[HN Gopher] French company ramps up production to meet demand fo...
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French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military
drone radar
Author : dClauzel
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-04-08 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.eu)
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has
| urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper.
|
| > However, the reality is complicated.
|
| > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing
| around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,"
| Descourvieres said.
|
| If there was an actual _war_ on, and a nation was taking both
| combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly
| amounts to squat.
|
| It seems hard to imagine that this is the country which
| constructed the Maginot Line - in a decade, mostly during a grim
| economic depression, when their entire nation's population was
| only a bit over 40M.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It's getting hard to believe anything in this world anymore. A
| million shells fired by the Germans in Verdun in a mere 8 hours
| and now the entirety of Europe can't make that number in a
| year.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Those aren't the same shells though
| bluGill wrote:
| They would work and be better than the nothing we have.
| Well some minor adustment for 155mm shells.
| simmerup wrote:
| Just wait until we see what China can produce for a war
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| Add about two zeros to what the West collectively can
| build.
| hibikir wrote:
| Did you ever read on the early parts of the war, during the
| race to the sea? Both sides were extremely low on ammunition,
| as they realized that their ideas of how much ordinance would
| be used in a real war were completely wrong. It took a really
| long time to ramp up production capacity to get anywhere near
| Verdun, and for the biggest horrors of WWI's trench warfare
| to appear.
|
| Everyone kind of learned their lesson for WWII, as the real
| signal that war was coming wasn't actual invasion, but the
| ramping up of industry to actually supply combat. The US
| intervention in Europe couldn't have happened much earlier,
| because setting up the logistics to do any intervention
| whatsoever took years... and this was at a time where, while
| the US still claimed neutrality, the country was already
| changing their industrial production to be able to begin
| intervention.
|
| So even in the good old days, nobody could change their
| industrial capacity to supply a war on a dime. And if there
| is no war, the costs of dedicating so much production to
| unused equipment is prohibitive
| LunaSea wrote:
| Few reasons, one of them is that the Maginot line was built
| during a time where France was an industrial powerhouse. This
| has not been the case in a long time.
|
| The other point, is that you are comparing a public
| infrastructure project with a private company.
|
| Said private company behaves like one and does not want to take
| unnecessary risks by recruiting and training too much staff and
| later not having enough orders to keep them on the payroll.
| swores wrote:
| Minor pedantic FYI - although your comment was clear (I
| think, or maybe I did misunderstand it), there's a linguistic
| difference between "Few reasons" (meaning "there aren't many
| reasons) and "A few reasons" (meaning "more than one", but
| implying that you're introducing the reasons, not that you're
| quantifying them as not many).
| ciscoriordan wrote:
| A depression cuts both ways -- lower tax revenue, but lower
| labor costs too.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Unsurprisingly enough, complicated technology requires
| complicated manufacturing capabilities and finite time to
| create, QA etc.
|
| These radar systems are many orders of magnitude more
| complicated than anything manufactured during WW2. It's not
| something easily scaled up.
| boricj wrote:
| If France were to be at war with a nation knocking on our
| borders, our policy nowadays is to fire a nuclear-tipped ASMPA
| missile _as a warning shot_. We do not rely on our conventional
| forces or anyone else to safeguard our sovereignty should it
| escalate to that.
|
| Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty
| years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over
| quantity, but we've kept what we call a _modele d 'armee
| complet_, or an army with a complete set of capabilities,
| alongside the arms industry to sustain it. Said arms industry
| after spending decades surviving on frugal orders is now in the
| process of scaling up production substantially. It takes time,
| but we've already tripled production of Caesar self-propelled
| artillery with another doubling in sight for example.
|
| If push comes to shove, we might take some time to wake up from
| our slumber, but we're French. Picking a fight with the Gallic
| rooster is usually a bad decision.
| tekla wrote:
| French military doctrine: We will Nuke you as a warning. If
| that doesn't get the message across, we will empty our
| nuclear arsenal until all of your miserable cities are rubble
| and your farmlands are glass.
| boricj wrote:
| There's a famous quote by _De Gaulle_ from the early 1960s
| which basically states that France isn 't worth the price
| of killing 80 million people over, even if you have the
| means of killing over 800 million French people.
|
| Also, we don't need American ballistic missiles to do so,
| unlike our friends on the other side of the English
| Channel.
| ptero wrote:
| I suspect the doctrine of nuke as a warning shot is less
| effective today when a small group can launch, either for own
| purposes or as a proxy for another state, a large group of
| drones to strike with speed and precision the targets 1000+
| km away. With that threat type nuking is not an option and we
| are back to traditional defense. My 2c.
| hibikir wrote:
| Not unlike with vaccines, massive production ramp ups are
| possible once the suppliers know that they aren't carrying any
| significant risk of losing a lot of money for overbuilding
| capacity.
|
| As some of us learned in the pandemic, increases in production
| capacity that are not going to be long term will get your
| company hobbled, if not downright bankrupted if you
| overproduce. See what happened to anyone that assumed the
| demand for exercise equipment for the home was going to be long
| lived.
|
| When looking at this kind of problems, it's always either
| regulation or incentives.. and here it isn't regulation, so
| it's all incentives.
| cm2187 wrote:
| The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless
| measure of defence providing a false sense of security though.
