European economies have retained capacities in injection molding and other critical industries - and they are ramping up battery and magnet production.
Rare earths are one significant vulnerability, but that's not surprising, as Europe generally tends to depend on other parts of the work for raw materials (but there's Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South America and the US who could step up there).
Yes, China dominates in scale, no question. But your single focus on US capabilities and shortcomings, while important, often misses the developments and capabilities in other parts of world.
Europe is much better placed for mass drone manufacturing than people realize. And Ukraine is the best example.
It seems like the crux of the article is “don’t be complacent”. Use what just happened in Russia as a catalyst for action.
In the meantime the rollback of subsidies in the IRA if realized with reduction our industrial capacity to fight a 21st century war. The fact that battery capacity in particular has been captured as a culture war issue is a huge concern here. Because then we may not just have complacency but active and intentional regression.
Ben, I can see your point about Europe - in theory, I think you're right.
In practice, unlikely...
a) Absolute tax-obsessed government choke the lifeblood out of startups - forbidding them to make any profit, but demanding they hand it all over (profit or reserves - doesn't matter) before you can even invest in anything, so they can feed the nanny-state. Only "old" companies with old money can survive (but not thrive). Bad-shit crazy.
b) Energy is simply too expensive to produce much of anything.
c) Wages are through the roof - mandatory employment schemes, inability to fire workers, etc.
d) Environmental concerns having all but destroyed mining
Sure, when Germany, Poland and France get pummelled hard, things might change. But at a very steep cost. Until that happens, rigor mortis rules.
High taxes do not necessarily deter startup formation, and may in fact _encourage_ startup formation, because it's a lot easier to quit your day job for a startup idea if you're confident that you'll still be able to afford the necessities of life for your family.
The reason so many founders in the US are young men is that young men don't have kids to worry about, and aren't worried about health expenses over the near term.
You go to Norway, and you find a lot more forty-year-olds with families who are founding new companies. If it doesn't work out, they can still be sure that their kids will have a roof over their head, health coverage, and access to good education. I dunno if it's still true, but as of 2011 when this article was written ( https://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html ) they were producing more new companies per capita per year than the US.
Again, Europe is not just the big countries you're mentioning.
Ukraine is Europe - and on the path to the EU - and it's already outproducing almost any other country in the world with drones. Plenty of big and small countries are Europe.
And even the places you mentioned have recently (belatedly, but still) ramped up artillery production to levels that are a multiple of before and a multiple of US production.
Inertia is not the same as not being able to get it done, once the impetus is there.
Eh, taxes are not the problem with startups here. The problem is there's not much to offer to people that is not already offered cheaper by US or Asian companies. (And this product dilemma leads to focusing on small local issues, which lead to small local "startups".) And there's simply not enough capital to tackle big issues.
On average, the European countries analyzed currently levy a corporate income tax rate of 21.3 percent. This is slightly below the worldwide average which, measured across 181 jurisdictions, was 23.45 percent in 2023
There's no point in mining in Europe because of the Baumol effect. (Labor is too expensive.)
....
Yes, firing workers in many European states takes management effort, and ... management is complicit in not giving a fuck about low performers. (Because they too are low performers after all.)
Scale is important. Very important. You are underselling scale. The US can do all these things you described, its just that those companies operate on a cost structure that makes them only able to work on expensive fat US government contracts or large business. Nothing else. China has so much capacity that it can cater to anyone small or large.
Scale is indeed important. But it's way easier to quickly scale from 1 to 100 than from 0. Even easier to scale from 10 to 100 etc.
That's the issue the US faces. In many industries and areas, its manufacturing capacity is zero or close to zero.
Europe has the manufacturing base and skills - not just generally, but also in concrete sectors and areas - to scale up more quickly if needed. And again, Ukraine is the best example.
Every year for the DEFCON conference I make electronic PCBs to give away as puzzles and trinkets as part of their "Badge Life" culture(google it).
Without China's unbelievable low costs, this hobby would not be possible. When I was in college 15 years ago making PCBs in the US cost hundreds of dollars and was a convoluted process that was confusing to non experienced engineers.
China came in and made it so stupidly easy and cheap that youtubers are now creating PCB designs. We are talking single digit dollars for the same product that cost hundreds of dollars 15 years ago. In addition to that they got rid of the convoluted process and made it so that you can drag and drop and their automation would guide you to completion of your order and then a support representative would examine your order before submission. Normally in the US that is reserved for high paying clients not hobbyists.
Of course the US responded, their equivalent price is ~$80 for the same order that would be a few dollars from China (and thats including shipping from China). I would know because when the tariffs hit I started looking at US prices. Abysmal.
There is no incentive to really ramp up at this point. Lets say the tarrifs come back and de minimis goes away. China becomes more expensive than the US. They still sell to the rest of the world, so my european hacker friends still get dirt cheap PCBs while my hobby just dies because it makes no sense to do it at those prices and our volumes are so low that it does not incentive local production to ramp up.
Now you might say the Chinese will get hurt. Of course they will but they already have the capacity and the rest of the world will benefit (even lower prices, more priority etc.)
I dare you to tell me how the US is going to easily ramp all of THOSE processes shown in the video easily.
I'll give you a hint: In the first 5 minutes of the video you see scores of engineers validating customer boards. Those are trained electrical engineers that are doing "customer support" jobs. There are so many trained Chinese people in this field pushing down wages. It results in what is upper middle class wages here being customer support wages in China.
The US does not have hoards of electrical engineers getting paid low wages so the ability to ramp up fails at step 1 in the process.
Btw, I also absolutely believe the US could get into mass manufacturing of drones. But it would need to overcome a couple of hurdles, especially at the beginning. And you dint want to do that when you're already in the middle of a hot conflict.
You can build these drones with the injection molded materials..either short fiber carbon or glass. Pultrusion or extrusion of fiber based composites might be how they do it there as you say for frames. Especially rotors.
But body and chassis could be IM. Even blow molded hollow fuselage to hold the motors, guidance, EE and bang stuff.
What keeps me up at night is the vulnerability of infrastructure in our country. Cheap drones can take out electrical transformer which cost millions and take months to build.
If we go to war with China you can bet they will target our electrical and other infrastructure across the country, damaging our ability to manufacture pretty much everything.
We are more susceptible to power loss than ever. Just see what happens with a hurricane - no internet, payment systems down, no gasoline. Supposedly gas stations are supposed to have propane or battery/solar backup by legislation. We give them decades to comply and my guess is there is no redundancy built into the Northeast.
Maybe but maybe not. I attend the largest "hacker" conference in the US DEFCON every year and in the past few years they have started tor amp up initiatives like the Franklin Project: https://defconfranklin.com/
The project consists of connecting technologists with just day-to-day small town folk and helping them little by little secure their systems. Think about it: The entirety of the US is a giant patchwork of unsecured random systems all running custom software that serves specific niche purposes.
