Why the US is a paper tiger
And it isn't JUST drones
I published recently about Russian drone technology, with some assertions that you might've regarded as questionable, such as the superiority of Russian drone technology compared to that of the US in the West in general.
DeepSeek, for example, disagrees with me.
United States: Leads in military drone technology with advanced systems like the MQ-9 Reaper (General Atomics) and RQ-4 Global Hawk (Northrop Grumman).
DS insists that Russia "lags", which was certainly the case in 2022.
Once again, we see that LLMs are not very bright. Better to ask a high school student who likes drone war games.
I stand by my assertion-- Russia leads – not just in drones, of course, but in almost all areas of practicable military technology. More on that in another post.
“Practicable” is the key word
As I've said before many times, an LLM is very useful but you have to know how to use it.
You cannot take the correctness of its answers for granted – you have to be willing to revise your queries and interrogate it. The Bot you are dealing with will default to a consensus answer – that is, the general opinion on the Internet, which is of course dominated by Western propaganda.
In other words, you have to force DS to do a "deep" dive- as Bob showed in his special article for coffee buyers ! Do that and you might get something useful.
In this case, DS rates the US highest for advanced systems like the Reaper and Global Hawk, which are hugely expensive, but have their vulnerabilities as the Houthis have shown. DS also mentions Switchblade combat drones, which were supplied to Ukraine and proved to be pretty useless, as the video indicates – despite all the hype and propaganda on the Internet about them being game changers.
Russia is at war; its needs are existential. It was lagging in drone technology (among other areas) in 2022 , But “import substitution” and the exigencies of the battlefield led to Russia turning to small, private companies run by outside-the-box tech geniuses, of video gamers, to supply what they needed. The government demanded results which the big defense companies could not deliver.
The big defense companies could not object,
In the US, it is the government that cannot say no. It is government by the corporations, for the corporations, of the corporations. Human rights in the US are not granted, they are bought.
Deindustrialized and financialized, the US doesn’t want cheap, practical combat systems developed by private contractors, as is the case in Russia. They want expensive stuff – the more expensive the better, which yields the best returns on capital, no matter how useless.
Returns on capital are basically a kind of kickback. Having worked in this industry I should know. If there is a competition or say a fighter jet, it is not the best and most appropriate weapon system that wins--it is the one with the best returns on capital for the investor caste. That means the most technologically "advanced" , even if inoperable or unnecessary.
What do all these systems have in common besides enormous price tags—unnecessary advanced but not fully developed technology. Forget something that just works.
And don’t think about the fact that all of these systems are obsolete before introduction — and their successors too!
How can people be so stupid?
An underlying problem is the US educational system, which, unlike the Russian system, does not emphasize technical education. It is a certification system, which certifies not competence but your social class. It does not teach you to DO anything. Russia turns out engineers: the US turns out MBAs. Americans are educated to be stupid.
As you can see, the Russians have the best drone tech in the world augmented by simple but advanced electronics, refined, glitch-free software, innovative networking technologies, and new concepts.
But drones are just one of many new weapons in which they are achieving breakthroughs.
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Ichi is very clean. He grooms a lot. And every morning he comes and sits on my chest and grooms my beard.
I took a virtual tour of the Lancet Drone Factory. There was also a documentary about the inventor and how he built the factory. It was all very interesting. If I recall, the factory was built in an abandoned mall so all the HVAC and electrical systems were in place as well as plenty of parking.
The p.o.s. F-35 is a prime example of a US boondoggle. We design weapons to line pockets while Russia and China design theirs to win.
"DeepSeek, for example, disagrees with me.
"United States: Leads in military drone technology with advanced systems like the MQ-9 Reaper (General Atomics) and RQ-4 Global Hawk (Northrop Grumman)".
This looks to me like a fine example of how LLMs fail. What DeepSeek probably established is that most respected sources say that the USA leads and that the Reaper and Global Hawk are best.
What neither DeepSeek nor any LLM can discover is what the real strengths and weaknesses of those machines are. LLMs inhabit the world of words, in which they are big beasts. But they cannot even step into the world of reality.