Is Hegseth Looking at Drones?

 It's all very nice to produce tanks which really don't work well, or fighter jets which can't decide exactly what they really are.  Keeps our M-I-C in business, after all.  Right?

But what about drones?

This is an excerpt from a much longer essay on the Mess Called Ukraine:

 ...Let’s say 300k+ drones are produced per month, as now claimed, by the Russian side, with only 10-30% of them succeeding in some way, even if it’s a glancing blow which does not disable the target. That’s about 30-90k hits per month. Artillery is fired at a rate of 10-20k shells a day, or 300-600k shots per month, by the Russian side. If we assume a similar 10-30% do some damage to a target, we can educe that anywhere between ~30k to ~150k artillery hits are being registered per month, which does not include various other systems like aerial bombs, etc.

Judging by those numbers, it’s easy to see that drones could plausibly account for at least 20-30% of scored hits, if not much more, given their higher accuracy. It may be better to break it down by type of target: tube and rocket artillery and aerial bombs likely account for the vast majority of damage to infrastructural targets like weapons depots, ammo dumps, fortifications, workshops, stationary equipment, etc., while drones may account for a proportionally high amount of infantry kills—like I said, not necessarily the majority, but perhaps 35-65%. A huge portion of videos we now see feature not only FPV kills of infantry, but large hexacopter and agricultural ‘agro-drones’ dropping bombs on dugouts, etc. Drones have also weakened opposing artillery due to their increasing range, which now regularly allows them to roam 15-20km behind enemy lines—and even much farther in the extreme examples—which is precisely where most artillery systems work. This forces artillery systems to retreat out of range and be ineffective, with only the minority portion of systems with superior range able to consistently function along some fronts....

Should drones be mandated for National Guard units?

Yes.