Many of the people who own and run these systems are not technically savvy and are running old legacy systems just because they work. There is a danger that an initial attack from an adversary would involve activating hordes of hidden security breaches to cripple the nation before they could respond to an offensive.
By pairing technologists with the people who own these systems, and having them volunteer even if it's just occasional once a month, we help bridge the gap and little by little secure the entire nation.
Yeah other asymmetric real vulnerability is that we’re an open country and they’re not. We should really just give up on Taiwan, there’s no chance. We also don’t want to be sticking our nose in Middle East wars given the possibilities for terrorists to use these technologies at home, but that ship has sailed.
And I know everyone loves nuclear here, but nuclear plants seem like a massive vulnerability for these types of attacks.
Meh, nuclear plants are especially well protected because of the containment. They are designed to withstand earthquakes and airlines (and of course missile attacks).
Taiwan.
Giving up Taiwan means giving up the *strategic* location. It's like giving up Guam or Hawaii. Except it's right fucking there! Okay, so it's like giving up Long Island. You don't withdraw from the magically naturally best situated beachhead!
Of course there's realpolitik, and this has to be a NATO-wide effort, otherwise the US gets singled out. (But unfortunately the US is doing that to itself already for too long.)
Practically, not morally, I see giving up on Taiwan as akin to the British giving up Hong Kong or India. It’s not that is a good thing geopolitically for the host country, is that it’s become untenable
... Hong Kong was occupied and was very clearly on rented time (as the Empire wound down), whereas Taiwan is a willing ally, close but not that close to the mainland.
Well, of course that doesn't mean it's trivial to "be there" to provide the support that they need, but it's not as binary as the case of HK (or India), because Taiwan has a lot more agency than HK, a pretty long history of independence, and apparent willingness to do things to keep it this way, and so on.
Still, the difference in economies and, of course, fires is enormous. And history is littered with regions enjoying independence for long and then subjugated in a few years. So likely Xi wouldn't hesitate to turn Taiwan into Xinjiang 2. Especially if they want to negate the aforementioned beachhead situation.
But. Exactly because the proven harshness of the regime Taiwan is IMHO not in the same situation as HK was, because a peaceful transition in a short period is unlikely. (And yes, that's why China has the advantage of the the long game, and that's why already people are recommending to "give up".)
Everyone agrees Taiwan is part of China, so the US would be a part of a Chinese civil war. Realistically I don’t think anyone has the appetite for that.
Many countries since 1971 (when the UN Resolution 2758 was passed, with votes 76-35) have a lot more nuanced stance, and the EU, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the UK, Belgium over the past years started to pass various resolutions regarding this.
Agreed. We should get with our allies in the area and offer some kind of Hong Kong deal where we will withdraw our security promises by 2075. This buys 50 years of peace and gives everyone enough time to deal with the transition.
I do not want my family killed by getting drawn into some stupid Chinese civil war.
Of course, if I was Taiwan I would make sure that when/if China attacks, that the Three Gorges Dam would be the first thing to go in collateral damage.
This seems right from the position of Taiwan/HK, but I’m thinking about the position of US/UK or all the other colonist powers that eventually had to give up holdings due to geopolitical realities. UK eventually didn’t have the leverage to hold HK, and we soon won’t have the leverage to protect Taiwan.
Taiwan isn’t a colony but it’s basically the same situation. We eventually “lose” it one way or another, so the question is whether we lose it via decision (bad) or by losing a war (worse.)
You give up on Taiwan you are essentially collapsing the US Tech industry. Isn't that the only real growth industry in the US? The Arizona TSMC Chip plant is great at producing the second newest chips but in a war scenario the US government gets first dibs so no more AI chips(all AI companies start to stall and collapse), no more Server chips (stalling growth on the web), no more iPhones/Android//Macs/new PCs.
The footnote about the energy density comment is particularly bullshit given that the fuel to crank efficiency kJ:Nm of a cutting edge ICE is about 50%, whereas a battery:motor delivers efficiency of 90%+.
I know you're being intentionally generous with the 50% best case, but just to give people a sense of the actual inefficiency gap, here are some efficiency numbers for some popular auto engines (from AI):
1. Conventional Gasoline Engines (Non-Hybrid, Otto Cycle)
Manufacturer Engine Type Thermal Efficiency
Toyota 2.5L I4 (2AR-FE) NA ~27–29%
Ford 2.3L EcoBoost I4 Turbo ~28–32%
GM 2.0L Turbo (LTG) Turbo ~28–31%
2. Hybrid/Atkinson-Cycle Engines
Manufacturer Engine Type Thermal Efficiency
Toyota 1.8L (2ZR-FXE) Hybrid, Atkinson ~40–41%
Ford 2.5L (Duratec Hybrid) Hybrid, Atkinson ~39–40%
GM Voltec Gen 1 (Chevy Volt) Hybrid/Series-EV ~38–39%
This is also why larger electric aircraft are potentially interesting, although at least for now it looks like you might still win the "energy usable for travel per unit of weight of both the fuel and the conversion equipment" by electrolyzing hydrogen on the ground, transferring H2 tanks onto the plane, and turning that into electricity through a bank of fuel cells.
I'm a bit skeptical that this will remain true, though -- batteries are still quite far from hitting any theoretical limits on how energy dense they _could_ be. If folks finally figure out cheaply producing solid-state lithium-metal anode batteries, things are gonna get crazy.
I mean, it’s also worth just pointing out the intuitive fact that motorbikes were almost always bigger and heavier than normal bikes, by quite a bit more than electric bikes are now - and no one ever tried to build small gasoline powered quadcopters or stand-up scooters. You need electric power to get something that small that can carry enough power to propel itself.
In future naval battles, one can win without even making a hit on the opponent's platform. All you need to do is wear your opponent down and force them to use up all their ammunition on air defense.
Back in 1984 I was a very junior officer on a US Navy Spruance class destroyer, at the time the most capable destroyer in the world. We and a Perry class frigate and an oiler were sent on a friendly cruise up the Baltic to Helsinki, the first time in many years that US warships had entered those waters. Soviet Pact forces were all over us the entire trip, from the air, the surface, and from underwater. We were standing six on, six off watches for four days, essentially at general quarters the entire time, as Soviet bombers and patrol boats buzzed us continually. By the time we got to Helsinki, our crew was spent. Completely exhausted, our ability to keep up that level of intense concentration and combat effectiveness for another day was gone. We were done for, and not one shot had been fired. [I'll add a note of gratitude to the Finns, who put us in a big sauna after we arrived, fed us wonderfully, then got us shnokered, then repeated this cycle about four times until we were all limp like noodles -- best port visit I ever had]
I recall this experience now as I think about how nearly impossible it would be to effectively defend Taiwan. The PRC could fire cheap, inaccurate missiles at our ships continuously for a few days, wearing down our crews, and causing us to use up our very limited inventory of anti-aircraft missiles against the handful of missiles that got close. At that point, send in the drones.
