My faith that this plan will succeed is a bit shaken by the other news story about the Navy today: the Navy ran out of pants.
We can’t seem to produce enough pants for our sailors and marines, but we expect to produce “thousands upon thousands” of fancy new drones? Well I do hope it all works out, but uh, I guess I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.
Manager: Rodney, Rodney what the fuck are you doing?
Rodney: Sweating as he tries to complete a tripple stitch on a pair of Navy Standard Issue Pants. Sorry boss, these pants gotta get shipped today!
Manager: Fuck the pants, Rodney. These MQ-9 Reapers gotta be finished and out the door by noon. gestures to massive pile of weaponry and metal in the corner The Chinese are gonna invade Taiwan!
Rodney: puts pants down Sure boss!
We aren’t gonna produce those drones. We don’t have the infrastructure, China does. When we decided to ban Chinese made drones there were no one capable of replacing them in the consumer space. The ones left in the Blue UAS program pulled out of consumer markets. DJI dominates and that’s just in the consumer market. I wouldn’t sell the Chinese short in military drones.
Where do you think our current drone fleet came from? A hint: it wasn’t China.
The Cherokee Nation. I’ve actually done some work in the drone industry and I know that the Cherokee Nation build drones for Lockheed Martin. The Native Americans are not the American government so they can bypass some tariffs and other legal issues the US government faces with regards to import export. We still don’t have the infrastructure of China. We don’t have the manufacturing base in this area that China has. Don’t look down on China, they are innovative in drone technology. The companies in the US needs to get a innovative as the Chinese one but for that we need the same support from our government that the Chinese get to create the missing infrastructure that China has.
Well, DJI has the market cornered in quadcopter/multirotor drones. But what do they have with wings?
From the sound of it, this program is also quite interested in vehicles with longer loiter times and heavier payload capacity (winged aircraft). And they’re explicitly interested in seeding smaller companies with funding that would allow them to realize whatever innovations they may have and scale up. So with that in mind, it may be irrelevant that DJI dominates the multirotor drone market.
I guess we’ll find out in time.
The problem is neither of us know what the true capabilities between the two nations are. Obviously they keep that intel under lock and key and if either of us had inside knowledge and revealed that knowledge then the respective nation would come after us.
I find these discussions on military capabilities to be pointless on Lemmy and Reddit. No one actually knows and if they did they can’t say anything, there are too many people pretending to know what they’re talking about speaking with authority but are making everything up, and though you can gain some insight on a nations capabilities by paying attention to news and media that focus on military technology no one actually cites those sources.
