TIL Saab was an aerospace company.
My Dad had a '98 Saab. It had an "S" button on the shifter. It stood for "speed". When we were 7/8 years old we'd beg him to press it and it would speed up 10mph. I got my license in 2011, immediately took that car onto the highway and pressed the S button.
Nothing happened. I went home and read the manual. S stand for sport. It keeps the engine in a higher gear than normal for quicker response
Yeah I remember we had a family friend and they had a Boost button in their Saab. I don't know if it literally said Boost but in my memory it does. We begged him to press it but he told us it was extremely dangerous and would cause flames to shoot out the back. So of course we begged him even more...
The goal of concept to aircraft in 36 months is admirable. Anduril recently built a jet in a similar timeframe. In the US at least, the last 30 years after defense industry consolidation has caused great stagnation. The F-35 took over a decade and went monstrously over budget, more as a jobs program than as a functional product. Competition showing they can build a jet faster and cheaper is what we need to kick the DoD into gear with the large contractors.
That depends on what you mean by "concept to aircraft". Boeing and Lockheed Martin built flying JSF prototypes pretty quickly after receiving the initial program requirements. But it took a lot longer to reach operational status. Ironically the biggest delays were caused by software development, and that part isn't any easier for unmanned systems. Maybe Saab and Anduril will be faster than Lockheed on the software side but so far they haven't delivered anything with even a fraction of the capabilities.
Yup, while I'm sure that part of it is that the big players got used to this modus operandi, part of it it just your client not knowing what they want. I work for a financial institution, I see this everyday. Our IT partners just have to wait for our ill-conceived and ill-defined tickets and changes of priorities, keep track of the tickets and the money keeps flowing by itself. I know the analogy isn't perfect, but still.
Hats off to Anduril for shaking up the space. Wonder if the Swedes will be able to match them.
The client not knowing what it wants, and then having multiple clients who all want different things. Making meaningfully different variants for different branches of the US military seems excessive.
Do we really need a VTOL version? I don’t know, maybe. Or maybe it looks cool and we can do without / spend that money elsewhere.
Canada is (rightfully) re-thinking their F-35 commitment after the current U.S. Administration bullied them in trade negotiations: https://youtu.be/ukYxk31zXWg
Make the Pentagon finally pass an audit. Cut its funding. It is clear the profligacy is incentivizing bad decisions - the new normal in the Strait of Hormuz being only the latest.
It's clearly too much of a toy and too much capability for the past few decades of both civilian and military administration. An entire generation only knows the United States military as an institution of blunder, excess and failure.
After cleaning house, the United States should also bring back the draft. More social spending should be paired with more public service. It will be harder to start wars of choice and treat veterans like beggars when everyone's kids will have to sacrifice. This will not degrade capability, as many of the most capable militaries in the world have a draft - notably Israel. Making people from Iowa and New York serve together would be good for a dangerously fracturing country. The "volunteer professional" military was created to get around opposition to Vietnam. It's a disgrace.
Concerns over the DoD failing audits are silly and uninformed. The reality is that they only started publishing full financial reports in FY2018 and are legally required to pass an audit in FY2028. The department is full of complex legacy systems and it's going to take years to modernize those no matter what.
In the meantime, cutting funding accomplishes nothing and only punishes troops who can't do anything to fix the core problems. Despite the enormous budget the DoD is actually underfunded for their assigned missions. This is causing escalating failures and reducing readiness. The only solution is to scale back the missions, and that can only be done by Congress and the President. This is fundamentally a political issue so vote accordingly.
The notion of bringing back the draft is stupid. Most US senior military leaders don't even want conscripts: they're generally unmotivated, cause morale problems, and don't stick around. For an offensive expeditionary force they're worse than useless. Comparisons to Israel are irrelevant because they operate a territorial defense force which isn't expected to conduct sustained power projection far beyond their own borders. And it the new era of autonomous systems there's little need for mass armies anyway.
Veterans are hardly treated like beggars. Those who complete a full 20+ years of service (or are medically retired) receive a solid pension and medical benefits. While there are some flaws in the military retirement and disability system, and occasionally veterans don't get the services they deserve, it generally works pretty well for such a huge system.
Also pointing at the Hormuz situation as a victim of this is silly. I would be very surprised if the top military leaders truly believed that Iran couldn’t execute asymmetric warfare to disrupt the gulf without a US invasion.
