Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race
seanobannon.substack.com
seanobannon.substack.com
The main story is about Manna, an Irish company, but that doesn't help the US itself as they aren't made in the US. The article is advocating for a similar regulatory regime as Manna (and presumably others) have received in Ireland here in the US, and then name drops Anduril near the end.
Anduril's current business is to become part of the military industrial complex, but if regulations are changed they could shift their production towards commercial projects and expand their business.
If you go further than that, successfully producing delivery drones means that they need to carry a payload safely to some destination, deliver the payload nicely (as in, smoothly leave a parcel on the ground), come back and be reusable. The drone flies by GPS, but doesn't really need a radio signal (ideally there is no operator, the drone just goes, delivers and comes back).
Killer drones are "one-way". They are defined by a lifetime of like 25min, ending up violently in a place where the operators care about maximising damage. They fly in war zones. Nobody really cares if some percentage of the drones falls from the sky or doesn't explode upon contact. They need to fly in GPS-denied mode, and they probably need a radio for the operator to select the target when the times comes. This has to be a military-grade radio that works in the presence of jamming to some extent.
Those are very different projects. Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.
If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today. In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.
I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.
And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary
One of the previous defense minister was skeptical of their utility too and called them “wedding drones”, and now you can see very frequently in war footages mentions how they are using “wedding drones” in this or that reconnaissance or surveillance operation.
You absolutely need tens of thousands of drones in the air all the time to support modern warfare.
And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.
“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.
Given the choice between a $200 DJI and a $100 homebuilt "killer" drone, you would probably want 2x of the killer drones. However, if your bottleneck is your manufacturing capabilities instead of your money, then you might be forced to use the DJI drones instead of the custom killers.
DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on.
Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the video data is a significant chunk of the total personnel in this war.
Without having that, killer drones are not effective, since they are very short-lived, have very poor cameras and power characteristics. It is very difficult to find enemy with self-made drones.
So I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly into a cheap mass produced war-time surveillance drone with minimal effort.
The same goes for software - both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".
For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right?
> I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly
It could potentially be repurposed relatively quickly if it was well designed. But what tells you it will be? Most software is not very well designed, and in the western drone industry it's particularly right, in my experience. If you subsidise a company to make military drones and they write bad software, you will still end up with a military drone ("the software is bad but it lasts 25min most of the time"). If you subsidise a company to make survey drones in the hope that their design will be good enough to be quickly ported to military needs...
> both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".
I highly doubt that. Civilian radios are easily jammed.
In practice, jamming of wide area is not a solved problem. It is easy to jam GPS because its signal is already weak, or a cell phone in a city, but it is very difficult to jam a drone in the sky which have a line-of sight to the antenna or a retranslation drone. Also all modern cheap drones have a way to switch frequencies if one gets jammed, and jamming all frequencies is also very very difficult.
You either need to have a very big powerful machinery - which is very easy to detect location of and send a HIMARS rocket. Or a huge number of smaller devices, which is impractical as you don't have power in trenches.
So in practice, drone jamming is only effective in the last 100-200 meters from the target (if it is a vehicle with power source) which doesn't really matters for surveillance drones as they do their job from the distance.
> Civilian radios are easily jammed.
In theory, in practice on the battlefield, when drones can switch frequencies on the go - very very difficult with the exception of the last hundred meters.
Because of this, modern killer drones now have a primitive "AI" to lock on the target on the last meters of approach.
Funny you should say that. The US had in 1938 a grand total of about 38 tanks. WWII started a few years later, and after converting prewar automobile factories to tank factories, the USA built more tanks than every other nation combined.
Pretty much the same thing happened for airplanes, as mentioned in the article.
US industrial production was literally the arsenal of democracy.
It is a LOT easier to convert commercial manufacturing base to military purposes than to start from scratch. So, yes, subsidizing commercial production to stay in-country is definitely good for mil readiness (and ultimately, the tank business).
That is an excellent reason to subsidize maintaining convertible or dual-use tech in the civilian arena. e.g., make sure turbines are used in more civilian uses. Stockpile tech that is really civilian incompatible such as the depleted uranium armor.
Turbines are a good example of how a civilian tech could have gone differently. In the 1960s several turbine-powered cars were in development for street use and a turbine race car qualified and lead most of the 1967 Indianapolis 500 race. But then the USAC effectively disqualified it [0], and civilian development stopped for other reasons. But it arguably might have continued had turbine power been allowed to race and dominate.
Yet, turbines are used both for aircraft and for natural gas power, both stationary and portable, and there are many small turbines. So, of course, we would not go to an ICE engine builder but to the builders of aircraft and gas power plants. There are also manufacturers of small-scale turbines that might ramp up.
On the other hand, we can also look at how modern warfare has changed over the last three years. multi-million dollar tanks are being reliably destroyed by $800 drones. And drone tech is highly fungible. Many common computer chips and boards can be used to control it, many common lightweight motors will work, and composites or lightweight metals can make the bodies. All of these technologies are highly configurable, so it would be a short lead time to make new factories to turn out pretty much whatever shape drone we wanted, whether it is flying, rolling, or swimming.
