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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

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drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.

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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.

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/

San Fran historically saw a ton of investment from the Navy, not the Army. The article provided -- which has wayyyy to many underlined links, hideous article -- only goes back to the ~60's, but the USN and USMC were heavily involved in Cali developments long before.

The general point -- the DoD puts a lot of money into Silicon Valley research -- stands, however.

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.

> 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.

The consumer drone market is a small fraction of the military market. Consumer drones are also cheaper and less powerful.

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