Drones aren’t a great example of why all this is self-defeating policy is bad. You seem to view this as a purely numbers game without regard to the realities of what those numbers would mean.
Like, is the fight going to come down to whoever has the most drones? If China has a trillion but we only have 500 billion, we lose? Does China need that kind of numerical superiority in the first place to threaten air bases? I don’t think so.
Second, you really should do at least some napkin math on this topic. Yes, China has far more injection molding capacity. But you don’t NEED a lot of it to make as many drones as you like, because they’re small and simple and don’t use a lot of material. Same goes for every other component. No, we can’t make as many batteries as China - but we make more than enough to manufacture a million drones per day already, because a battery isn’t the same as every other battery. One cars worth of batteries is enough for a hundred drones.
Spinning up drone manufacturing isn’t difficult. These aren’t F-35s or complex esoteric machines at this point.
It really just seems like you are viewing this through the lens of “more drones = wins” and that’s only true in some situations. Sure China can make more drones, but you don’t NEED a billion drones a month to threaten US airbases. What do all those extra drones do ince a war starts? Because you aren’t going to be able to pipe all that factory drone output directly to the US once a war starts. Your pre-staged drones will do the damage, and defending against them doesn’t mean “BUILD THE MOST DRONES!!”
It’d be nice if you talked to a manufacturing engineer or two, maybe some folks with military experience, or anything. Continuing to make all these bizarre implicit assumptions seemingly without addressing the basic and obvious questions just makes these articles feel like fearmongering more than analysis.
Which honestly is probably fine, if it gets people to take action. But it might help for the people who actually need to be convinced to believe you put some thought into this.
You do Noah an injustice here. What he wrote is spot-on and needs to be said. Sure, you can write volumes expanding on this topic - which I hope war-games folks do - but you don't need to to get the point across.
In any large scale conflict in history it usually was the side(s) with superior manufacturing/economic power that ultimately won.
Its not hard to see that China absolutely and completely dominates this. What's worse, in almost any technological field China is on par with the US.
The point about injection moulding is relatively arcane, what is far more critical are the millions of powerfull chips that are needed to power these things, especially when running autonomously (beyond FPV, the only way these things can scale, and they will.)
I seriously ask you to carefully consider the matter. Imagine the sheer destruction a swarm of a million autonomous drones can do.
The highly specialized but few factories in the US might be capable to turn out some minor stream of high-end weaponary, but producing these drones en-masse requires a completely different kind of supply chain.
Also keep in mind that for autonomous drone swarms to function you need to have astute battlefield awareness and information processing infrastructure (preferably in space). China has got it nearly all, where not it is rapidly building it out.
The next major battles will be more about robotics than humans, more about intelligence than muscle. And Chinese, it is well known but unfortunately taboo to mention, are typically +0.5SD to +1.0 SD smarter than us, which implies that there are a heck of a lot more highly intelligent workers available per capita than we have.
If this is true, then why was China so far behind the west for so long? Either the IQ measurement is somehow wrong or IQ isn't a decisive factor here. I'm not one of those woke losers who thinks this topic is heresy, but it does seem like something doesn't add up here.
Do you happen to have some graphs about the IQ distribution of countries? (Well, US and China is the question here basically.)
Also ... having hundreds of millions of people in both countries, I'd wager there are already too many smart cookies for a nasty war machine on both sides. (Especially if centralization via automation and robotics is coming - https://ai-2027.com/ )
I think the real issue is government capability to get things done, and relyctance to pivot from the politically-expedient manufacture of Reaper drones to "woke" swarms of cheap deadly plastic drones.
Noah is saying this because he is fully bought into the Biden subsidies for EVs and batteries, (he somehow left solar out this time since solar powered loitering drones are somewhat feasible ) and thinks this is a valid reason to not end them.
Tesla alone can make enough batteries for millions of FPV drones a day, and they don’t depend on unbuilt subsidized battery factories. He’s also previously disclosed that he’s an investor in ImpulseLabs which also depends on LFP batteries (and subsidies?) and doesn’t disclose where they are sourced from.
There are many new foolish government policies that put our infrastructure at risk, but ending EV and battery subsidies isn’t one of them.
Churchill did include an aircraft carrier with the Revenge and Prince of Wales warships. It broke down and had to put in at Gibraltar for repairs. The decision to allow the warships to continue without air support was misguided and Churchill never forgave himself for the decision.
While I welcome the coup success of Ukraine’s drones, its main effect is propaganda. Make the war so expensive for Russia and they may decide the fight is not worth the cost. It would have been better if the drones had destroyed every Russian bridge within 50 miles of the Ukrainian border.
Regarding China, a nation that was building the Imperial City over 2000 years ago, when most of Europe lived in mud huts (I exclude the rise of the Roman Empire where Augustus said he found Rome built of bricks and left it built of marble). There is absolutely no need for China to go to war over Taiwan. They only need to agree a level of cooperation that enables each to control their own environment and coordinate their development. I accept that the failure of China to honour the forty years they guaranteed Hong Kong to maintain its freedoms is a major inhibition on the part of the Taiwanese government to accept any guarantees. However, the example of the Mongols who thought they could conquer the known world in the 12th and 13th centuries may caution the Chinese against trying to do the same.
As for America and Trump, no worse example of serendipity exists in history. Russia and Ukraine remind us all of the need for perpetual vigilance for action to defend ourselves. The Peace dividend is indeed spent and most of us have depleted armies and outdated weaponry. Fortunately we have not totally neglected our educational systems so a rapid response is totally within our capability.
Education as practiced nowadays is useful for empowering individuals, but ... it's ridiculously lousy at achieving any important society-wide goals.
(Sure people with more education tend to vote against strongmen, but so do people with higher IQ, so controlling for this I think there's not much left of the effect.)
And with the option for homeschooling, well. Even the benefits of spending time with other people vanishes. (Not to mention the de facto segregation of privileged kids in all places around the world.)
They got as far as what is known today as Budapest, which was known as Pest in the 13th Century. Their leader died during the siege so the contenders for the leadership had to return to Mongolia to elect a new leader. They never returned. What was left of the Mongol Army was defeated by an army of Arabs from Egypt. The Mongol army in that battle included a regiment of Teutonic Knights who identified the Arabs as their enemy and preferred to fight in an army that had devastated most of Asia and the Middle East for a century.
