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