In today's world the assembly line itself is derived from CAD, robot CNC machines, and the workforce is not specialized. The workforce consists of "assemblers" and machine operators, moreso than "machinists" or "machine designers"
This difference between workforces is a potentially profound difference.
That said, I'd still say having one capability today still makes a far shorter path to convert from Civ-to-Mil output. I run a carbon-fiber composites shop that does everything from design through materials, CAD, CAM, moldmaking, forming with multiple technologies, CNC machining, and assembly. It would be a straightforward task to setup for new Mil products (and not just because we already do some Mil work), especially compared to not having it at all.
I mean, in WWII, a lot of car manufacturers made tanks instead. Buick made the Hellcat, Chrysler, Ford and a variety of train manufacturers made the Sherman, and on and on. The skills are much more transferable than a lot of other fields.
In fact, this is explicitly why the US and others subsidize their passenger car industries.
This probably wouldn't work as well today, because most modern automakers just do engine design, assembly, and pick some parts out of a Bosch catalog, but I bet the more ambitious, vertically integrated automakers like BYD or Tesla could do an OK job in a pinch.
The US would do well to start catching up on that technology.
BTW, I assume that when/if the Ukraine war ends, the Ukrainian drone industry will be the best in the world.
So yes, drones and other unmanned munitions are game changers. I just wish the argument wasn't "increase civilian drones so we have a rich and vibrant military industrial complex ready for when we get to destroy things."
Then again, some of what the article is kinda saying is "if there's civilian applications for this, you don't need to have a military industrial complex (until you're forced to on a wartime footing, at which point you're not starting from zero)." Which is basically the strategic-importance argument that is keeping Boeing afloat these days...
Taiwan should be building a lot of drones if they intend to fight. However, that's not the only possibility; recent shifts in US posture may encourage the "voluntary reintegration" local political faction, including the possibility of handing over TSMC intact.
Russia's experience with drones vs. her guided missile cruisers has more than enough there to translate to more capable aircraft carriers.
China has (checks wikipedia) three operational carriers, one very modern Fujian, the obsolete former training ship Liaoning, and Shandong, which appears to be halfway between the two, the first locally built carrier. During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon... (interesting and varied history!)
And would have absolutely no way to reach that scale again. Or the equivalent in drone production, which is why it’s absolutely preposterous to take a hostile attitude towards our closest neighbors and trade and potentially put our geographical advantages at risk.
I was reading something that said militarily, the US is now in the same position that Japan was prior to WWII because we've outsourced so much of our production.
What they need and they have is enough weapons to destroy any US aircraft carrier approaching their coast.
Naval power doesn't mean just aircraft carriers and China has 100x shipbuilding capacity US has.
The notion of unsinkable carriers is mostly fiction. In WWII I think almost every CV America entered the war with (but 3, Enterprise, Saratoga and Ranger) was sunk by ‘44.
I'd say it already is.
This sounds like it's dramatically under-estimating the Chinese engineers. If you take a drone today, like a DJI Mavic. Pretty much every single component of that drone is better than what we can do - at scale - in the West. It's not like we sent them blueprints and they mass produced the drones. Their technology is first class, arguably better than the West in the field of robotics.
Drone hardware in software are mature. Adoption is more matter of observing tactics and human interaction
That seems way off. See the recent euromaidanpress headline:
>Defense News: Ukraine plans 15-km unmanned “kill zone” along Russian front as drone production hits 4,000+ daily https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/02/defense-news-ukraine-...
Which is kind of interesting strategically. I was thinking Ukraine can't really afford to keep losing large numbers of soldiers and will probably try switching to drones to hold the Russians back. It's probably a technology that favours defenders over attackers as the defenders can work from hidden bunkers but the attackers have to move above ground.
Would note that Russia’s failure to execute combined-arms manoeuvre-based warfare technically makes it a static fighting force.
I’m not suggesting they aren’t a lethal fighting force. They’re just not a dynamic one. They still rely on static tactics, i.e. blowing up the enemy, versus dynamic ones that rely on manoeuvre.
I don’t know where you draw the line between static and dynamic/modern but IMO they’re clearly in the latter mode at least some of the time, even though it’s hard to tell which attacks are strategic and which are the result of combined arms tactics due to fog of war.
“Biddle identifies what he calls the ‘Modern System’ of combat (though I am going to treat it a bit more broadly than he does). In short, it’s a set of tactics and operational art that emerged out of the First World War and were refined in the European theaters (East and West) of the Second, to cope with the tremendous potency of industrialized firepower which had fundamentally reshaped war. Rather than relying on fixed positions for defense and dense shock-formations (‘shock’ here – think ‘bayonets, grenades and trench-knives’), the modern system relies on cover-and-concealment for survivability and maneuver in the offense (go around, not through your opponent’s overwhelming firepower). Adroit use of terrain on the tactical level is a key component of the system, which in turn requires both extensive training of junior officers and NCOs and devolving quite a bit of command agency down to them so that they can make local decisions (compare to, for instance, linear tactics which leave virtually no decision-making to the individual rifleman).