|
| It's a combination of several things.
|
| First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was
| a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank
| has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the
| cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year).
| That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the
| scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single
| plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are
| tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise.
|
| Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over
| Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing
| military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along
| with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government
| spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and
| other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem
| with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it
| becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in
| the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the
| horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have
| zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger.
|
| That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half
| a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and
| NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing
| pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even
| poland). And there will be little a country like France will be
| able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized
| to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They
| have nothing in between.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a
| useless measure of defence providing a false sense of
| security though.
|
| ... which has absolutely nothing to do with bell-cot's point
| in invoking it as a counterexample to France's current
| production ability.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Even re production. It's only a massive piece of concrete.
| France is still good at pouring massive amonts of concrete,
| that's what all of its suburbs are made of. The line was
| not exactly a marvel of engineering even for the time (and
| neither forward looking).
| Ajay-p wrote:
| Well, I mean, China has probably already stolen it. Given the
| nature of espionage it's highly likely the U.S. has the details
| and can build it on their own.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| There must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones
| including sound, visual, radio.
|
| Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply
| themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended
| against?
|
| Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300
| feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop
| that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide
| in without radio communication once they spot their target.
|
| Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money
| being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the
| world.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I suspect we're going to see a big resurgence in anti-aircraft
| guns, like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Of all shapes and sizes. I can imagine a robot M16 attached
| to a drone spotter might be effective against the sort of
| small drones that are hitting tanks in Ukraine.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Plus people will get a lot less worked up about AI picking
| and aiming at targets in the air vs on the ground.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Why not a 20 mm cannon?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| why fire ammo when you have laser beams?
|
| https://bluehalo.com/c-uas-autonomous-systems/c-uas-
| directed...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Directed energy weapons are still in their early days,
| they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of
| potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal
| hitting the target does.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Or on a smaller scale, something homebrew like a bunch of
| AK-74s attached to something resembling a minigun [1]. Or the
| other way around, take old AA guns, place them on the back of
| a pickup and shred Russian infantry without mercy [2].
|
| Certainly the Ukrainians are showing the future when it comes
| to land-based wars; the question is how many of these we're
| actually going to see.
|
| [1] https://armourersbench.com/2023/07/09/ukraines-
| improvised-an...
|
| [2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ingenious-ukrainians-
| invent-ho...
| sand500 wrote:
| Could train birds of prey to actively hunt down and rip apart
| drones.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/the-milit...
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at
| war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid
| nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then
| ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about
| profit.
|
| War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes
| it sound sexier, I dunno.
|
| https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...
| adaml_623 wrote:
| Phew so glad we've fixed that war problem. Sadly defence
| spending is a bit like vaccinations.
| mrighele wrote:
| Ideally you want to prepare for war _before_ the war actually
| starts.
|
| The perception doesn't come from a paranoid nation, but the
| fact that a neighbor is actually at war and the invader keep
| telling that after that it will be your turn.
| gwervc wrote:
| Especially with Macron under which the national debt
| skyrocketed. We are supposed to find a lot of money really
| quickly but he always spends _billions_ on outside issues
| without public consultation.
|
| Heck, there's a promise for 3 new billions just this year!
| That's insane. All that money is going to waste in a war that
| isn't ours, and that is lost for Ukraine from day 1. Of course
| in the end of the day it will be citizens like me would have to
| pay for that through new and higher taxes. As if we weren't
| already in the top 2 in that matter...
| https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-m...
| rat87 wrote:
| France is an ally of Ukraine and making sure Russia loses it's
| baseless imperialistic invasion of Ukraine is the EUs #1
| foreign policy priority, because if it doesn't it might attack
| NATO/EU members.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The pamphlet was written in 1935.
|
| Then came probably America most just war, fighting Japan and
| Hitler.
|
| War may be a racket 99% of the time, but that 1% really
| matters.
| fjfaase wrote:
| From what I heard about the SMART-L [1] radar around 1990, it
| could spot reflective objects the size of tennis balls at a
| distance of about 100Km.
|
| I guess with modern electronics and DSP, a much smaller system
| must be able to detect drones with ease.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L
| AlexanderTheGr8 wrote:
| What if you cover the drone with non-reflective material? Or
| does it care about the reflective nature of the core of the
| object rather than just the surface?
| AlexanderTheGr8 wrote:
| I read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar
| detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be
| confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command &
| control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it?
|
| Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed
| of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the
| payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the
| price of the drone. So what to do?
|
| I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is
| shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for
| 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The
| drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely
| black-mirror dystopian stuff.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You're making a lot of wrong assumptions, drones can be any
| size, nobody's talking about missiles to shoot them down, not
| all drones are kamikaze, &c.
|
| If they're already being produced they do work for their
| intended purpose, Thales doesn't fuck around
| cm2187 wrote:
| These videos are horrible. On one side I feel for that kid who
| probably didn't chose to be there and grappling with imminent
| death. On the other hand if my country was invaded I would
| probably watch those videos with popcorn. It's a weird war,
| mixing social media with a ww1 trench war, military hardware
| with a share button, you get to watch the horror of the
| trenches from under your duvet.
|
| The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic,
| have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a
| $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war
| can possibly go.
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