Eight Newly Produced MQ-9 Reaper Drones Destroyed in Iranian Strike

drcongo

That website doesn't seem to have that story on it.

BlackRabbit1

Wiping out multi-million military equipment with basically a waste pipe that has attached wings...

wongarsu

FTA: 'the firm reported in early June: “Between parts in stock for new builds, and company-owned Reapers with some number of flight hours on them, there are less than 10 total ‘new’ MQ-9As available to any customers anywhere in the world.” The destruction of eight of these new aircraft thus likely accounts for the United States’ entire reserve of its most critical unmanned aircraft type'

scanny

It would be interesting to get a breakdown of what goes into something like the MQ-9, given they were introduced back in 2007 I wonder how difficult it would be to spin up a replacement using more COTS tech to lower the price and lead time for new builds. I presume a lot goes into the satellite comms system, dealing with jamming, and certifying anything that flies. In my complete ignorance I would presume a prop-driven unmanned aircraft built for loitering and dropping farily common ordnance with a quality optical package should be something that a bunch of defence companies could roll out quickly for the pentagon?

kelseyfrog

Every Reaper destroyed is a Reaper reordered. Outcomes like these ensure the military's future as a jobs program.

jmyeet

Whatever your opinions on the war itself, this has been a fascinating exercise in how a small regional power has militarily defeated the global hegemon relatively cheaply (ie with a military budgets 1% of the size). Oh and "precision strikes" in this article is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this article. That means "targeted assassinations" and has done ever since the Obama administration [1][2]. Now these Reapers were lost on the ground, which points to Iran having access to significant intelligence, likely near real time satellite imagery and it's widely suspected this comes from Russia. But some ~30 of these Reapers have alsoo been lost in the air. That's significant too because the IRGC has developed relatively cheap "loitering" air defense munitions that are basically a jet engine atgtached to a missile. In some variants the missile has a parachute so it can be recovered and reused if it doesn't attack a target. And they seemingly can attack Reapers that are relatively slow (~300mph) but fly relatively high (~50,000 feet). The US military has simply never had to deal with this previously. This seems to be enough of a threat that the US cannot freely operate aircraft in Iranian airspace for fear of being shot down. The US being unable to suppress air defense is also a new development. There are lots of signals that various munitions are running critically low, particularly missiles such as Tomahawks and the various munitions for missile interceptros (eg THAAD, Patriot). The military industrial complex exists to transfer government wealth to private hands. Producing weapons is secondary and this war has exposed just how bad it is at it. Why? Because using $1-4M interceptors to shoot down a $20k drone that can be produced in the thousands isn't sustainable. Production lines seemingly cannot be ramped up and the stockpiles already expended will take years to replenish. This war is going to be written about as a turning point in history (IMHO). It may well mark the beginning of the end of American Empire that has been on steroids since 1945. But empires die slowly (and violently). [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-i... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

ChrisArchitect

Please update link to story: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/iranian-strike-eig...