…
Static-System armies, since – as we’ll see – in modern warfare, they tend to be a fair bit more fixed and static than the modern system armies (note: I’m going to keep calling them ‘armies’ for simplicity, but the modern system combined land and air assets), preferring to dig in for sieges and trench warfare. So again: static system (old, cheap) vs. modern system (new, expensive). And remember: this is a difference in doctrine not equipment, in how an army expects to fight their battles and how they actually do – a difference in how, not in what. It is possible to have all of the tools of the modern system, and still not have the training or will to do the modern system (indeed, Iraq did just this in 1991 and got torn apart for it). You can buy tanks and planes, but you cannot buy the modern system, you must train it.“
Russia’s human waves are a trench tactic. Command flows entirely top down. They’re going straight at the enemy. And training is virtually impossible given the expendability of their troops.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Edit: if you are so inclined, Commanding Military Power: Organizing for Victory and Defeat on the Battlefield by Ryan Grauer, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and Airland Battle by Robert Leonhard, and Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century by Jonathan House would provide a more rounded view of the academic debate. The latter is particularly relevant because it looks at Russia’s tactics in Chechnya.
(recent sky new footage of them being sent off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEwObPT8zE)
- Putin is actively taking Ukrainian territory by force
- Trump is threatening to take Greenland, Canada and the Panama canal by (economic) force
- Xi Jinping is threatening to take Taiwanese territory by force
Of all three, Jinping seems like the smallest threat to the "world order".
If you're talking about economic power, that's a different story but I wouldn't call them "adversary" in that context.
Putin is in a hot war right now. Xi seems to be actively preparing for one. The chance of the US sitting aside a military invasion of Taiwan seems very low to me.
Ukraine has made pretty clear that drones will play a huge roll in future major conflicts. It's crazy that we haven't already shifted major portions of the defense budget from legacy weapons systems (e.g. tanks) to drones.
I'm not sure if I'd be rooting for this eventuality.
Small drones do not assume the role of tanks. Drones assume the role of WW1 aircraft: artillery spotters and very light bombing capability. They have this role there because both sides have SAM superiority over the other's airforce.
Drones solve the problem that combat aircraft are too expensive and too easy to shoot down.
I'm not saying they do. I was replying to a comment.
Define "light". Ukraine is fielding FPV drones with EFPs attached that can easily slice into anything armored.
But would this still be the case for a conflict with US involvement?
That's what those capabilities are designed to do ("SEAD"), but they're very expensive. And so strategic that the US wasn't willing to let the Ukranians have any.
If they work like they should on paper and can keep the opponents pinned to the ground under US air supremacy it'll be great but there's always that little doubt that it will work as well against a more evenly match opponent like a theoretical US v Russia/China when it's not punching down so far.
My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it, but I don't think that's the way forward. It needs to be known that we've absolutely mastered them.
You know, kind of like the Chinese have done with their drone shows at the Olympics and similar events.
What would you call the Reapers and such? The US has a massive fleet of large, armed drones, remotely operated, and quite a few are capable of being armed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicles_in_th...
It's different from the consumer/small commercial drones being talked about here, but the US Military is pretty darn good at UAVs.
It's definitely a concern as part of a larger attack, but I don't think a quadcopter drone swarm alone is likely to sink a carrier or leave it combat ineffective in the long term.
A few nice miniguns with radars sensitive enough to pick up birds that fire flak.
Auto cannons.
Missiles.
... Lasers.
I am confused.
The US has massive fleets of military drones of every type and size that have been proven in combat environments. They literally pioneered the development of this type of military system and have been using them operationally decades before anyone else. Did everyone just forget this?
The US has extremely mature and capable drone technology, much better than a lot of what is being used in Ukraine. Really the only question is the ability of the US to scale production if it needed to.
The US leads in larger drones, like the Global Hawk, which is the size of a regional airliner, can stay airborne for more than a day, and cover tens of thousands of kilometers in that time. The smaller and cheaper ones are just expensive toys, far behind what's seen in Ukraine in terms of actual usefulness. A cheap Chinese agricultural sprayer drone with equally cheap 3D-printed drum of infantry grenades or an anti-tank mine strapped to it outperforms most "military grade" commercial offerings like Switchblade that cost ten times as much and are good for only a single use, unlike the sprayer, which returns home after dropping its payload.
There is much to learn about drone warfare from Ukraine but I would not expect a conflict with advanced technical capabilities to look similar.
https://www.marines.mil/News/News-Display/Article/2857680/fo...
“Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.“ What is that supposed to mean? A drone has a lot of parts. I can make 2 1/2 drones a day if I have the parts.