I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense.
For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.
It doesn't say if a million drones are going to be purchased from a defense contractor. Hopefully it goes to a commerical US drone company that makes drones for consumers, film, inspections, etc with an order of million military-harden drones from the Goverment. There would an expection they could tool up to many millions in a time of conflict.
Defense contractors already cover small batches of super-specialized drones.
This misses a very important point, which is that civilian manufacturing can be pivoted easily to defense manufacturing during wartime. Absent civilian manufacturing, you have no choice but to invest in dedicated defense manufacturing, which is not useful in peacetime (beyond deterrence).
The deindustrialization that creates this reality has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. They benefit from it but they didn't create the context.
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.
> reorient our education system away from performative progressive ideology and towards achieving practical results.
NCLB was cooked up by Republicans along with defunding schools, school choice, and the homeschooling. You are correct that it is performative but there is nothing progressive about the last 20 years of public education.
You're pointing the the wrong direction there, look at the groups actually attacking and refusing to fund public schools better in the US... The actual issue is the systematic dismantling of public education for religious and ideological reasons; evolution, climate change, vaccinations all ideologically convenient to the religious conservative right in the US.
We need adequate funding for public schools but there is no real correlation between funding levels and student outcomes. A lot of that money is simply being frittered away. One of the best ways to start would be to destroy teacher's unions because they usually act in ways contrary to students' best interests.
Going to need one hell of a citation on that first claim because there's a lot of evidence showing reality follows the opposite intuitive correlation, additional funding does provide better outcomes. [0]
> destroy teacher's unions
States have tried doing essentially that and it's not worked for decades. So I say we should actually fund schools, pay and support teachers like we actually want educated kids before we try yet again to blame underpaid, undersupplied teachers trying to wrangle ballooning class sizes of rowdy kids.
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
The Army already has a branch specifically devoted to engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers. While its primary focus is civil engineering, training and employing electrical and electronics engineers certainly doesn't seem out of the question.
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.
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.
I'm struggling to find an academic source to provide any level of detail beyond confirming this basic fact, but Germany and Britain's economic ties before WW1 were actually not too different. They were rivals but also major trading partners.
I won't try to shoehorn the past into the present, but for the very specific point about intertwined economies, it has in fact happened before.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
using all these personal adjectives to describe the world economy strikes me as very chauvinistic, and I am not convinced the cold war was such a good thing that we need another!
Everyone has a personal ideal view of what life should be. Some people are content to chill and have creature comforts, no stress. I've no problem with that view, but it's not my disposition. I want to push boundaries.
It just so happens that competition pushes technology further. It puts a sharp edge on investment dollars and intellectual capital. A lot of money gets spent, but it gets spent smartly.
WWI and WWII - horrible and tragic - pushed us so hard that people alive as teenagers during the invention of flight lived to see a man walk on the moon.
The cold war created the PC, internet, and planted the seeds for the smartphone and AI.
We had a whole lot of incrementalism in the 00's - 20's. Ad tech, emojis on smartphones, so many social networks. I want to see all of that turned on its head, everything pushed forward 10x. By the time I die, I want to see robots, whole body transplants, autonomous everything, brain uploads, VR indistinguishable from life, cures to every cancer, decelerated aging, widespread access to middle class standard of living. I have so much desire for this and it's all I want for.
That's going to require pushing through an economic and technological salient. Competition accelerates that.
It's time for America to stop being weak and naive. Lazily greedy. To stop spending on ad tech upgrades and instead sow the seeds of a scientific and industrial powerhouse.
When we focus on protecting rather than optimizing eyeball engagement and becoming pilfering middle men, we make the greatest strides.
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.”
The real breakthrough would be to build the capacity of building something at scale just in time instead of allocating big contracts to build or maintain an industry even if not needed at a given moment. A pipe dream of course. Moreover i fear these hardware (smaller in size, and with technologies evolving quickly) become obsolete sooner and are harder to upgrade to new standard (than say a F-35 - sic), and at scale.
This isn't enough drones. Instead of treating them as consumables, we're repeating the mistakes of Germany in WW2, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, resulting in neither.
If they can't produce a million per month, we're going to lose any actual war.
Still no real explanation for the drone incursions over dozens of military bases and nuclear sites last year (including Picatinny), or the incursions happening all over Europe right now
> I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities.
Based on what?