No, you don't need electrical car batteries or production capacity, those are too large and heavy. You need e-bikes, of which the batteries are a formed by linking small battery cells together, which could be used as batteries in smaller drones. As a bonus you will need to produce a whole lot of those cells to make enough e-bikes for the Americas, meaning that you can have huge innovation and scale benefits. So basically, what I'm saying is that, in order to boost US defense capacity, you should turn every sprawled road network into bicycle paths and ban cars from city centers. Not only will that be huge for your battery industry, it will also strengthen the body of the average American so they can join the army if needed, and it'll save massive amounts of fuel that are needed in case of an emergency such as war.
Oh, and it will also make your cities more livable and healthy and reduce carbon emissions and all of that
“ No, you don't need electrical car batteries or production capacity, those are too large and heavy. You need e-bikes, of which the batteries are a formed by linking small battery cells together,”
EV batteries are the same both made up of small cells. Here is a Tesla battery:
Thanks for the info, didn't actually know that. The last time I looked up close to anything like a car battery must have been a forklift with a lead acid battery to which I had to add water on a regular basis. I guess my entire defense hook is totally invalidated then, but I'll stick to my point that a city filled with e-bikes and pedestrians is better than the automotive mania we currently have ;-)
You are thinking too big, we need even smaller batteries, so we should subsidize production of laser pointers and have every citizen buy dozens, and then when the Chinese drones swarm over the horizon our brave patriots will run outside and blind the drones before they bomb our walkable green cities into carbon spewing craters.
Depressing and true. It is simply a fact that a man who believes he is the most intelligent person on the planet doesn’t understand the limits to his knowledge. Donald Trump’s hubris has made him blind to the fact that there are things he doesn’t know.
I'd argue that what's at issue is not just Trump's (and others') failure to understand the limits of their knowledge – it's a frightening level of myopia.
The administration's political agenda is driven purely by a desire to go backward (e.g., build more big tanks) and will only think about the future if dragged there kicking and screaming.
Not all elderly men are myopic, but most are. Trump, who is turning 79, is unsuited to the position he holds for no other reason than a lack of imagination. He believes, through the force of his personality, that he can bend the world to his thinking. Karma is a bitch.
Why is anybody surprised by this massive and effective drone attack on airbases all across Russia. How many times can people be told 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles, operating under the cover of night, played an important, outsized role in stopping Putin’s 41-mile-long blitzkrieg (billions in military technology, armaments, trained military personnel) on Kiev. The crucial ingredients are Ukrainian political will and ingenuity. All the hardware in the world is nothing without wetware. The Ukrainians have this in spades. I think Palmer Luckey is right when he calls bullshit on those who constantly whine about being so far behind we can’t catch up. Most people will claim any significant advance or new invention can’t be done. Thank goodness the few mavericks among us don’t listen. There is no shortage of ingenuity in America. It’s not an accident most of the leading tech companies have a home in the U.S. The U.S. government is the greatest most-effective VC firm in history. DARPA is a haven of wizards. When the USSR put Sputnik in space, the President asked and tasked DARPA to do something. Within week, voila! Tracking technology traces Sputnik’s movement. The project leader asked his lead engineer, so if we can track something in space, is it possible to track someone or something on Earth. The engineer said he didn’t know, but a few weeks later he walked into the project leader’s office with GPS. The U.S. completely transformed its industrial complex within one year to manufacture everything the military needed to fight WWII. Tanks were rolling out of factory buildings before the retrofitting of automotive manufacturing buildings was finished. As Palmer Luckey has said, he has no use for people who say something can’t be done. And he’s a very conservative Republican. Our problem is we’ve elected a corrupt and inept President who’s put amateurs in charge of important government departments and we have a spineless coin-operated Congress that’s afraid of shallow bullies like TACO Trump. Why in the hell wouldn’t we embrace Ukraine as an ally? Putin is an overrated old KGB thug.
Also, the vast majority of the battery plants we subsidized were merely assembling Chinese battery components (with the battery itself often designed using licensed Chinese IP).
Biden and Trump love assembly work as it creates jobs. Tariffs will have the same effect- assemble foreign products using foreign IP in the US so that labor and plant costs increase the domestic content. Sane people not trying to buy votes should be more focused on IP and basic research into new products and reshoring the supply chain for components and materials, rather than assembling someone else’s product here.
The US has assembled BMWs in the US for 25 years. This hasn’t turned GM into BMW or caused America to supplant Germany’s car industry. Russia assembled lots of European cars too (pre-2022). Now people in Moscow are buying Ladas.
Pols want assembly jobs. That doesn’t build an industry.
Yikes. The scenario of a thousands of Chinese drones launched from civilian containers in a Pearl Harbor-like simultaneous first strike on American military bases is quite scary. Now add in drones attacking major electrical power lines and pipelines, and you can do catastrophic economic damage as well.
Any weapon that gives a powerful first strike capability is worrying. I never thought of drones as such a weapon, but that may be where we are headed.
How long before drone technology ends up serving the goals of a terrorist attacking civilian infrastructure on American soil? Seems just a matter of time at this point.
A naval blockade around Brazil would shut down China food supply quickly. While the military may need to run on more batteries, humans still need food.
“the Houthis defeated the US” requires amazing mental gymnastics, but isn’t a surprising statement from an academic with no military experience, something most academics and diplomats lack. “Trump heard from Qataris/MAGA isolationists that it’s not worth fighting” and “defeated the US” are not the same thing.
Now for actual drone vs drone warfare, it’s all about controlling the spectrum. Hamas drones became useless and the IDF employed drones endlessly to hunt Hamas leaders and fighters, so both sides can play these games, and the US is actually better situated to fight drone vs drone against everyone except China being a peer adversary.
You make a lot of good points, Noah, but you're again selling Europe - and particularly Ukraine - short.
Ukraine has started moving drone production onshore. Not just final assembly, also components.
See for example here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/04/08/ukraine-is-making-fpv-drones-without-chinese-parts-and-at-lower-cost/
European economies have retained capacities in injection molding and other critical industries - and they are ramping up battery and magnet production.
Rare earths are one significant vulnerability, but that's not surprising, as Europe generally tends to depend on other parts of the work for raw materials (but there's Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South America and the US who could step up there).
Yes, China dominates in scale, no question. But your single focus on US capabilities and shortcomings, while important, often misses the developments and capabilities in other parts of world.
Europe is much better placed for mass drone manufacturing than people realize. And Ukraine is the best example.
That's a good point.
It seems like the crux of the article is “don’t be complacent”. Use what just happened in Russia as a catalyst for action.
In the meantime the rollback of subsidies in the IRA if realized with reduction our industrial capacity to fight a 21st century war. The fact that battery capacity in particular has been captured as a culture war issue is a huge concern here. Because then we may not just have complacency but active and intentional regression.
