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Comment by kaibee | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.

> You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.

DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated factory if you're selling at a massive scale. Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

And it's also dumb to fund your opponent's war production lines.

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> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

1. It is a bad idea to use national defense in this manner. There are more honest tools that can be used, see two.

2. Using tariff or other trade tools can blunt the impact of DJI's market position and allow for US entrants to develop. [0]

A weakness of both nat-sec bans and tariffs is that they don't actually do anything to encourage a company like Anduril to make the pro/sumer stuff needed for volume sales to develop broad acceptance, fast iteration and well founded supply chains.

0. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/03/larger-lesson...

> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

I anticipate exactly zero automated drone factories.

I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.

Sure, but you won't be allowed to buy one for less than the cost of a small car.

which, the factory that builds drones or the drones themselves?

What would stop someone from building their own cargo container sized drone factory that takes parts like motors, pcbs, batteries in one end and spits out finished drones on the other?

"automated factory" is somewhat redundant, no?

The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.

I am of the opinion that the US made a very serious mistake by opening up tariff-free trade with countries which do not have comparable labor and environmental safety laws. The Feds should have come up with reasonable estimates of what foreign manufacturing was saving by cheating that way, and charged them that amount of money to sell products in the US. Factories which wanted to avoid those tariffs could pay for, and submit to, an independent audit of their factories.

Instead we decided that it was fine for US manufacturing to compete on an "even" basis with nations who are fine with laborers losing fingers and/or getting paid slave wages, and manufacturers dumping their waste stream into a nearby river. We've paid a severe price for that misguided egalitarianism, and it's time to change course.

> US made a very serious mistake by

Was it a mistake if the goal was to get cheaper products at the expense of foreigners losing fingers?

I agree it is myopic policy for the long term, but certainly many voters are happy to push safety problems somewhere else.

It is bad policy long term, and this policy has been around for a long time. At some point we need to address bad policy.

As duties and trade restrictions were dropped in the late 70s and 80s, the mantra was that by doing so, the West would "uplift" poorer countries such as China. The goals to improve quality of life, transform the third world from agrarian to mass production, with a hope of spreading democratic principles as well.

And yes, over and over this was the desireded goal, I remember the election campaigns, the speeches, the white papers, the think tanks.

This has mostly been a success, looking at many such countries. The standard of living has gone up, for example China now has a "middle class" of sorts.

Environmental concerns were not on the radar at the time, not 50 years ago, not like today.

The intentions were reasonably positive and well founded. Of course, I agree reassessment is necessary, and it really should always be.

It was great for short term profit and stock value and everyone involved in making those choices is either dead or soon to be dead and doesn’t have to deal with the fallout.

>The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.

In the consumer market, if the $1000 drone has a significantly worse user experience then people just won't buy it. Before DJI the consumer drone market was much smaller; by creating a cheap, high-quality product DJI caused more people to purchase drones, growing the market. If there's no competitive alternative the market will just shrink again; consumer drones aren't a necessity.

By all reports, Skydio drones offer an excellent user experience.

The DJI Mini 3 Prop is currently $899, and Skydio can't manufacture something like that in the US, and sell it for that amount of money. But I bet they could make something comparable at a sale price of $1100-1300.

Allowing Communists to dump goods in our market is optional. I don't know that I support a ban on DJI products, I have a Mini 2: I like drones, but not enough to drop a couple grand on a Skydio 2 (and note that they exited the consumer market, presumably because of the aforementioned price dumping making it infeasible to compete). I would be pissed off if it was permanently grounded. But at minimum I support tariffs which are heavy enough to give domestic industry a chance to compete on an even footing.

And given the evident relationship between drone technology and national security, I could be persuaded that a full ban is in the national interest. Perhaps (this is only sort of a joke) the NSA could release a full open-source jailbreak of every DJI product, and publish an API for the cloud components which any American compute provider could then offer.

Then block their servers. Let 'em know that we'll let them back in the country when Facebook can operate in China, and not before.

At this point China is about as communist as FedEx is federal. They are “state capitalist” which pretty much means the government owns or has controlling stakes in a lot of companies. Singapore’s is similar.

