Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf.
So… like a very slow missile then?
Radar doesn’t work very well on cardboard. Ukraine has already been using drones like this since 2023.
Doubt they have much carrying capacity for explosives like a shahed drone which is $25k, while these $2k cardboard drones are great for surveillance with little concern for loss.
It doesn’t take much explosive to defeat infantry.
Sure, it isn’t flying across the country to hit an installation like a Shahed, but it could function as a longer-range, loitering mortar round.
Lots of small payloads would be useful if you can put a lot of them in the right place: blast fragmentation, HEDP, thermobaric, smoke, illumination, etc.