Israel gave presentations to DoD that said they could affect regime change in Iran. The DoD said “lol yeah, okay buddy, ain’t now way in hell.” Israel had a single audience, Trump, and just had to play into his ego + pretending that this would be Venezuela 2.0.
> Competition showing they can build a jet faster and cheaper is what we need to kick the DoD into gear with the large contractors.
The problem is, will there be enough of a demand? Part of why military procurement programs are stretched so long now is because the hot war that these things might be used in (aka, an all out direct war with Russia or China) is... increasingly unrealistic, but at the same time the US (or EU) still have to maintain the know-how, and we don't need hundreds or thousands of unit which makes the unit price including R&D extremely high.
As it stands US tech companies don't want to do high volume low cost drones, so ukraine will likely end up doing it and become the supplier for other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac... is almost a straight copy of the infamous Iranian Shahed for ~$35,000 USD. (Perhaps the US sourced their Shahed from Ukraine, though that, like many things about this program, has not been officially discussed.)
I wonder, at the point of such a simple thing as the Saheed (there are videos online of some of its electronics, not saying it's bad, indeed it's cheap and effective, but it's dirt simple), does the USA really need to reverse engineer it? Is it just a way to prevent project management turning the thing into a million dollar per unit thing?
I mean looking at the state of that conflict… the low-cost drone thing doesn’t look that great. Maybe other countries will want to go with this kind of attritable aircraft concept instead.
If we're going to expend time and effort on finding new and exciting ways to destroy other members of our species, it might be worth noting that the major change in battles over the last decade seems to have been flooding the zone with cheap, micro-to-small drones, not something like this.
That being said, perhaps we find something more productive to do with our time as humans?
All of the current conflicts (russia / ukraine, us / iran) would consider drones as a nuisance if:
#1. For russia / ukraine neither side has air superiority. If one side had it, they could be obliterating the other side with a constant stream of 500 lb gravity bombs. Each of which has more explosives than 100 drones.
#2. For us / iran, the US is unwilling to risk any pilots. And iran has some air defenses in place. The US could drop bombs from up close, gravity mk-82's and jdams every hour for months. Currently they are using standoff weapons which are either minimally effective (drones) or crazy expensive (Tomohawk, Standard Missile, etc.)
One B1 gets shot down, and 4 crew get paraded around in downtown Tehran, and what little support trump has will vanish.
What am I trying to say? Drones have a place. They don't obsolete anything. The key is to have the weapons available to meet the time in which they are needed.
Be careful that you're not able to fight the next war because all your effort is working on solving the problems of the past war when your enemy has found a better way around it.
It would be nice if humans could find ways to not kill each other, but the reality is humans have a very poor track record and you would be a fool to not put at least some effort into defending yourself.
We unfortunately have not found a way to turn our kleptokratic dictatorship neighbor into one.
The greatest failure of the past 20 years was the belief that if we open up trade and grow rich together, rational self-interest will lead to liberalization and peace. Instead, it just gave our enemies more resources to spend on self-destructive imperialist ambitions.
There is no way no know. Any number is an acceptable answer. For a good answer you can find lots of reasoning/logic/history to justify your guess, but it is still a guess.
Well, as long as they’re poor free market democracies, it’s a mulligan, right? Bonus points if you use special ops or intelligence agencies to kick it off so it doesn’t count as a war.
This might have to be put into the context that they do in fact move the conflict over resources to economic wars. They also actively engage in wars over ressources when they think they can win outside of MAD, see U. S. vs Iran.
Economic warfare also does in fact kill people. Denying a population, e. g., Cuba, the ability to access medicine/food kills humans just as well as a bullet in the long term.
There are various other ways this causes suffering. Different forms of warfare are still warfare, even if you don't to hold a gun for all of them.
Being "rich" also requires someone else to be "poor".
>Economic warfare also does in fact kill people. Denying a population, e. g., Cuba, the ability to access medicine/food kills humans just as well as a bullet in the long term.
Deny them jobs, investment that could create jobs and paths to prosperity.
Give them drugs.
Shocked Pikachu when they don't like you.
Edit: Revised language to be more broadly applicable.
The DARPA LongShot is a cruise missile barge that deploys another short range missile from its bay. That could be repurposed for other munitions like drones.
