task0778
Diamond Member
For the most part we’re still shooting down $20,000 Shaheds (the cheap-ass $20k drones on the far right corner) with multi-million-dollar missiles. But that is about to change. Enter some new startup companies that are changing the face of war.
A few weeks back an Iranian Shahed drone slammed into an AWS data center here. That same week a drone strike shut down one of Abu Dhabi’s largest oil refineries.
Iran’s Shahed is the poster boy for this new kind of war. Since the conflict kicked off the UAE alone intercepted over 2,250 of them.
The Shahed is the latest dot on the most important chart in modern defense: the cost-per-kill curve. But some US startup companies are doing something about that:
CX2 (US drone co) builds jamming systems to take out enemy targets.
The electromagnetic spectrum is the invisible ocean of radio waves every drone and missile swims in. Drones go dark the moment they get jammed. Their video links drop, and the drone crashes into a ditch.
Likewise you can “spoof” million-dollar missiles. During the early days of the Ukraine war US-made missiles missed their targets 90% of the time because of jamming.
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Seeker is Mara’s (another US drone co) first interceptor drone. It destroys incoming drones by crashing into them. It costs only a few thousand dollars and is small enough that two soldiers can carry dozens of them in a backpack.
Seeker has the potential to flip America’s cost asymmetry disadvantage on its head.
Without giving exact figures, it’s FAR cheaper than a Shahed.
Mara’s Spotter system looks like an “orb” and uses built-in cameras and a listening system to detect threats. It sits there listening for the whir of incoming drones.
When Spotter detects a threat it instantly triggers an army of Seeker interceptors to attack. Seekers come packed like cheap ice pops, 48 in a bunch.
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The big primes like Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing won’t disappear. They will be slowly eaten alive by a new generation of founder-led companies that fundamentally care more and move 10X faster.
We’re still early in this transition. Defense startups captured just 1% of Pentagon contracts last year. And there’s room for both startups and the primes. F-35s and Neros’s kamikaze drones aren’t competing for the same job.
But the decisive weapon is no longer the most expensive system. It’s the cheapest one you can make in the biggest numbers.
Problem: the Chinese are way ahead of us in this area.
Olaf is a 20-year old kid who's running one of these drone companies. He's candid about how far ahead China is in drones. Neros’s best onboard camera looks, in Olaf’s own words, “like a 1980s TV.” The Chinese equivalent is crystal-clear and 10 years ahead.
Why such a big gap? Roughly 100,000 people are working on AI drones in China. In America the number is closer to 1,000. In Shenzhen you can buy any drone part you want in hours. Building a drone in America without Chinese parts is almost impossible. We need to do something about that with our DoD dollars.
