<story><title>The Turkish drone that changed the nature of warfare</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/the-turkish-drone-that-changed-the-nature-of-warfare</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robonerd</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Several news sources have reported that a single TB2 drone can be purchased for a million dollars, but Bayraktar, while not giving a precise figure, told me that it costs more. In any event, single-unit figures are misleading; TB2s are sold as a “platform,” along with portable command stations and communications equipment. In 2019, Ukraine bought a fleet of at least six TB2s for a reported sixty-nine million dollars; a similar fleet of Reaper drones costs about six times that.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there is still a lot of opportunity in the low end with even smaller and cheaper UAVs with a few kilograms of payload.   There have already been numerous instances of COTS UAVs being jerry-rigged to drop mortar shells, and it seems to work pretty well in a lot of scenarios.  Particularly for smaller governments dealing with relatively unsophisticated insurgencies.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Turkish drone that changed the nature of warfare</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/the-turkish-drone-that-changed-the-nature-of-warfare</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckNorris89</author><text>I wish more people would talk about the Switchblade loitering munitions (kamikaze) drones.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve already had western made drones on the battlefield for decades, this is nothing new, just much cheaper than what the west makes while doing the same job equally good.&lt;p&gt;But the man portable kamikaze drones are the real game changer.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6G9xLyNfPzQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6G9xLyNfPzQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xv8Flu533xE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xv8Flu533xE&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>