on the hordes of FPV kamikaze drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia:

In Ukraine, such drones are often assembled at kitchen tables from commercial components from China. Though unsophisticated, they are efficient engines of destruction, and at around $500 apiece are destroying tanks, artillery, trucks and foxholes at a high rate.

[…]

While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare.

[…]

An Anduril spokesman told Breaking Defense that “In round numbers, typical Bolt configurations are in the low tens of thousands of dollars,” depending on the exact payload and configuration.

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

[…]

Ukrainian journal Defence Express was quick to criticize the Bolt-M, stating that, like other American designs, it fails to incorporate the key lesson of FPV warfare “they are, first of all, cheap and produced at scale.” Instead they suggest the design might be adapted into a reusable, AI-enabled light bomber for conditions of intense jamming.

Comments

  1. Phileas Frogg says:

    Perhaps it was the influx of so many Germans into our society, or a result of our funding and investment structures, but America today seems incapable of taking the, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to get the job done,” approach when it comes to weapon design.

    America’s rivals don’t seem to suffer from this problem at anywhere near the same rate. Maybe our ruling class is just too myopic and focused on capital over manufacturing…but that would be to engage in an unfair ethnic stereotype…

  2. Sneed says:

    4 of 5 Slavic homebrew FPVs miss easy targets on a good day. Few have thermal cameras, encryption, safe fuzes, or jamming resistant radios. Manual piloting prevents swarming and ensures if the pilot team dies the whole unit is screwed.

    IOW, they’re junk. What Western soldier would want to carry 5x the amount of junk when he could get something which reliably does what it says on the label?

  3. T. Beholder says:

    America today seems incapable of taking the, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to get the job done,” approach when it comes to weapon design.

    IMO it’s much simpler. That’s a subset of the “bogus metrics” problem.

    The product usually is not selected for military purpose, but for bragging and money washing purpose. They may sneak in good old Pentagon Pricing for nuts and bolts and toilet seats, but they need to somehow justify the price at the big picture level.

    If so, an acceptable for the bureaucrats system should have a higher-than-ever number in some parameter, no matter how pointless in practice. Or it should have some gimmick that makes the semi-literate journalists go ZOMG. Preferably both.

  4. Spin Drift says:

    Ok, had student engineers design an autonomous drone that could transport 5kg 15 klicks by entering GPS coordinates to get to the vicinity and then use lidar and thermal sensors to home in and deliver to target. It was set and forget delivery for UPS/Amazon packages. Auto return to preset coordinates. Drone cost of under $2000. Double the range for one way trip. $20,000 can get 10 of these to arrive at a single area. 100 lb of C4 is a tight local. Terrorists rejoice. Imagine what this would do at the Rose Bowl. This uses all off the shelf parts.

    It’s what nightmares are made of.

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