> further hatred of Russia
Russia, being an agressor terrorist state perpetrating a genocide on Europe's doorstep, is already hated by anyone with half a brain half following the news. Be it the bombing of children's hopitals or sending incendiary devices via DHL or bombing munitions depots in Czechia and Bulgaria or assasinating defectors with gruesome indiscriminate chemical or radiological warfare, they are well known, well documented, pieces of shit. Did we mention them kidnapping Ukrainian children to resettle and give for adoption to Russian families? Torturing POWs and civlians? Genuinely, they're not even trying not to be comically evil. Whatever heinous act you can think of, they've probably done it as an official state sanctioned policy.
Why would European states need to invent stuff - and note, nobody has said that it was Russian drones, a ship was impounded and its crew arrested off France for failing to provide documentation, and there have been hints it's suspected of being the drone launch platform that impacted Copehnagen Airport, but nothing has been officially said - when there is so much shit, which is publicly documented and widely accepted? We know they tried to kidnap journalists, assasinated people all over Europe, etc etc etc. If European countries wanted to respond more heavily, most of the population would be for and the main argument against would be the fact that the terrorist state has nuclear weapons, which drastically complicats the equation. If they didn't have them, things would have been so much simpler and better for everyone.
I regularly see comments on HN that worry about how our output is lower than China. Their population is 4x ours. They have long used financial repression to encourage industrial development. The incentives toward overcapacity, price wars, and domestic competition are so strong that they are actively trying to curtail it. Why should I endorse a defense strategy that is guaranteed to enrich ideologues in Silicon Valley, but not likely to achieve anything else?
A million drones is a rounding error in China. Increasing this number by orders of magnitude would require the state administering some pretty big pills, which I doubt the average American would want to swallow.
1 million *overpriced drones. Ah, military contracts.
Hilarious when someone with decent maker experience can plug shit together in a shed to easily make a hunter-killer drone these days. Just missing the explosives.
The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. There's certainly the issue of "military equipment gets more extensive testing", but capitalism has answered that somewhat; defective products are extremely bad for corporations and I do wonder if the failure rate of modern electronics approaches that of some military hardware specs (though not necessarily in ruggedness).
Donald Trump Jr. was appointed to the advisory board of a small, Florida-based drone component company called Unusual Machines in November 2024. [1] He is also an investor in the company and holds a significant financial stake (reported to be worth around $4 million). Following his appointment, the company's stock price experienced a sharp increase. [2] In October 2025, the company announced it had secured a contract with the U.S. Army to supply drone motors and other components, described by the CEO as their largest-ever U.S. government order. The Army also signaled plans for a possible follow-on order for additional components in 2026.
Horrible as it sounds, that may explain the plan to buy drones instead of a plan to spin up the manufacturing capacity to make millions of drones.
But also we need to look at it from the perspective of leaders as well. You want to spin up manufacturing capacity so you roll out policies to do that and what happens in a republic? Every leader demands the manufacturing be in their district/state. No matter how ill suited that district/state is to that manufacturing. Political considerations become the driving factor as opposed to ability, resiliency and sustainability.
So sometimes just providing demand side of a market can spin up manufacturing without having to wade into all that nonsense. And believe me, it would be nonsense.
So the double fail of their brazen corruption could inadvertently end up being a positive long term in this particular instance. Like multiplying two negative numbers.
This field moves so quickly. Is this mostly pork or a strategic "they won't be useful, but building up development and production capacity is the goal" kind of thing?
Edit: Foreign perspective: Saab (Sweden) is pitching drones as a service (DaaS?) to Sweden as a way to enable short development cycles, similar to those in Ukraine, while minimizing waste due to purchasing bureaucracy.
I don't think it's pork. Drones have proven their usefulness on the modern battlefield, and those million drones probably cost about as much as about a squadron of F-22s. In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones.
I do think that they're making a mistake by considering drones as ammunition rather than as ammunition delivery vehicles. Because the next phase of the conflict, after both sides have a million drones, comes down to who has better software. If one side has a million drones and the other side is stuck with traditional military hardware like tanks and helicopters and fighter jets, the side with a million drones wins, just like how in WW2, if one side had an aircraft carrier and the other side had a fleet of battleships, the aircraft carrier won. But as soon as both sides started having aircraft carriers, things like the quality of the pilots and planes started mattering. Same here - once you have drone parity, the side with the better software wins.
> In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones.
This is not how militaries work. Military forces exist to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Combat is literally the ultimate team sport. A world full of drones still has a need for F-22s or similar. Just with proper short-range air defenses around their airfields.
It's not who has the coolest piece of gear; it's who can employ everything and everyone they have in the most effective fashion to accomplish the goal of national leadership.
I don't disagree, but economies also function on tradeoffs. At some point you have to decide whether you allocate the productive capacity of the economy to F-22s or to drones. That "most effective fashion" changes as the technology level of the economy changes.
nostrademons says >" In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones."<
Timing!
