Comment by opwieurposiu
6 hours ago
Ukraine's current drone consumption has been quoted at 9,000/day, or 270k/month.
A million drones won't last long in a peer conflict. Most of the drone parts come from china. What we really need is to build our own drone supply chain that does not rely on china.
Right now, it is virtually impossible to have a supply chain completely removed from China for the manufacturing of low-cost drones. They are literally world class in production of PCB's and even PCBA.
There simply isn't enough engineers, capital expenditure and factory space to move away from this paradigm
Yeah U.S. has a really serious problem with the deprioritization of science education over the last 45 years. There are very few really skilled scientists and engineers in the U.S, they are concentrated in specific geographic metros, and many of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
If the U.S. got into a serious peer conflict, the relative lack of human capital is a huge problem. In WW2 we could get away with a few scientists and engineers designing military equipment that's produced in bulk and then lots of foot soldiers employing it. Today, with the increasing complexity of modern weaponry and the ability for the weaponry itself to be an incredibly lethal force, the bottleneck is in building out the supply chain. Each component requires a skilled engineering team optimizing it and ensuring it fits into the overall whole.
Our next "Sputnik Moment" is coming. At some point we're going to be forced to reorient our education system away from performative progressive ideology and towards achieving practical results.
https://www.space.com/10437-sputnik-moment.html
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We do have PCB manufacturing and assembly in the US though, it's just far cheaper and plentiful overseas so companies usually go there for mass manufacturing. The true bottleneck is the components those are barely made in the US at all.
You know who has capital? The US government. It's very plausible that the Army could fund the infrastructure needed for this industry as a national security imperative.
Manufacturing is often thought as this concept that you can just throw money at any time, I'm afraid to say often you are throwing your money into a void. Equipment is one thing, but engineers are literally the lifeblood of production infrastructure. Without them you are pissing into the wind
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Sure, but we can start to take incremental steps in that direction. I think everyone has finally realized that offshoring strategically important manufacturing sectors was a mistake and so now we have to reindustrialize regardless of the cost.
Well that's certainly an awkward pickle the USA has found itself in, isn't it?
It seems like it but the USA v China angle is way more complicated than these types of super power rivalries have been in the past. The USA is a massive part of the Chinese economy. It'd be weird for a country to attack either the largest part of it's supply chain or it's largest customer.
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> "We expect to purchase at least a million drones within the next two to three years," Driscoll said.
> "And we expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough that we could activate to manufacture however many drones we would need."
To be fair Ukraine's drones seem to mostly be commercial units with an explosive strapped to them. I imagine the failure rate/hits are quite low compared to what they could be with something purpose built.
They're also relying mostly on human operators rather than autonomy, human operators come with all the usual caveats of reaction time and requiring video to be sent back.
I don't want people to think I'm denouncing their drone operators though, they're doing what needs to be done with limited resources, stress and psychological tolls.
That was true at the beginning of the recent conflict, but now there is an extensive domestic drone design and production.
Yes, a lot - but not all - are fly by wire. (And actually literally wire, or rather fiber optic cable to avoid RF jamming.)
Oh yes for sure - but most of the domestic production is still "plugging drone bits from China together".
I think they're definitely working on more autonomy etc but I think it kind of proves that even the current ones are actually pretty effective. A well designed drone with AI/autonomous capabilities is terrifying. People could point to switch-blade but the cost per unit for the functionality you get is just absolutely insane.
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Ukraine is using drones as a substitute for many military capabilities it doesn't have, and is fighting a war where it is in desperate need of whatever munitions it can get to be used over a relatively short distance. Drones have undoubtedly become part of the battlefield, but a war between great powers being waged on the opposite side of the world is going to look very different from a small nation holding off it's neighbor.
At some point there's going to be on the ground fighting from either force invading the territory of one of the power poles in the conflict or their neighbors who are not aligned with the nearest pole; in US v Russia that would be happening somewhere in Europe in one of the NATO allies, US v China probably Taiwan/Philippines/Japan/Korea/India depending.
Wherever that happens to be will be a good candidate for the kind of warfare we see in Ukraine right now. There's basically no way it doesn't reach that at some point unless it's a very brief skirmish and even then for some pairings there's the inevitable border sparing even if there's minimal direct land conflict.
Drones for Ukraine provide cheap low material risk precision strike options that would normally be done by the US using precision artillery/missiles (expensive per shot cost and very vulnerable to counter battery fire) or airstrikes (relies on establishing air superiority which has proven difficult for Ukraine and Russia, anti air is long enough range it's difficult to strike so no one has fully knocked their opponent's system offline). Russia proved to be a bit of a paper bear but there's no guarantee the US would be able to establish the kind of air superiority we enjoy in all our recent conflicts (heavily punching down power wise) in a fight with China or maybe even Russia.
