USA Unable to Make Drones Without Components from China | Hacker News Reader

USA Unable to Make Drones Without Components from China

militarnyi.com

13 pointscroes9 comments

Historically, a country being able to create, equip, and supply its own military forces was "table stakes" for being a serious power. Vs. being a knows-its-place junior coalition partner. Or a helpless bystander. Or a battlefield. Or one of the "spoils of war" which the serious powers fought to secure.

That critical task was not entrusted to the invisible hand of capitalism. America founded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Armory in 1777. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Navy_Yard was established in 1799. There were many more such facilities - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Army_ar... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_Yard .

But, sadly, "Greed Is Our One-And-Only God" modern capitalism is incompatible with such long-term concern for national security. And with $billions in defense contract profits at stake, the capitalists refused to tolerate competition from gov't-owned and operated facilities. So between the 1960's and today, virtually all of America's historic armories and navy yards have been shut down and sold off.

By many accounts, the History Dept's in most of America's colleges and universities are now on the chopping block.

It would appear that the CCP still studies history.

Ukrainians eventually overcame it and now produce entirely China-free drones apart from IR lenses (when they are needed), and magnets. If that was possible surely bigger countries can do it easily.

Or maybe even buy the components from Ukraine if they’re producing at scale, not their priority at the moment but would provide some leverage for support.

Or Trump just blackmails them like before with Ukraine's natural resources.

The US need long term replacement for Chinese parts, Ukrain needs short term intel.

The US have the bigger lever.

Both have alternative suppliers, at least on paper.

Ukraine can get intel from France, etc.: https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-military-intellige...

In practice, it may be that NATO desperately needs Ukrainian military personnel to personally share their experience with drone warfare, or risk being Blitzkrieg'd by an equally drone-experienced Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZL1KzV54Cw

In reality, drones only matter because neither Ukraine nor Russia has a viable air force able to operate in SAM-rich environment, and they both ran out of artillery shells having to make do with the small amounts they can produce/buy. So it's not like that drones came out as superior to everything else, but everything else went out of business.

Drones are too low and too slow to counter planes. If either side had an air superiority, drones won't matter as theatre isolation will make them irrelevant.

If drones look like some uber weapon these days it's an aberration coming from archaic nature of both armies otherwise, at least now after their stock of munitions have been expended. Surely if there was a war of Iran vs Iraq nowadays, drones will probably be just as relevant. But not US vs China as both sides have workable air forces. And navies.

But you can ask, how come they’ve run out of artillery shells and haven’t run out of drones?

Answer: because drones are cheaper and easier to produce.

That suggests that drones will be a significant factor in any future conflict that occurs over an extended period of time. Russia is a country of 143 million people under an authoritarian regime that has been able to switch the economy to a war footing. If Russia can’t produce enough artillery shells, probably no-one can.

The effects of attrition on air power are also hard to predict as there’s very little recent data to go on. How long would it take the US to run out of F-22s during an extended war against a capable adversary? Possibly not very long, unless those planes are absolutely everything that they’re cracked up to be.

This is not true. Even though drones are assembled domestically, both sides get components like chips, motors, batteries etc from China.

Most of the drones, sure, but they also have a low-level (a few thousands per month) production of those with almost no China-origin components - only Ukrainian or Western made. They are still pricier than all-China though, at almost $1000 per (night vision) FPV drone able to carry 2kg.

Only really hard-to-replace part is magnets for electric motors.

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