AirKamuy is shipping flatpacked drones made of paper that cost around $2,000.

Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    10 days ago

    This is an approach that could never succeed in the U.S., because there the focus is always on throwing as much money as possible at the defense contractors so that the billionaires can get even richer.

    A current example: the war of aggression against Iran that the U.S. is waging in violation of international law.

    To my knowledge, not even a halfway plausible reason has been given for this. And so it becomes quite clear that this is simply about shifting state resources into the pockets of the super-rich - and U.S. citizens just go along with it, even though it isn’t even them who are dying by the thousands, but rather, among others, Iranian schoolchildren, hundreds of whom were murdered simply by a bombing of a school…

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      10 days ago

      The usa military budget is non comparable to european military budgets, they pay for different things. IMO.

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          6·
          10 days ago

          It includes costs for retired personnel and social security (social security is not in the military budget in most or any European countries) for example.

        • Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          9 days ago

          In addition, they patrol the entire planets oceans, and are the main reason why you don’t have pirates just taking ships constantly.

          • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
            5·
            9 days ago

            (I’m not necessarily saying piracy is bad…)

            But I feel like the violent enforcement of extreme inequality is what creates pirates, not what stops them.

            • Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              9 days ago

              No, mass scale looting of ships is stopped by armed navies, along with the instant communication and remote viewing that make it impossible to do it without anyone noticing. You don’t even need severe inequality for people to think about stealing 100 million dollar cargo moving slowly by itself.

  • Dadifer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    101·
    10 days ago

    The number of our amazon boxes will block out the sun.

    Then we will fight in the shade.

    • FreeBooteR69@lemmy.caEnglish
      91·
      10 days ago

      Doubt they have much carrying capacity for explosives like a shahed drone which is $25k, while these $2k cardboard drones are great for surveillance with little concern for loss.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        10 days ago

        It doesn’t take much explosive to defeat infantry.

        Sure, it isn’t flying across the country to hit an installation like a Shahed, but it could function as a longer-range, loitering mortar round.

        Lots of small payloads would be useful if you can put a lot of them in the right place: blast fragmentation, HEDP, thermobaric, smoke, illumination, etc.