Ben, I can see your point about Europe - in theory, I think you're right.
In practice, unlikely...
a) Absolute tax-obsessed government choke the lifeblood out of startups - forbidding them to make any profit, but demanding they hand it all over (profit or reserves - doesn't matter) before you can even invest in anything, so they can feed the nanny-state. Only "old" companies with old money can survive (but not thrive). Bad-shit crazy.
b) Energy is simply too expensive to produce much of anything.
c) Wages are through the roof - mandatory employment schemes, inability to fire workers, etc.
d) Environmental concerns having all but destroyed mining
Sure, when Germany, Poland and France get pummelled hard, things might change. But at a very steep cost. Until that happens, rigor mortis rules.
High taxes do not necessarily deter startup formation, and may in fact _encourage_ startup formation, because it's a lot easier to quit your day job for a startup idea if you're confident that you'll still be able to afford the necessities of life for your family.
The reason so many founders in the US are young men is that young men don't have kids to worry about, and aren't worried about health expenses over the near term.
You go to Norway, and you find a lot more forty-year-olds with families who are founding new companies. If it doesn't work out, they can still be sure that their kids will have a roof over their head, health coverage, and access to good education. I dunno if it's still true, but as of 2011 when this article was written ( https://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html ) they were producing more new companies per capita per year than the US.
Again, Europe is not just the big countries you're mentioning.
Ukraine is Europe - and on the path to the EU - and it's already outproducing almost any other country in the world with drones. Plenty of big and small countries are Europe.
And even the places you mentioned have recently (belatedly, but still) ramped up artillery production to levels that are a multiple of before and a multiple of US production.
Inertia is not the same as not being able to get it done, once the impetus is there.
One of the biggest exports to America from Czech Republic is ammunition.
Eh, taxes are not the problem with startups here. The problem is there's not much to offer to people that is not already offered cheaper by US or Asian companies. (And this product dilemma leads to focusing on small local issues, which lead to small local "startups".) And there's simply not enough capital to tackle big issues.
This applies to Europe perfectly: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-work/
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On average, the European countries analyzed currently levy a corporate income tax rate of 21.3 percent. This is slightly below the worldwide average which, measured across 181 jurisdictions, was 23.45 percent in 2023
"""
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/corporate-income-tax-rates-europe/
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There's no point in mining in Europe because of the Baumol effect. (Labor is too expensive.)
....
Yes, firing workers in many European states takes management effort, and ... management is complicit in not giving a fuck about low performers. (Because they too are low performers after all.)
Scale is important. Very important. You are underselling scale. The US can do all these things you described, its just that those companies operate on a cost structure that makes them only able to work on expensive fat US government contracts or large business. Nothing else. China has so much capacity that it can cater to anyone small or large.
Scale is indeed important. But it's way easier to quickly scale from 1 to 100 than from 0. Even easier to scale from 10 to 100 etc.
That's the issue the US faces. In many industries and areas, its manufacturing capacity is zero or close to zero.
Europe has the manufacturing base and skills - not just generally, but also in concrete sectors and areas - to scale up more quickly if needed. And again, Ukraine is the best example.
Every year for the DEFCON conference I make electronic PCBs to give away as puzzles and trinkets as part of their "Badge Life" culture(google it).
Without China's unbelievable low costs, this hobby would not be possible. When I was in college 15 years ago making PCBs in the US cost hundreds of dollars and was a convoluted process that was confusing to non experienced engineers.
China came in and made it so stupidly easy and cheap that youtubers are now creating PCB designs. We are talking single digit dollars for the same product that cost hundreds of dollars 15 years ago. In addition to that they got rid of the convoluted process and made it so that you can drag and drop and their automation would guide you to completion of your order and then a support representative would examine your order before submission. Normally in the US that is reserved for high paying clients not hobbyists.
Of course the US responded, their equivalent price is ~$80 for the same order that would be a few dollars from China (and thats including shipping from China). I would know because when the tariffs hit I started looking at US prices. Abysmal.
There is no incentive to really ramp up at this point. Lets say the tarrifs come back and de minimis goes away. China becomes more expensive than the US. They still sell to the rest of the world, so my european hacker friends still get dirt cheap PCBs while my hobby just dies because it makes no sense to do it at those prices and our volumes are so low that it does not incentive local production to ramp up.
Now you might say the Chinese will get hurt. Of course they will but they already have the capacity and the rest of the world will benefit (even lower prices, more priority etc.)
The Chinese are so confident in their top status that they invite Youtubers to tour the complete operation in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljOoGyCso8s
I dare you to tell me how the US is going to easily ramp all of THOSE processes shown in the video easily.
I'll give you a hint: In the first 5 minutes of the video you see scores of engineers validating customer boards. Those are trained electrical engineers that are doing "customer support" jobs. There are so many trained Chinese people in this field pushing down wages. It results in what is upper middle class wages here being customer support wages in China.
The US does not have hoards of electrical engineers getting paid low wages so the ability to ramp up fails at step 1 in the process.
Btw, I also absolutely believe the US could get into mass manufacturing of drones. But it would need to overcome a couple of hurdles, especially at the beginning. And you dint want to do that when you're already in the middle of a hot conflict.
Attack drones used by both sides of the war A are built on carbon fibre frames, not injection mould plastic.
That does not change the basic argument of the article, but it is an important difference.
You can build these drones with the injection molded materials..either short fiber carbon or glass. Pultrusion or extrusion of fiber based composites might be how they do it there as you say for frames. Especially rotors.
But body and chassis could be IM. Even blow molded hollow fuselage to hold the motors, guidance, EE and bang stuff.
You can build them from sticks if you really want to. Point is, that's not how it's done now.
https://www.meme-arsenal.com/memes/452abec38b29bb6d176cfcd48982b26a.jpg
What keeps me up at night is the vulnerability of infrastructure in our country. Cheap drones can take out electrical transformer which cost millions and take months to build.
If we go to war with China you can bet they will target our electrical and other infrastructure across the country, damaging our ability to manufacture pretty much everything.
China holds all the cards here.
We are more susceptible to power loss than ever. Just see what happens with a hurricane - no internet, payment systems down, no gasoline. Supposedly gas stations are supposed to have propane or battery/solar backup by legislation. We give them decades to comply and my guess is there is no redundancy built into the Northeast.
>China holds all the cards here.
Maybe but maybe not. I attend the largest "hacker" conference in the US DEFCON every year and in the past few years they have started tor amp up initiatives like the Franklin Project: https://defconfranklin.com/
The project consists of connecting technologists with just day-to-day small town folk and helping them little by little secure their systems. Think about it: The entirety of the US is a giant patchwork of unsecured random systems all running custom software that serves specific niche purposes.