F-22s could destroy drone factories, drone manufacturers' supply chains, factories, etc. A million drones don't just appear in the air battle-ready. And vice-versa.
So it boils down to timing and finding the right tool for the job.
However it's certainly easier to spread drone manufacturing out. And multiple sources for the same part versus F-22s convoluted and highly specialised supply chain.
Turns out when you don't have a human in an aircraft that you need to keep alive, you can get away without a lot.
Ukraine could go through 1M drones in 2-4 months. This isn’t a strategically meaningful stockpile. I think this is just to address our military technology deficit and get drones into training exercises and evaluate vendors. I don’t expect the US to ever again produce any weapon systems at scale beyond policing operations.
Companies like Anduril Industries and Skydio are quickly advancing in this field. I think they will be billion dollar companies eventually solely based off their drone tech.
The only way you don't see the value of drones is if you were knocked into a coma in January 2022 and just woke up. The US can make good weaponry if it keeps the usual bureaucratic shitheadery and cronyism to a manageable level. Only time will tell if that plays out.
> Reuters has reported that the Pentagon's DOGE unit is leading efforts to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months.
This is without a doubt the smartest use of DOGE engineers I've heard of yet.
I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense.
For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.
It doesn't say if a million drones are going to be purchased from a defense contractor. Hopefully it goes to a commerical US drone company that makes drones for consumers, film, inspections, etc with an order of million military-harden drones from the Goverment. There would an expection they could tool up to many millions in a time of conflict.
Defense contractors already cover small batches of super-specialized drones.
> we must massively subsidize defense-specific (drone) manufacturers
That's a feature not a bug, it's called the military-industrial complex, some people benefit from it, a lot
This misses a very important point, which is that civilian manufacturing can be pivoted easily to defense manufacturing during wartime. Absent civilian manufacturing, you have no choice but to invest in dedicated defense manufacturing, which is not useful in peacetime (beyond deterrence).
The deindustrialization that creates this reality has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. They benefit from it but they didn't create the context.
That's what the U.S. army used to do, and why they invested in the Silicon Valley. [1] Also a lot of research grants still flow out of the DoD.
[1]https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/
The US often funds military companies with the goal of consumer spin-offs. The aerospace majors are similar.
The inversion of state capitalism vs free markets here is amusing.
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
> reorient our education system away from performative progressive ideology and towards achieving practical results.
NCLB was cooked up by Republicans along with defunding schools, school choice, and the homeschooling. You are correct that it is performative but there is nothing progressive about the last 20 years of public education.
You're pointing the the wrong direction there, look at the groups actually attacking and refusing to fund public schools better in the US... The actual issue is the systematic dismantling of public education for religious and ideological reasons; evolution, climate change, vaccinations all ideologically convenient to the religious conservative right in the US.
We need adequate funding for public schools but there is no real correlation between funding levels and student outcomes. A lot of that money is simply being frittered away. One of the best ways to start would be to destroy teacher's unions because they usually act in ways contrary to students' best interests.
Going to need one hell of a citation on that first claim because there's a lot of evidence showing reality follows the opposite intuitive correlation, additional funding does provide better outcomes. [0]
> destroy teacher's unions
States have tried doing essentially that and it's not worked for decades. So I say we should actually fund schools, pay and support teachers like we actually want educated kids before we try yet again to blame underpaid, undersupplied teachers trying to wrangle ballooning class sizes of rowdy kids.
[0] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/how-money-matter...
I would argue the educational teaching criterias from the states (and fed) are the problem with educational outcome, not the teachers unions.
It wasn't the progressives that just slashed the science research budgets in half :/
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
The Army already has a branch specifically devoted to engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers. While its primary focus is civil engineering, training and employing electrical and electronics engineers certainly doesn't seem out of the question.
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.
I'm struggling to find an academic source to provide any level of detail beyond confirming this basic fact, but Germany and Britain's economic ties before WW1 were actually not too different. They were rivals but also major trading partners.
I won't try to shoehorn the past into the present, but for the very specific point about intertwined economies, it has in fact happened before.
> "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.
> "plugging drone bits from China together".
China has more or less stopped selling those bits to Ukraine
Reference?
And is China restricting sales of drone motors to the US? As part of the rare earth trade embargoes?
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.
using all these personal adjectives to describe the world economy strikes me as very chauvinistic, and I am not convinced the cold war was such a good thing that we need another!
Everyone has a personal ideal view of what life should be. Some people are content to chill and have creature comforts, no stress. I've no problem with that view, but it's not my disposition. I want to push boundaries.