TIL Saab was an aerospace company. My Dad had a '98 Saab. It had an "S" button on the shifter. It stood for "speed". When we were 7/8 years old we'd beg him to press it and it would speed up 10mph. I got my license in 2011, immediately took that car onto the highway and pressed the S button.
Nothing happened. I went home and read the manual. S stand for sport. It keeps the engine in a higher gear than normal for quicker response
Yeah I remember we had a family friend and they had a Boost button in their Saab. I don't know if it literally said Boost but in my memory it does. We begged him to press it but he told us it was extremely dangerous and would cause flames to shoot out the back. So of course we begged him even more...
You could argue that the “Swedish Airplane Inc.” (Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, SAAB) also does cars.
Where is the B from? (S)venska (A)eroplan (A)ktiebolaget and the B? from (b)olaget?
Aktie Bolaget (stock firm)
Well… they did cars. Saab hasn’t existed as a car brand since 2016. They split from Saab aerospace in 1989.
Saab made great cars and is part of core childhood for all swedes age 40+.
The centerpiece of their advertising campaign at some point was "born from jets" with fighter jets flying in the background.
Aerospace and defence!
The goal of concept to aircraft in 36 months is admirable. Anduril recently built a jet in a similar timeframe. In the US at least, the last 30 years after defense industry consolidation has caused great stagnation. The F-35 took over a decade and went monstrously over budget, more as a jobs program than as a functional product. Competition showing they can build a jet faster and cheaper is what we need to kick the DoD into gear with the large contractors.
That depends on what you mean by "concept to aircraft". Boeing and Lockheed Martin built flying JSF prototypes pretty quickly after receiving the initial program requirements. But it took a lot longer to reach operational status. Ironically the biggest delays were caused by software development, and that part isn't any easier for unmanned systems. Maybe Saab and Anduril will be faster than Lockheed on the software side but so far they haven't delivered anything with even a fraction of the capabilities.
The DoD changing its mind several times did not do the F-35 project any favors
Yup, while I'm sure that part of it is that the big players got used to this modus operandi, part of it it just your client not knowing what they want. I work for a financial institution, I see this everyday. Our IT partners just have to wait for our ill-conceived and ill-defined tickets and changes of priorities, keep track of the tickets and the money keeps flowing by itself. I know the analogy isn't perfect, but still.
Hats off to Anduril for shaking up the space. Wonder if the Swedes will be able to match them.
The client not knowing what it wants, and then having multiple clients who all want different things. Making meaningfully different variants for different branches of the US military seems excessive.
Do we really need a VTOL version? I don’t know, maybe. Or maybe it looks cool and we can do without / spend that money elsewhere.
Block 4's still an absolute shit-show in terms of management and progress...
Canada is (rightfully) re-thinking their F-35 commitment after the current U.S. Administration bullied them in trade negotiations: https://youtu.be/ukYxk31zXWg
The DoD needs a kick in the opposite direction.
Make the Pentagon finally pass an audit. Cut its funding. It is clear the profligacy is incentivizing bad decisions - the new normal in the Strait of Hormuz being only the latest.
It's clearly too much of a toy and too much capability for the past few decades of both civilian and military administration. An entire generation only knows the United States military as an institution of blunder, excess and failure.
After cleaning house, the United States should also bring back the draft. More social spending should be paired with more public service. It will be harder to start wars of choice and treat veterans like beggars when everyone's kids will have to sacrifice. This will not degrade capability, as many of the most capable militaries in the world have a draft - notably Israel. Making people from Iowa and New York serve together would be good for a dangerously fracturing country. The "volunteer professional" military was created to get around opposition to Vietnam. It's a disgrace.
Concerns over the DoD failing audits are silly and uninformed. The reality is that they only started publishing full financial reports in FY2018 and are legally required to pass an audit in FY2028. The department is full of complex legacy systems and it's going to take years to modernize those no matter what.
https://www.dodig.mil/DoW-Financial-Statement-Audit-Explaine...
In the meantime, cutting funding accomplishes nothing and only punishes troops who can't do anything to fix the core problems. Despite the enormous budget the DoD is actually underfunded for their assigned missions. This is causing escalating failures and reducing readiness. The only solution is to scale back the missions, and that can only be done by Congress and the President. This is fundamentally a political issue so vote accordingly.