Many of the people who own and run these systems are not technically savvy and are running old legacy systems just because they work. There is a danger that an initial attack from an adversary would involve activating hordes of hidden security breaches to cripple the nation before they could respond to an offensive.
By pairing technologists with the people who own these systems, and having them volunteer even if it's just occasional once a month, we help bridge the gap and little by little secure the entire nation.
Yeah other asymmetric real vulnerability is that we’re an open country and they’re not. We should really just give up on Taiwan, there’s no chance. We also don’t want to be sticking our nose in Middle East wars given the possibilities for terrorists to use these technologies at home, but that ship has sailed.
And I know everyone loves nuclear here, but nuclear plants seem like a massive vulnerability for these types of attacks.
Meh, nuclear plants are especially well protected because of the containment. They are designed to withstand earthquakes and airlines (and of course missile attacks).
Taiwan.
Giving up Taiwan means giving up the *strategic* location. It's like giving up Guam or Hawaii. Except it's right fucking there! Okay, so it's like giving up Long Island. You don't withdraw from the magically naturally best situated beachhead!
Of course there's realpolitik, and this has to be a NATO-wide effort, otherwise the US gets singled out. (But unfortunately the US is doing that to itself already for too long.)
Practically, not morally, I see giving up on Taiwan as akin to the British giving up Hong Kong or India. It’s not that is a good thing geopolitically for the host country, is that it’s become untenable
... Hong Kong was occupied and was very clearly on rented time (as the Empire wound down), whereas Taiwan is a willing ally, close but not that close to the mainland.
Well, of course that doesn't mean it's trivial to "be there" to provide the support that they need, but it's not as binary as the case of HK (or India), because Taiwan has a lot more agency than HK, a pretty long history of independence, and apparent willingness to do things to keep it this way, and so on.
Still, the difference in economies and, of course, fires is enormous. And history is littered with regions enjoying independence for long and then subjugated in a few years. So likely Xi wouldn't hesitate to turn Taiwan into Xinjiang 2. Especially if they want to negate the aforementioned beachhead situation.
But. Exactly because the proven harshness of the regime Taiwan is IMHO not in the same situation as HK was, because a peaceful transition in a short period is unlikely. (And yes, that's why China has the advantage of the the long game, and that's why already people are recommending to "give up".)
Everyone agrees Taiwan is part of China, so the US would be a part of a Chinese civil war. Realistically I don’t think anyone has the appetite for that.
That seems like a very strong claim.
Many countries since 1971 (when the UN Resolution 2758 was passed, with votes 76-35) have a lot more nuanced stance, and the EU, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the UK, Belgium over the past years started to pass various resolutions regarding this.
Agreed. We should get with our allies in the area and offer some kind of Hong Kong deal where we will withdraw our security promises by 2075. This buys 50 years of peace and gives everyone enough time to deal with the transition.
I do not want my family killed by getting drawn into some stupid Chinese civil war.
Of course, if I was Taiwan I would make sure that when/if China attacks, that the Three Gorges Dam would be the first thing to go in collateral damage.
This seems right from the position of Taiwan/HK, but I’m thinking about the position of US/UK or all the other colonist powers that eventually had to give up holdings due to geopolitical realities. UK eventually didn’t have the leverage to hold HK, and we soon won’t have the leverage to protect Taiwan.
Taiwan isn’t a colony but it’s basically the same situation. We eventually “lose” it one way or another, so the question is whether we lose it via decision (bad) or by losing a war (worse.)
The choices are give them nukes or give them up, and our leadership doesn't have the balls to give them nukes.
You give up on Taiwan you are essentially collapsing the US Tech industry. Isn't that the only real growth industry in the US? The Arizona TSMC Chip plant is great at producing the second newest chips but in a war scenario the US government gets first dibs so no more AI chips(all AI companies start to stall and collapse), no more Server chips (stalling growth on the web), no more iPhones/Android//Macs/new PCs.
The footnote about the energy density comment is particularly bullshit given that the fuel to crank efficiency kJ:Nm of a cutting edge ICE is about 50%, whereas a battery:motor delivers efficiency of 90%+.
I know you're being intentionally generous with the 50% best case, but just to give people a sense of the actual inefficiency gap, here are some efficiency numbers for some popular auto engines (from AI):
1. Conventional Gasoline Engines (Non-Hybrid, Otto Cycle)
Manufacturer Engine Type Thermal Efficiency
Toyota 2.5L I4 (2AR-FE) NA ~27–29%
Ford 2.3L EcoBoost I4 Turbo ~28–32%
GM 2.0L Turbo (LTG) Turbo ~28–31%
2. Hybrid/Atkinson-Cycle Engines
Manufacturer Engine Type Thermal Efficiency
Toyota 1.8L (2ZR-FXE) Hybrid, Atkinson ~40–41%
Ford 2.5L (Duratec Hybrid) Hybrid, Atkinson ~39–40%
GM Voltec Gen 1 (Chevy Volt) Hybrid/Series-EV ~38–39%
This is also why larger electric aircraft are potentially interesting, although at least for now it looks like you might still win the "energy usable for travel per unit of weight of both the fuel and the conversion equipment" by electrolyzing hydrogen on the ground, transferring H2 tanks onto the plane, and turning that into electricity through a bank of fuel cells.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-up-with-hydrogen-electric-aviation
I'm a bit skeptical that this will remain true, though -- batteries are still quite far from hitting any theoretical limits on how energy dense they _could_ be. If folks finally figure out cheaply producing solid-state lithium-metal anode batteries, things are gonna get crazy.
https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2024/01/solid-state-battery-design-charges-minutes-lasts-thousands-cycles
I mean, it’s also worth just pointing out the intuitive fact that motorbikes were almost always bigger and heavier than normal bikes, by quite a bit more than electric bikes are now - and no one ever tried to build small gasoline powered quadcopters or stand-up scooters. You need electric power to get something that small that can carry enough power to propel itself.
In future naval battles, one can win without even making a hit on the opponent's platform. All you need to do is wear your opponent down and force them to use up all their ammunition on air defense.
Back in 1984 I was a very junior officer on a US Navy Spruance class destroyer, at the time the most capable destroyer in the world. We and a Perry class frigate and an oiler were sent on a friendly cruise up the Baltic to Helsinki, the first time in many years that US warships had entered those waters. Soviet Pact forces were all over us the entire trip, from the air, the surface, and from underwater. We were standing six on, six off watches for four days, essentially at general quarters the entire time, as Soviet bombers and patrol boats buzzed us continually. By the time we got to Helsinki, our crew was spent. Completely exhausted, our ability to keep up that level of intense concentration and combat effectiveness for another day was gone. We were done for, and not one shot had been fired. [I'll add a note of gratitude to the Finns, who put us in a big sauna after we arrived, fed us wonderfully, then got us shnokered, then repeated this cycle about four times until we were all limp like noodles -- best port visit I ever had]
I recall this experience now as I think about how nearly impossible it would be to effectively defend Taiwan. The PRC could fire cheap, inaccurate missiles at our ships continuously for a few days, wearing down our crews, and causing us to use up our very limited inventory of anti-aircraft missiles against the handful of missiles that got close. At that point, send in the drones.
