I don't see how drones don't make all conflicts into WW1. 100 Billion dollars buys about 3.3 million Shaheds assuming the manufacturing is not made more efficient. There are many questions on whether its possible to spend 100 billion dollars on Shaheds, or launch all of them. But this is more than enough to destroy any logistics and transportation infrastructure necessary for a ground invasion.

There are many many countries who can afford 100 billion dollars for stored military equipment that has a long shelf life. The US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of about 10k per shell.

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andrewflnr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think that what makes it not WWI is that not even trenches really save you from precision munitions.

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2001zhaozhao 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From my extremely uneducated point of view it seems like that is true and probably what is already happening in Ukraine. However, at some point robots might be able to take and hold ground, and maybe they can be designed to require only decentralized, automated infrastructure to operate that is hard to strike economically even with drones. At that point, may the side with the most robots win.

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Cpoll 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> US makes ~50k artillery shells a month at a cost of about 10k per shell.

50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense budget.

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rdtsc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Now imagine for the same $10k cost making a cruise missile, instead. This is close to what a Shahed is -- the estimate is $20k-$50k / unit, so close enough.

This is bonkers. Countries can now afford for the same cost * to make not a 10-20 mile range artillery shell, but a 1500 mile effective range cruise missile.

* Defense costs are "fake" to a large degree. A lot of that is really corruption with money flowing from the taxpayers to the arms manufacturers, but still if we go by the numbers...

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pyuser583 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are fake in the sense individual items are listed as having costs that are not accurate.

But really the defense deals are very complicated, and not based around buying x number of items.

You’re making a not well-formed query. How much is a shell?

Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand.

	▲	rdtsc 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand. The shells are already made by the 10 and 100s of thousands, Shaheds are also not a research project, so either one is in amortized serial production now. What I meant is that a $10k shell doesn't cost that much. Russians are making the equivalent artillery shells for an _order_ of magnitude less for around $1k. A lot of defense costs are just overinflated simply because they can be. The government is spending taxpayer money, it's not really coming from the politicians' pockets. If the kickbacks are just right, they may in fact flow back into the politicians pockets.

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fpoling 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. So drones are effective at destroying big stationary civilian infrastructure and much less at long distance strikes at military targets. Russia's inability to destroy Ukrainian aviation is a good example.

But then with solar and batteries civilian infrastructure becomes much more resilient against drone strikes.

	▲	rdtsc an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. It's true but they are so cheap that launching a whole bunch and/or improving them incrementally is possible. Yeah they are for stationary targets mostly, for sure. And of course their sounds and relatively low speed does make them somewhat easier to shoot down with short range AA guns and can have automated acoustic early warning system (it's like a flying lawnmower or chainsaw).