The notion of bringing back the draft is stupid. Most US senior military leaders don't even want conscripts: they're generally unmotivated, cause morale problems, and don't stick around. For an offensive expeditionary force they're worse than useless. Comparisons to Israel are irrelevant because they operate a territorial defense force which isn't expected to conduct sustained power projection far beyond their own borders. And it the new era of autonomous systems there's little need for mass armies anyway.
Veterans are hardly treated like beggars. Those who complete a full 20+ years of service (or are medically retired) receive a solid pension and medical benefits. While there are some flaws in the military retirement and disability system, and occasionally veterans don't get the services they deserve, it generally works pretty well for such a huge system.
Also pointing at the Hormuz situation as a victim of this is silly. I would be very surprised if the top military leaders truly believed that Iran couldn’t execute asymmetric warfare to disrupt the gulf without a US invasion.
Israel gave presentations to DoD that said they could affect regime change in Iran. The DoD said “lol yeah, okay buddy, ain’t now way in hell.” Israel had a single audience, Trump, and just had to play into his ego + pretending that this would be Venezuela 2.0.
I couldn't agree more on the draft. Draft and making congress actually declare wars would be a huge improvement.
Industry and wealth transfer and job creation programs have different goals. Congress is at odds with efficient industries.
> Competition showing they can build a jet faster and cheaper is what we need to kick the DoD into gear with the large contractors.
The problem is, will there be enough of a demand? Part of why military procurement programs are stretched so long now is because the hot war that these things might be used in (aka, an all out direct war with Russia or China) is... increasingly unrealistic, but at the same time the US (or EU) still have to maintain the know-how, and we don't need hundreds or thousands of unit which makes the unit price including R&D extremely high.
F-35 took nearly 3 decades.
As it stands US tech companies don't want to do high volume low cost drones, so ukraine will likely end up doing it and become the supplier for other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac... is almost a straight copy of the infamous Iranian Shahed for ~$35,000 USD. (Perhaps the US sourced their Shahed from Ukraine, though that, like many things about this program, has not been officially discussed.)
I wonder, at the point of such a simple thing as the Saheed (there are videos online of some of its electronics, not saying it's bad, indeed it's cheap and effective, but it's dirt simple), does the USA really need to reverse engineer it? Is it just a way to prevent project management turning the thing into a million dollar per unit thing?
I mean looking at the state of that conflict… the low-cost drone thing doesn’t look that great. Maybe other countries will want to go with this kind of attritable aircraft concept instead.
> the low-cost drone thing doesn’t look that great
In what sense do you mean that?
I still consider the Saab Draken one of the most beautiful aircraft ever designed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_35_Draken
Especially the top view:
https://www.flyajetfighter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Sa...
Agreed!
Though I prefer this picture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:20171007130915!Saab_Drake...
Reminds me of Apogees Raptor and similar fighter plane DOS games.
Yes, that's an even better picture! Austrian air-force version, right?
how about a 2-door 900 turbo revival?
With the bare minimum of modern electronics. The dream.
my goodness how i miss mine!
Rare moment on HN where I can share that I had a 9-3 Viggen. Such a wonderful car, wish I didn’t need to sell at the time.
Namesake of the previous generation SAAB aircraft.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_37_Viggen
I'd be happier with a 9-3t (small t not large T) redo.
But nooo, SAAB sold their auto division to GM in 2005.
Saab 9-2x and 9-7 were the most reliable Saabs and that was thanks to GM.
It was quite the Saab story.
Wasn't the 9-2x just a rebadged Subaru Impreza?
isn't a 9-2x a rebadged Subaru Impreza?
GM was a 50% owner when they spun it off of the aerospace company as an independent company in 1989.
I would be willing to try a Saab 4dr EV...
Or just bring the 9-3 Turbo back!
No 9-anything, only 900 and 9000.
My 9-3t stock could dust many modified Mustangs in a drag race.
I never saw a 900 do that.
I'm betting that High-End Concept will win the race over Saab.
those kids don't stand a chance against such an epic aircraft
I'm surprised manned aircraft are getting so much money/attention. I suppose you could fly them remotely too though (but pricey for a drone).
The article says this one is autonomous
is it manned? I assumed autonomous means unmanned?