Drones aren’t a great example of why all this is self-defeating policy is bad. You seem to view this as a purely numbers game without regard to the realities of what those numbers would mean.
Like, is the fight going to come down to whoever has the most drones? If China has a trillion but we only have 500 billion, we lose? Does China need that kind of numerical superiority in the first place to threaten air bases? I don’t think so.
Second, you really should do at least some napkin math on this topic. Yes, China has far more injection molding capacity. But you don’t NEED a lot of it to make as many drones as you like, because they’re small and simple and don’t use a lot of material. Same goes for every other component. No, we can’t make as many batteries as China - but we make more than enough to manufacture a million drones per day already, because a battery isn’t the same as every other battery. One cars worth of batteries is enough for a hundred drones.
Spinning up drone manufacturing isn’t difficult. These aren’t F-35s or complex esoteric machines at this point.
It really just seems like you are viewing this through the lens of “more drones = wins” and that’s only true in some situations. Sure China can make more drones, but you don’t NEED a billion drones a month to threaten US airbases. What do all those extra drones do ince a war starts? Because you aren’t going to be able to pipe all that factory drone output directly to the US once a war starts. Your pre-staged drones will do the damage, and defending against them doesn’t mean “BUILD THE MOST DRONES!!”
It’d be nice if you talked to a manufacturing engineer or two, maybe some folks with military experience, or anything. Continuing to make all these bizarre implicit assumptions seemingly without addressing the basic and obvious questions just makes these articles feel like fearmongering more than analysis.
Which honestly is probably fine, if it gets people to take action. But it might help for the people who actually need to be convinced to believe you put some thought into this.
You do Noah an injustice here. What he wrote is spot-on and needs to be said. Sure, you can write volumes expanding on this topic - which I hope war-games folks do - but you don't need to to get the point across.
In any large scale conflict in history it usually was the side(s) with superior manufacturing/economic power that ultimately won.
Its not hard to see that China absolutely and completely dominates this. What's worse, in almost any technological field China is on par with the US.
The point about injection moulding is relatively arcane, what is far more critical are the millions of powerfull chips that are needed to power these things, especially when running autonomously (beyond FPV, the only way these things can scale, and they will.)
I seriously ask you to carefully consider the matter. Imagine the sheer destruction a swarm of a million autonomous drones can do.
The highly specialized but few factories in the US might be capable to turn out some minor stream of high-end weaponary, but producing these drones en-masse requires a completely different kind of supply chain.
Also keep in mind that for autonomous drone swarms to function you need to have astute battlefield awareness and information processing infrastructure (preferably in space). China has got it nearly all, where not it is rapidly building it out.
The next major battles will be more about robotics than humans, more about intelligence than muscle. And Chinese, it is well known but unfortunately taboo to mention, are typically +0.5SD to +1.0 SD smarter than us, which implies that there are a heck of a lot more highly intelligent workers available per capita than we have.
If this is true, then why was China so far behind the west for so long? Either the IQ measurement is somehow wrong or IQ isn't a decisive factor here. I'm not one of those woke losers who thinks this topic is heresy, but it does seem like something doesn't add up here.
Do you happen to have some graphs about the IQ distribution of countries? (Well, US and China is the question here basically.)
Also ... having hundreds of millions of people in both countries, I'd wager there are already too many smart cookies for a nasty war machine on both sides. (Especially if centralization via automation and robotics is coming - https://ai-2027.com/ )
The Tesla Gigafactory in Reno can easily handle making batteries for over 100 million small drones per month if converted to defense use.
"In any large scale conflict in history it usually was the side(s) with superior manufacturing/economic power that ultimately won."
Tell that to the victims of the Mongol horse archers.
The Mongols were just the best horse manufacturers
I think the real issue is government capability to get things done, and relyctance to pivot from the politically-expedient manufacture of Reaper drones to "woke" swarms of cheap deadly plastic drones.
"More guns wins" works for every major war since the industrial revolution.
Noah is saying this because he is fully bought into the Biden subsidies for EVs and batteries, (he somehow left solar out this time since solar powered loitering drones are somewhat feasible ) and thinks this is a valid reason to not end them.
Tesla alone can make enough batteries for millions of FPV drones a day, and they don’t depend on unbuilt subsidized battery factories. He’s also previously disclosed that he’s an investor in ImpulseLabs which also depends on LFP batteries (and subsidies?) and doesn’t disclose where they are sourced from.
There are many new foolish government policies that put our infrastructure at risk, but ending EV and battery subsidies isn’t one of them.
The argument is very Cold War, Dr. Strangelove-esque. "Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"
Churchill did include an aircraft carrier with the Revenge and Prince of Wales warships. It broke down and had to put in at Gibraltar for repairs. The decision to allow the warships to continue without air support was misguided and Churchill never forgave himself for the decision.
While I welcome the coup success of Ukraine’s drones, its main effect is propaganda. Make the war so expensive for Russia and they may decide the fight is not worth the cost. It would have been better if the drones had destroyed every Russian bridge within 50 miles of the Ukrainian border.
Regarding China, a nation that was building the Imperial City over 2000 years ago, when most of Europe lived in mud huts (I exclude the rise of the Roman Empire where Augustus said he found Rome built of bricks and left it built of marble). There is absolutely no need for China to go to war over Taiwan. They only need to agree a level of cooperation that enables each to control their own environment and coordinate their development. I accept that the failure of China to honour the forty years they guaranteed Hong Kong to maintain its freedoms is a major inhibition on the part of the Taiwanese government to accept any guarantees. However, the example of the Mongols who thought they could conquer the known world in the 12th and 13th centuries may caution the Chinese against trying to do the same.
As for America and Trump, no worse example of serendipity exists in history. Russia and Ukraine remind us all of the need for perpetual vigilance for action to defend ourselves. The Peace dividend is indeed spent and most of us have depleted armies and outdated weaponry. Fortunately we have not totally neglected our educational systems so a rapid response is totally within our capability.
Education as practiced nowadays is useful for empowering individuals, but ... it's ridiculously lousy at achieving any important society-wide goals.
(Sure people with more education tend to vote against strongmen, but so do people with higher IQ, so controlling for this I think there's not much left of the effect.)
And with the option for homeschooling, well. Even the benefits of spending time with other people vanishes. (Not to mention the de facto segregation of privileged kids in all places around the world.)
