> The Defense Innovation Unit notice called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapons payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying with a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles—or 8,000 nautical miles on a one-way strike mission—while executing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the US military

I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.

The cheap Iranian and Ukrainian drones these are increasingly competing with are only delivering 50-100kg of payload - which is plenty to blow shit up, and doesn't require a big, expensive, reusable airframe.

Yeah, it's about requirements. The Ukraine war has shown that fast-iterating MVPs are better in many battlefield situations. The saying that militaries end up preparing for the prior war instead of the next, comes to mind.

> I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.

Partly, but I think there also is a feedback loop. Reapers are expensive, so they must reliably reach their targets. That makes them more expensive (need to be faster, more reliable, less visible on radar, etc), so fewer get ordered, so they must get even more powerful and reliable. That makes them more expensive, etc.

Also, being very expensive, you want them to be able to return home after a mission. That again increases weight, costs.

Result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper says only 575 got built over a period of about 20 years. In comparison, the USA built about 96,000 aircraft in 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...), reaching that total in about two days.

While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter. Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.

A 50-100kg payload is only useful against soft targets if the purpose is to "blow shit up". It is the reason Ukraine needed to develop platforms like Flamingo with a much larger warhead capacity than a cheap drone can carry.

If you look at us military procurement over the past 20 years you will find that many, many projects have been sunk because of this exact reason.

Always fighting the last war. But wait until you see how the next generation of our drones fails in a future war!

Being less flip, the pull quote suggests (per my bias) our drone design is as much influenced by how much shit contractors can sell to put on a drone as it is by tactical needs. The kinds of targets that would require one ton of explosive are fixed sites that have been specifically hardened against attack. You'd hope some modern McArthur would look at the situation and say, "Screw it, we will just go around those sites and bomb the hell out of their supply lines with tiny drones", but what the hell do I know?

In short: War is sell.

There's an ok documentary on a similar situation (A10 Thunder II) on curiosity stream and it explains how politics basically causes problems like this.

So I looked up the specs and found:

- Reapers fly at a "medium" altitude, which is up to about 50,000 feet;

- They can fly up to 300mph;

- Despite being relatively high up they are relatively slow so lots of country have the military capability to shoot them down and have done so. This includes Iran and the Houthis;

- A typical payload is 2x GBU-31 JDAM (1000lb each). The explosive payload is roughly half that but these are relatively cheap (<$50,000) because they're barely-guided gravity bombs;

- They will also have 4x AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which are precision-guided, costs $100k+ each but only has an explosive payload of under 20lb. When people talk about drone assassinations that becccame super-popular in the Obama administration, this is largely what they're talking about;

- You can also skip the JDAMs and just have 8x Hellfires instead.

Now Shahed drones aren't as fast, don't fly as high, aren't as precise and you know they're there (a lot of Hellfire attacks are a surprise). But they're incredibly cheap and they overwhelm missile defences easily just by sheer volume. In fact, we're using $1-4M Patriot interceptors to shoot down $20k drones. Obviously that's not going to scale when Iran can produce thousands a month and the supply lag for Patriots is actually years long. Supplies of certain missile defense munitions are suspected to be critically low already and will take years to replenish.

So where I'm going with all this is that Reapers and Sheheds serve different purposes but however you look at it, a $50M Reaper with $1M+ in munitions is WAY less efficient at deliverying payloads that a swarm of cheap drones, particularly when your enemy has invested a lot in missile defense and your $50M Reaper is vulnerable to air-defense systems from even non-state actors (ie the Houthis).

Put another way, $20k for a 50-100kg payload is incredibly efficient and the US has essentially been forced to evacuate all their Gulf bases because they're completely unable to defend them. Billions in damage has been done to these bases too.

The Reaper just isn't fit for purpose anymore. Use it against a more militarized opponennt (eg Russia, China) and they'll shoot those things down like it was a carnival side show.