Rheinmetall macht einen Rückzieher, nachdem CEO die Drohnenindustrie der Ukraine als „in der Küche gebaut“ abtut

„Not innovation“, if it does the same job for a fraction of the costs and can be produced in higher volumes is a fucking good innovation.

Rheinmetall can get back to us when they’ve figured out mass production, something everyone knew how to do 90 years ago but seemingly can’t figure out today.

He’s knocking Ukraine’s drone industry because it’s homemade and not the product of billions of dollars from a megacorp? How out of touch can you get.

He was scared… They make a shedload of money off building big metal machines that are now rapidly becoming obsolete… He saw his bonus disappear into thin air…

When you are actively fighting for survival kitchen built is certainly better than stern statements.

Ha ha, good, that was a stupid thing to say.

What really adds injury to insult though is that Papperger had a chance to actually inject some useful points into the conversation around drone munitions, but blew it. I don’t know the guy, maybe he is just like that, but it seems counterproductive: now it will be harder to talk usefully about drone warfare.

Because, the thing is, he had a valid point. Or, rather, let’s put it this way: there is a valid point in there, somewhere adjacent to Papperger with his foot in his mouth. Drones are not what made armor obsolete — certainly anyone who is old enough to remember the first few years of the war remembers that Russian armor was already being shredded by modern infantry anti-tank weapons, before FPV drone munitions were „a thing“ in any serious sense.

And the obsolescence of traditional armored warfare goes back further than that, to the Persian Gulf War when anti-tank weapons mounted on light vehicles demonstrated enormous, and enormously lopsided, armored losses. It’s a thirty-year-old thing, is my point. It wasn’t suddenly caused out of nowhere in 2025 by drones.

Unless you count guided anti-tank missiles as drones, which I guess in a broad sense they are. A highly-optimized autonomous „fire and forget“ anti-tank attack drone would look an awful lot like a Javelin missile.

And bigger picture, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine’s great successes against Russia have come in large part from their ability to discern and exploit the specific vulnerabilities of Russian systems. There is a ton to unpack and learn from there. A company like Rheinmetall could have a lot to usefully contribute to that conversation: how to protect systems from a hypothetical future adversary with Ukraine’s mindset; what can be learned from Russia’s failures; the likely, stable end-state of anti-drone technology in the medium term.

Instead we got what we got.

The Giant defense companies are ossified dinosaurs from an earlier age. They can’t even build weapons anymore. How long do these new fighter jets stay in endless development? Meanwhile in The Ukrainian conflict provided an environment where random technically-minded people could actually innovate.

I used to read a do-it-yourself website called hackaday, not PC hacking just building things, back in the mid to late 2000s. You would not believe the stuff that random nerds could build on their own. I saw some of the first autonomous drones that could follow waypoints that people just cobbled together out of junk and microcontrollers.

Never mind the fact that people build homemade liquid fueled rockets in their garages. You would think CEOs like this would recognize the ingenuity but they don’t they see it as a threat.

What’s starting to happen is these companies are copying the tech and then simply charging 10 times as much for an official version.