The Mongols pretty much did conquer the world, though, or at least as much of it as their animals could graze on.
They got as far as what is known today as Budapest, which was known as Pest in the 13th Century. Their leader died during the siege so the contenders for the leadership had to return to Mongolia to elect a new leader. They never returned. What was left of the Mongol Army was defeated by an army of Arabs from Egypt. The Mongol army in that battle included a regiment of Teutonic Knights who identified the Arabs as their enemy and preferred to fight in an army that had devastated most of Asia and the Middle East for a century.
No, you don't need electrical car batteries or production capacity, those are too large and heavy. You need e-bikes, of which the batteries are a formed by linking small battery cells together, which could be used as batteries in smaller drones. As a bonus you will need to produce a whole lot of those cells to make enough e-bikes for the Americas, meaning that you can have huge innovation and scale benefits. So basically, what I'm saying is that, in order to boost US defense capacity, you should turn every sprawled road network into bicycle paths and ban cars from city centers. Not only will that be huge for your battery industry, it will also strengthen the body of the average American so they can join the army if needed, and it'll save massive amounts of fuel that are needed in case of an emergency such as war.
Oh, and it will also make your cities more livable and healthy and reduce carbon emissions and all of that
“ No, you don't need electrical car batteries or production capacity, those are too large and heavy. You need e-bikes, of which the batteries are a formed by linking small battery cells together,”
EV batteries are the same both made up of small cells. Here is a Tesla battery:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSPJYWTXvOZTUrc6CB0xiAnHyKh3FBRtJxJ8A&s
Depending on the cells used a Model 3 uses either 2170 of 4680 of the one pictured above - or a somewhat larger one.
Thanks for the info, didn't actually know that. The last time I looked up close to anything like a car battery must have been a forklift with a lead acid battery to which I had to add water on a regular basis. I guess my entire defense hook is totally invalidated then, but I'll stick to my point that a city filled with e-bikes and pedestrians is better than the automotive mania we currently have ;-)
You are thinking too big, we need even smaller batteries, so we should subsidize production of laser pointers and have every citizen buy dozens, and then when the Chinese drones swarm over the horizon our brave patriots will run outside and blind the drones before they bomb our walkable green cities into carbon spewing craters.
Depressing and true. It is simply a fact that a man who believes he is the most intelligent person on the planet doesn’t understand the limits to his knowledge. Donald Trump’s hubris has made him blind to the fact that there are things he doesn’t know.
Karma hates hubris.
I'd argue that what's at issue is not just Trump's (and others') failure to understand the limits of their knowledge – it's a frightening level of myopia.
The administration's political agenda is driven purely by a desire to go backward (e.g., build more big tanks) and will only think about the future if dragged there kicking and screaming.
Not all elderly men are myopic, but most are. Trump, who is turning 79, is unsuited to the position he holds for no other reason than a lack of imagination. He believes, through the force of his personality, that he can bend the world to his thinking. Karma is a bitch.
Why is anybody surprised by this massive and effective drone attack on airbases all across Russia. How many times can people be told 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles, operating under the cover of night, played an important, outsized role in stopping Putin’s 41-mile-long blitzkrieg (billions in military technology, armaments, trained military personnel) on Kiev. The crucial ingredients are Ukrainian political will and ingenuity. All the hardware in the world is nothing without wetware. The Ukrainians have this in spades. I think Palmer Luckey is right when he calls bullshit on those who constantly whine about being so far behind we can’t catch up. Most people will claim any significant advance or new invention can’t be done. Thank goodness the few mavericks among us don’t listen. There is no shortage of ingenuity in America. It’s not an accident most of the leading tech companies have a home in the U.S. The U.S. government is the greatest most-effective VC firm in history. DARPA is a haven of wizards. When the USSR put Sputnik in space, the President asked and tasked DARPA to do something. Within week, voila! Tracking technology traces Sputnik’s movement. The project leader asked his lead engineer, so if we can track something in space, is it possible to track someone or something on Earth. The engineer said he didn’t know, but a few weeks later he walked into the project leader’s office with GPS. The U.S. completely transformed its industrial complex within one year to manufacture everything the military needed to fight WWII. Tanks were rolling out of factory buildings before the retrofitting of automotive manufacturing buildings was finished. As Palmer Luckey has said, he has no use for people who say something can’t be done. And he’s a very conservative Republican. Our problem is we’ve elected a corrupt and inept President who’s put amateurs in charge of important government departments and we have a spineless coin-operated Congress that’s afraid of shallow bullies like TACO Trump. Why in the hell wouldn’t we embrace Ukraine as an ally? Putin is an overrated old KGB thug.
The battery plant shutdown in AZ has nothing to do with Trump
https://electrek.co/2025/02/04/kore-power-kills-1-billion-arizona-ev-battery-factory-plans/
Also, the vast majority of the battery plants we subsidized were merely assembling Chinese battery components (with the battery itself often designed using licensed Chinese IP).
Biden and Trump love assembly work as it creates jobs. Tariffs will have the same effect- assemble foreign products using foreign IP in the US so that labor and plant costs increase the domestic content. Sane people not trying to buy votes should be more focused on IP and basic research into new products and reshoring the supply chain for components and materials, rather than assembling someone else’s product here.
The US has assembled BMWs in the US for 25 years. This hasn’t turned GM into BMW or caused America to supplant Germany’s car industry. Russia assembled lots of European cars too (pre-2022). Now people in Moscow are buying Ladas.
Pols want assembly jobs. That doesn’t build an industry.
One thing missing from this conversation is the range on these drones.
Right, the clever thing here wasn't the use of drones per se, it was the Ukranians' ability to sneak drones into range to attack.
Yikes. The scenario of a thousands of Chinese drones launched from civilian containers in a Pearl Harbor-like simultaneous first strike on American military bases is quite scary. Now add in drones attacking major electrical power lines and pipelines, and you can do catastrophic economic damage as well.
Any weapon that gives a powerful first strike capability is worrying. I never thought of drones as such a weapon, but that may be where we are headed.
How long before drone technology ends up serving the goals of a terrorist attacking civilian infrastructure on American soil? Seems just a matter of time at this point.
A naval blockade around Brazil would shut down China food supply quickly. While the military may need to run on more batteries, humans still need food.
“the Houthis defeated the US” requires amazing mental gymnastics, but isn’t a surprising statement from an academic with no military experience, something most academics and diplomats lack. “Trump heard from Qataris/MAGA isolationists that it’s not worth fighting” and “defeated the US” are not the same thing.
Now for actual drone vs drone warfare, it’s all about controlling the spectrum. Hamas drones became useless and the IDF employed drones endlessly to hunt Hamas leaders and fighters, so both sides can play these games, and the US is actually better situated to fight drone vs drone against everyone except China being a peer adversary.