Regulatory gridlock in the U.S. risks losing the drone arms race

I tend to think that it’s not too much to ask a company to engage in transparent advocacy as opposed to astroturfing.

What evidence exists to show FAA regulations are hampering innovation?

Do they need to be rewritten? And if they do, is a thought piece by someone with no prior connection or history in aviation the person to make the case for it?

I have the impression from reading history books that the workforce at the time of World War 2 was uniquely specialized and widely available. There were many machinists that had special knowledge and experience of how to run their lathes, presses, etc. This workforce was involved in the assembly line of passenger cars, so you had expert machinists involved in producing passenger cars which made expertise widely available. Because of their knowledge, they could easily pivot to an armored vehicle (for example).

In today's world the assembly line itself is derived from CAD, robot CNC machines, and the workforce is not specialized. The workforce consists of "assemblers" and machine operators, moreso than "machinists" or "machine designers"

This difference between workforces is a potentially profound difference.

Military vehicles had much more in common with their civilian counterparts in the WWII era. Technologies have almost entirely diverged since then. An M4 Sherman tank had a gasoline piston engine and steel armor. An M1 Abrams tank has a turbine engine, and uranium and ceramic composite armor. To convert a factory from one to the other you'll have to rip out almost everything and start over.

Hmm maybe I'm not being very clear, I didn't want to write a 20 pages essay :-). I was saying that I don't think it's a particularly efficient way to approach defense.

My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.

If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today. In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.

They're not "based on civilian drones" other than using some basic software and electronics and design principals. Everything else is built around cheap and short lifetime.

Russia has exactly one aircraft carrier that nearly sank of its own accord. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...

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.

> drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war

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.

Ukraine has them too. They both buy the fiber tech from China.

And then you trace back the fibers, glistening in the sunlight... your operators had better be mobile.

Amazing that disposable drones can get fiber internet while residents of Silicon Valley can't!

Don't forget China. China is way ahead everybody else when it comes to consumer drones and producing them at scale. Like way ahead.

Russia is still a long way off that.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The larger drones are having an effect too. Ukraine as of mid feb had taken out about 10% or Russia's refining capacity and it's ongoing - the Ufa oil refinery was hit a day or so ago which is one of the largest in Russia and 1300 km from Ukraine. And of course their naval drones have had quite an effect on Russia's warships.

(recent sky new footage of them being sent off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEwObPT8zE)

> hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military

Would note that Russia’s failure to execute combined-arms manoeuvre-based warfare technically makes it a static fighting force.

Say what you will about the current situation, at least there is no nuclear arms race. I'd say that's a pretty big distinction.

Claims that other people are propagandizing are ridiculous with zero evidence, that’s some FUD BS. Make a better argument against OP if you’re so sure.

> And they (China) are explicitly interested in overturning the global order.

- Putin is actively taking Ukrainian territory by force

- Trump is threatening to take Greenland, Canada and the Panama canal by (economic) force

- Xi Jinping is threatening to take Taiwanese territory by force

Of all three, Jinping seems like the smallest threat to the "world order".

If you're talking about economic power, that's a different story but I wouldn't call them "adversary" in that context.

It's pretty amazing that an American armed forces service gave up an entire lineup of weaponry. 2021: "The Marine Corps had more than 450 tanks prior to the deactivation of the tank battalions. To date, MCSC has transferred more than 400 tanks to the Army. The remaining tanks in the Marine Corps inventory are afloat globally on Maritime Prepositioning Ships and are scheduled for transfer to the Army over the next few years."

"Drone" gets used to cover a lot of things; full aircraft sized Reaper/Predator drones down to toy-sized quadcopters. It's the latter which Ukraine has been developing, including a unique solution to ECM: the fiber-optic drone.

Small drones do not assume the role of tanks. Drones assume the role of WW1 aircraft: artillery spotters and very light bombing capability. They have this role there because both sides have SAM superiority over the other's airforce.

Drones solve the problem that combat aircraft are too expensive and too easy to shoot down.

There's things like the Anduril Bolt. They cost like 100x as much as devices the Ukranians are building from cardboard. Another major innovation is TOW style fiber optic control which is immune to electronic countermeasures. There's definitely a lot to learn, but sadly necessity is the mother of invention and not since WW2 has manufacturing cost really been a serious concern for US defense production. Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.

> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it

I am confused.

The US has massive fleets of military drones of every type and size that have been proven in combat environments. They literally pioneered the development of this type of military system and have been using them operationally decades before anyone else. Did everyone just forget this?

The US has extremely mature and capable drone technology, much better than a lot of what is being used in Ukraine. Really the only question is the ability of the US to scale production if it needed to.

> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it...

What would you call the Reapers and such? The US has a massive fleet of large, armed drones, remotely operated, and quite a few are capable of being armed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicles_in_th...

It's different from the consumer/small commercial drones being talked about here, but the US Military is pretty darn good at UAVs.

If you think of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, maybe not during the initial attack but once there were troops on the ground they would likely be vulnerable.

The major threat is SAM and other anti air. Maybe the US's stealth or long range cruise missiles would be enough to knock down and keep down the opponents anti air coverage but it's not guaranteed. Neither side has been able to gain safe access to the skies in this whole conflict, modern AA is just able to cover such a wide area it's hard to get ground assets close enough to strike.