It just so happens that competition pushes technology further. It puts a sharp edge on investment dollars and intellectual capital. A lot of money gets spent, but it gets spent smartly.
WWI and WWII - horrible and tragic - pushed us so hard that people alive as teenagers during the invention of flight lived to see a man walk on the moon.
The cold war created the PC, internet, and planted the seeds for the smartphone and AI.
We had a whole lot of incrementalism in the 00's - 20's. Ad tech, emojis on smartphones, so many social networks. I want to see all of that turned on its head, everything pushed forward 10x. By the time I die, I want to see robots, whole body transplants, autonomous everything, brain uploads, VR indistinguishable from life, cures to every cancer, decelerated aging, widespread access to middle class standard of living. I have so much desire for this and it's all I want for.
That's going to require pushing through an economic and technological salient. Competition accelerates that.
It's time for America to stop being weak and naive. Lazily greedy. To stop spending on ad tech upgrades and instead sow the seeds of a scientific and industrial powerhouse.
When we focus on protecting rather than optimizing eyeball engagement and becoming pilfering middle men, we make the greatest strides.
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.”
The real breakthrough would be to build the capacity of building something at scale just in time instead of allocating big contracts to build or maintain an industry even if not needed at a given moment. A pipe dream of course. Moreover i fear these hardware (smaller in size, and with technologies evolving quickly) become obsolete sooner and are harder to upgrade to new standard (than say a F-35 - sic), and at scale.
This isn't enough drones. Instead of treating them as consumables, we're repeating the mistakes of Germany in WW2, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, resulting in neither.
If they can't produce a million per month, we're going to lose any actual war.
Still no real explanation for the drone incursions over dozens of military bases and nuclear sites last year (including Picatinny), or the incursions happening all over Europe right now
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I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities.
Ah yes, those famous warmongering Europeans, attacking Gleiwitz all over again
> I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities.
Based on what?
> further hatred of Russia
Russia, being an agressor terrorist state perpetrating a genocide on Europe's doorstep, is already hated by anyone with half a brain half following the news. Be it the bombing of children's hopitals or sending incendiary devices via DHL or bombing munitions depots in Czechia and Bulgaria or assasinating defectors with gruesome indiscriminate chemical or radiological warfare, they are well known, well documented, pieces of shit. Did we mention them kidnapping Ukrainian children to resettle and give for adoption to Russian families? Torturing POWs and civlians? Genuinely, they're not even trying not to be comically evil. Whatever heinous act you can think of, they've probably done it as an official state sanctioned policy.
Why would European states need to invent stuff - and note, nobody has said that it was Russian drones, a ship was impounded and its crew arrested off France for failing to provide documentation, and there have been hints it's suspected of being the drone launch platform that impacted Copehnagen Airport, but nothing has been officially said - when there is so much shit, which is publicly documented and widely accepted? We know they tried to kidnap journalists, assasinated people all over Europe, etc etc etc. If European countries wanted to respond more heavily, most of the population would be for and the main argument against would be the fact that the terrorist state has nuclear weapons, which drastically complicats the equation. If they didn't have them, things would have been so much simpler and better for everyone.
I regularly see comments on HN that worry about how our output is lower than China. Their population is 4x ours. They have long used financial repression to encourage industrial development. The incentives toward overcapacity, price wars, and domestic competition are so strong that they are actively trying to curtail it. Why should I endorse a defense strategy that is guaranteed to enrich ideologues in Silicon Valley, but not likely to achieve anything else?
A million drones is a rounding error in China. Increasing this number by orders of magnitude would require the state administering some pretty big pills, which I doubt the average American would want to swallow.
1 million *overpriced drones. Ah, military contracts.
Hilarious when someone with decent maker experience can plug shit together in a shed to easily make a hunter-killer drone these days. Just missing the explosives.
The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. There's certainly the issue of "military equipment gets more extensive testing", but capitalism has answered that somewhat; defective products are extremely bad for corporations and I do wonder if the failure rate of modern electronics approaches that of some military hardware specs (though not necessarily in ruggedness).
> The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them.
That was like 18 months ago. Since then both sides have been forced to iterate at an insane speed.
FWIW the Trump family has inserted themselves on boards of various drone companies...
Donald Trump Jr. was appointed to the advisory board of a small, Florida-based drone component company called Unusual Machines in November 2024. [1] He is also an investor in the company and holds a significant financial stake (reported to be worth around $4 million). Following his appointment, the company's stock price experienced a sharp increase. [2] In October 2025, the company announced it had secured a contract with the U.S. Army to supply drone motors and other components, described by the CEO as their largest-ever U.S. government order. The Army also signaled plans for a possible follow-on order for additional components in 2026.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1956955/000168316824...