> A million drones won't last long in a peer conflict.
That depends on the geostrategic context of the peer conflict. If the belligerents are separated by 1000 miles, then saturation attacks with drones don't work. Drones occupy only a small niche in this context, such as reconnaissance or sabotage. The Iran-Israel war was a clear-cut example of this.
In my view, the more important thing is to ensure you have the capability to disable the enemy's industrial production (meaning: only the key nodes relevant to the armament supply chain) with stealth bombers. This is the X-factor that flips the script. In the Ukraine-Russia war, neither party has aerial superiority because they lack the technology to achieve it, so it becomes a WW2-esque war where industrial production is paramount.
The US, on the other hand, does have such capabilities thanks to modern stealth bombers, and using that capability is no more escalatory than sending 1,000,000 attack drones at the enemy.
Drones (and anti-ship missiles) in my view are more crucial to Taiwan itself, both because of their proximity to their likely belligerent and because they lack stealth bombers.
Arguably an even greater leverage point is to have the ability to select your enemy. Don't fight wars with belligerents that are 1000 miles away. Instead, fuel nationalist and separatist sentiments within elements of your adversaries that are much closer to them. Instead of having to fight your adversaries, get them to fight themselves, and destroy their country from within.
Russia is doing a masterful job doing this to the U.S. Biden's foreign policy also was pretty brilliant - get Russia bogged down in a quagmire with Ukraine, while supplying just enough weaponry to Ukraine to keep the war going but not enough to win it. Strategy is also used throughout the globe; see all the various proxy wars going on.
If the U.S. honestly wanted to have the best chance defeating China, the optimal strategy would probably to protect and fund Chinese billionaires political ambitions, so that they could provide a countervailing (and ultimately rivalrous) force to the ruling Communist Party.
The role of drones in this is largely in protecting supply lines and information collection/dissemination points. If you want to arm your enemy's adversary and give them a shot at challenging the ruling power structures in their country, you need to be able to get weapons and information to them.
> Russia is doing a masterful job doing this to the U.S. Biden's foreign policy also was pretty brilliant - get Russia bogged down in a quagmire with Ukraine, while supplying just enough weaponry to Ukraine to keep the war going but not enough to win it.
I would classify these as two different things - hybrid warfare and offshore balancing. But they are both tools that can create more strategic depth and push conflict further away.
There is a current effort to document and verify sourcing of parts for unmanned systems, you can read more about it here: https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas/framework
There are some related efforts to boost domestic manufacturing. I do not disagree and think we have a very long way to go.
This order should come with a mandate to build domestic manufacturing capacity.
The drones aren't important. The manufacturing capacity is.
America should be using every opportunity it can to subsidize reindustrialization. Especially for key industries, components and inputs, places where we make our money, critical supply chain items we rely upon, and dual use / defense tech.
Everything important. Machining, electronics, chemicals and plastics, pharmaceuticals...
It's going to be painful to play 20 years of catch up. But we need to bite the bullet and do it.
This is where subsidy and government purchases can really help.
It seems like the USA's goal to bring chip manufacturing back into the country only targeted cutting-edge chips. Refocusing on building "old-gen" chips is quicker and more affordable. Drones don't need the latest tech. Most consumer goods don't. I believe Germany did this to some success.
Luckily we have a lot of fabs in the USA for microcontrollers and the like that drive these smaller robotics.
Isn't TI still doing all of their chip manufacturing in the US?
it's kinda sad to see comments like this implying war with china as some sort of inevitability
we only "need" to bite the bullet if we want to make WWIII economically possible
This isn't about WWIII. This is about influence, dominance, and independence.
The US domestic industrial base is tightly coupled to a China. You need to bite the bullet if you want independence from an adversary and if you want to preserve global hegemony.
The best way to prevent a war with China is to be prepared for it.
> war
Defense.
Peace through mutual respect.
Economic stability and prosperity.
Self-reliance, resilience, competence.
Anti-fragility.
I'm not just suggesting preventing a hot war, but also ensuring we remain an economic peer.
America can't just "not lose" a war. It needs to maintain its economic growth and comfort of living for its citizens. We need lots of opportunity surface area in the future, and that means making sure we're broadly capable and competitive. Not painted into a corner, feeble, dependent.
Playing chess with decades of foresight.
I expect China to do the same. I expect that this rivalry will make both of our nations stronger.
In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've been resting on our laurels. Competition will inject a much-needed sense of mission and urgency.
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It did, the point is to build up the manufacturing base:
“Driscoll said his priority is getting the United States into a position where it can produce enough drones for any future war, stimulating domestic production of everything from brushless motors and sensors to batteries and circuit boards.”