They copied Lenin’s NEP, which was copied later by the German fascists. As it happens, Sun, Yatsen, on his deathbed, met with Mao one time in Guangzhou and they both agreed a fascist (or state capitalist) system would be best for the Chinese people. That was after NEP but before German fascists rose to power. Of course Stalin put an end to NEP and powered and willed full on communism after Lenin’s death.

> The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.

the time when the US could actually decide this sort of thing at close to planet scale is long gone. if you ban those devices, there will be countless other nations (including close friends of the US) where you will be able to buy them no problem.

High volume single-use drones and DJI drones are almost completely orthogonal in terms of technology, production, and procurement. The only thing they really share is MEMS gyroscopes and brushless motor windings. Making a million FPV bomb drones and making a million consumer camera drones are such dramatically different tasks that there is not a chance this theory holds water.

You should look at see what kind of drones are dominating Ukraine's skies. You'd see some water being held. And you probably should have googled this before making this comment.

I'm quite familiar with this space, thanks :)

DJI drones are being used in significantly lower quantities as "base stations" and long-range reconnaissance applications, with the occasional bomb-dropping side run.

FPV drones are being used in much, much, much higher quantity than DJI drones, owing to their massively lower cost to produce due to ... the simpler and mostly orthogonal supply chain!

Financing a consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability with an end goal of enabling the construction of large quantities of one-way FPV drones, as the parent post to mine suggested, would not be a good strategy, IMO.

Having domestic consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability at all is of course a good idea, but the quantity needed in war fighting is significantly lower, at least with the current tools and techniques seen in Ukraine.

Most of the kamikaze drone videos I see use Betaflight OSD. DJI is kinda expensive for suicide missions.

>This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.

Single use drones could exist without subsidizing by the consumer industry. Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands. Anything else would simply lead to overdesign and basically the same problem we have now where the enemy is simply lobbing cheap artillery in volume while we simply do not have smart missiles to spare for Ukraine, nor for ourselves if we got into such a war. Lmao.

The American MIC is largely...maliciously incompetent. I work in this sector. Overdesigning, so you can slap a 500% profit margin on something with more features than ever needed. Then you lobby the generals in charge of project funding with dinners, gifts and more.

> Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands.

I'm under the impression that the supply-chain for Ukrainian drones basically leads to China in the same way that it does for Russia. For a "small" regional conflict, this isn't a problem to Ukraine because there's no way China could or would restrict supply of their cheap drones. But for a large-scale conflict, it would be a problem for the US to not be able to source drone motors by the 10,000's.

> The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale

But yet they have no trouble procuring single-use (by definition) artillery shells that cost an order of magnitude more and require even more production volume?

Except - they have. All Artillery Shell Plants in all NATO countries combined (minus Hungary, because f* Orban) are unable to produce enough shells just for the War in Ukraine. The US has completely gutted their manufacturing base, and currently won't be able to compete in a peer conflict on a ling term basis. Not enough shell and ammo production, not enough logistical capability, not enough ships, not enough dock capacity...

Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.

I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136?

The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.

I don't understand why every estimate assumes Russian and Iranian engineers work for free and only include the raw material/components cost of these weapons systems.

R&D costs makes up the vast majority of the cost of Western weapons systems.

They don't. The estimates are typically 3x-4x the cost of the raw materials. Besides, for these weapons it's the marginal cost that counts.

> I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points.

I think you're 100% right here.

It may seem absurd, but something that can take out a main battle tank would be well worth $20,000. An M1A2 Abrams costs $24 million. The latest model Russian T-90 is around $4 million. A Chinese Type 99 is around $2.5 million. The asymmetry is clear.

Some of that $20,000 is making sure it works reliably under any conceivable weather conditions, after it's been stuck in a storage container at +50 C/-30C for weeks or months, etc.

On the other hand, if you're just doing reconnaissance, maybe you'd rather send a swarm of 20 $1,000 drones instead (in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy's countermeasures).

UA is showing the world what can be done with <$1k drones. China has that market locked down right now, presumably this legislation is aiming at that market. This isn't about Reaper-scale drones.

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