[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/umac-stock-climbs-amid-trump...
there is another drone company too, not just unusual machines. Though not sure which son, they might have put the other son on the other one.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/drone-company...
ah very clever to put them on "advisory boards". All of the influence and insider info and none of the paper trail.
And yet, UMAC's down today.
War can be very profitable
feels like grift.
i'm sure I'll get downvoted for this comment, but it always feels like a way to enrich themselves.
You're absolutely right!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-13/the-banke...
Horrible as it sounds, that may explain the plan to buy drones instead of a plan to spin up the manufacturing capacity to make millions of drones.
But also we need to look at it from the perspective of leaders as well. You want to spin up manufacturing capacity so you roll out policies to do that and what happens in a republic? Every leader demands the manufacturing be in their district/state. No matter how ill suited that district/state is to that manufacturing. Political considerations become the driving factor as opposed to ability, resiliency and sustainability.
So sometimes just providing demand side of a market can spin up manufacturing without having to wade into all that nonsense. And believe me, it would be nonsense.
So the double fail of their brazen corruption could inadvertently end up being a positive long term in this particular instance. Like multiplying two negative numbers.
This field moves so quickly. Is this mostly pork or a strategic "they won't be useful, but building up development and production capacity is the goal" kind of thing?
Edit: Foreign perspective: Saab (Sweden) is pitching drones as a service (DaaS?) to Sweden as a way to enable short development cycles, similar to those in Ukraine, while minimizing waste due to purchasing bureaucracy.
I don't think it's pork. Drones have proven their usefulness on the modern battlefield, and those million drones probably cost about as much as about a squadron of F-22s. In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones.
I do think that they're making a mistake by considering drones as ammunition rather than as ammunition delivery vehicles. Because the next phase of the conflict, after both sides have a million drones, comes down to who has better software. If one side has a million drones and the other side is stuck with traditional military hardware like tanks and helicopters and fighter jets, the side with a million drones wins, just like how in WW2, if one side had an aircraft carrier and the other side had a fleet of battleships, the aircraft carrier won. But as soon as both sides started having aircraft carriers, things like the quality of the pilots and planes started mattering. Same here - once you have drone parity, the side with the better software wins.
> In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones.
This is not how militaries work. Military forces exist to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Combat is literally the ultimate team sport. A world full of drones still has a need for F-22s or similar. Just with proper short-range air defenses around their airfields.
It's not who has the coolest piece of gear; it's who can employ everything and everyone they have in the most effective fashion to accomplish the goal of national leadership.
I don't disagree, but economies also function on tradeoffs. At some point you have to decide whether you allocate the productive capacity of the economy to F-22s or to drones. That "most effective fashion" changes as the technology level of the economy changes.
nostrademons says >" In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones."<
Timing!
F-22s could destroy drone factories, drone manufacturers' supply chains, factories, etc. A million drones don't just appear in the air battle-ready. And vice-versa.
So it boils down to timing and finding the right tool for the job.
However it's certainly easier to spread drone manufacturing out. And multiple sources for the same part versus F-22s convoluted and highly specialised supply chain.
Turns out when you don't have a human in an aircraft that you need to keep alive, you can get away without a lot.
I Ukraine would have had 10 F-22s with munitions and supply chain the war would have ended long ago.
Ukraine could go through 1M drones in 2-4 months. This isn’t a strategically meaningful stockpile. I think this is just to address our military technology deficit and get drones into training exercises and evaluate vendors. I don’t expect the US to ever again produce any weapon systems at scale beyond policing operations.
Yes, if they are capable enough. I get the feeling they iterate very quickly there. Is that compatible with US procurement procedures?
Companies like Anduril Industries and Skydio are quickly advancing in this field. I think they will be billion dollar companies eventually solely based off their drone tech.
Anduril already raised at a $30B valuation
hell yeah. they are making a ton of awesome things.
Little of column A, little of column B.
The only way you don't see the value of drones is if you were knocked into a coma in January 2022 and just woke up. The US can make good weaponry if it keeps the usual bureaucratic shitheadery and cronyism to a manageable level. Only time will tell if that plays out.
Trump's son started a drone company a few weeks back... The velocity of the grift will pick up.
> Reuters has reported that the Pentagon's DOGE unit is leading efforts to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months.
This is without a doubt the smartest use of DOGE engineers I've heard of yet.
I didn't know DOGE survived Musk's exit...
Mostly neutered, but still around. They basically took over the US Digital Service and their internal consulting services.
TIL DOGE has engineers