Houthi rebels shoot down 7 US military Reaper drones worth $334m, in recent weeks

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/360666149/houthi-rebels-shoot-down-7-us-military-reaper-drones-worth-334m-recent-weeks

27 comments

  1. Iran is improving its ground-to-air capabilities. Nice of the US to willingly provide targets.

    Edit: I think we should be flying hundreds of $50k decoy drones around the clock.

  2. Should be noted that it’s NZ$334 Million, US$200 Million.

  3. So more than we saved from firing half the US government with doge

  5. Well all they had to do was hope in signal and Pete gave them the info needed to shoot them down. Great job whiskey Pete.

  10. Reminds me of “Charlie Wilson’s War” when they finally figured out what works against the helicopters. (I assume that part was mostly in alignment with the truth of the matter)

  11. Huh, honestly, my biggest takeaway is that I would’ve thought that 7 US military drones would cost more than that.

  13. A few things,

    That 334 number is in New Zealand dollars, not USD

    The price point of $30M per drone is not exactly a unit price. It’s a contract price which includes a lot of ground equipment and maintenance man hours.

    These aircraft were all paid for already and are not being replaced with newly purchased units. The MQ-9A Air Force has ceased production and the future development is not with that platform.

    These aircraft have already served the US interests well in combatting ISIS. The potential future conflicts don’t really have much place for the platform so it would be relegated to aerial target use anyway b

  14. It isn’t the cost that is most important here. It is the fact that we have allowed our adversaries to know how to counter our drones.

  15. That sweet intelligence “stolen” by Russia, shared to the Iranians. Get used to it until the orange is gone and all systems get re-provisioned

  16. At least no human casualties on our side of the fence. Change our tactics up by mass droning and have attack drones hit launch sites!

  19. Just had a secret level brief today.

    Why tf is reddit the first place I hear about this

  20. I mean, that’s what they’re for. That’s combat in today’s age. The Houthis aren’t the same as Afghan insurgents. They’re relatively well equipped. 

    We’re not really worried about secrecy on these any more either because any adversary has reverse engineered it many years ago. 

  22. Is that above average? Statistically significant? Ok fine I’ll read.

  24. I was in a UAV that flew the RQ-7 Shadow (the predecessor to the Reaper). Our unit would crash like two a year. The DoD does not give a flying fuck about 7 of them being shot down, it’s pocket change.

  25. if you read through the comments and see there are already dozens of jokes about signal, there isn’t any need to add your own to the already massive pile

  27. Thanks to Pete Hegseth. Just about everyone knows what the US is going to do.

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