“Saab has unveiled its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept—an autonomous, tailless, supersonic, double-delta-wing air vehicle”
should've made nice cars instead T_T
If we're going to expend time and effort on finding new and exciting ways to destroy other members of our species, it might be worth noting that the major change in battles over the last decade seems to have been flooding the zone with cheap, micro-to-small drones, not something like this.
That being said, perhaps we find something more productive to do with our time as humans?
All of the current conflicts (russia / ukraine, us / iran) would consider drones as a nuisance if:
#1. For russia / ukraine neither side has air superiority. If one side had it, they could be obliterating the other side with a constant stream of 500 lb gravity bombs. Each of which has more explosives than 100 drones.
#2. For us / iran, the US is unwilling to risk any pilots. And iran has some air defenses in place. The US could drop bombs from up close, gravity mk-82's and jdams every hour for months. Currently they are using standoff weapons which are either minimally effective (drones) or crazy expensive (Tomohawk, Standard Missile, etc.)
One B1 gets shot down, and 4 crew get paraded around in downtown Tehran, and what little support trump has will vanish.
What am I trying to say? Drones have a place. They don't obsolete anything. The key is to have the weapons available to meet the time in which they are needed.
Be careful that you're not able to fight the next war because all your effort is working on solving the problems of the past war when your enemy has found a better way around it.
It would be nice if humans could find ways to not kill each other, but the reality is humans have a very poor track record and you would be a fool to not put at least some effort into defending yourself.
We have found a way to not kill each other!
Rich free market democracies don't fight wars against each other.
We unfortunately have not found a way to turn our kleptokratic dictatorship neighbor into one.
The greatest failure of the past 20 years was the belief that if we open up trade and grow rich together, rational self-interest will lead to liberalization and peace. Instead, it just gave our enemies more resources to spend on self-destructive imperialist ambitions.
Same story as always: the goal sounded nice, but no one wanted to do the actual work.
The "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" has been broken 4 times:
- NATO v Yugoslavia 1999 - India v Pakistan 1999 - Russia v Georgia 2008 - Russia v Ukraine 2014, 2022
NATO v Yugoslavia 1999 is not like the others
What is the denominator? I.e. how many times did it prevent war?
There is no way no know. Any number is an acceptable answer. For a good answer you can find lots of reasoning/logic/history to justify your guess, but it is still a guess.
Without it the parent post is irrelevant.
Only with rational actors. But do not underestimate the stupidity of leaders who thought it would be easy.
So is the US not democratic enough, not rich enough or not free market enough?
In case of war privilieges, your president can act as a dictator. At least the first 90 days, unless he finds a way to reset those days.
Also a very Christian nation that follows the teachings of Jesus.
I can't think of any rich free market democracies the US has fought wars against.
The trick is to destabilize their democracies first.
Which country?
They do it to themselves after people forget what made them rich in the first place.
Well, as long as they’re poor free market democracies, it’s a mulligan, right? Bonus points if you use special ops or intelligence agencies to kick it off so it doesn’t count as a war.
This might have to be put into the context that they do in fact move the conflict over resources to economic wars. They also actively engage in wars over ressources when they think they can win outside of MAD, see U. S. vs Iran.
Economic warfare also does in fact kill people. Denying a population, e. g., Cuba, the ability to access medicine/food kills humans just as well as a bullet in the long term.
There are various other ways this causes suffering. Different forms of warfare are still warfare, even if you don't to hold a gun for all of them.
Being "rich" also requires someone else to be "poor".
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Market democracy is not perfect but it solves 90% of the problems we'd have otherwise.
>Economic warfare also does in fact kill people. Denying a population, e. g., Cuba, the ability to access medicine/food kills humans just as well as a bullet in the long term.
Deny them jobs, investment that could create jobs and paths to prosperity.
Give them drugs.
Shocked Pikachu when they don't like you.
Edit: Revised language to be more broadly applicable.
Now we just need to figure out how to stop rich free market democracies from invading and bombing poorer countries
You can't fly a micro drone thousands of km's
The DARPA LongShot is a cruise missile barge that deploys another short range missile from its bay. That could be repurposed for other munitions like drones.
Could not help thinking about the Simpsons truck truck truck: https://youtu.be/5coythRANLA
But you can smuggle them in containers and trucks to accomplish the same strike thousands of km’s away.
> not something like this
When all you make are hammers, all your enemies look like nails.