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

https://seanobannon.substack.com/p/drone-delivery-for-defense

by seanobannon • 1 year ago

80 99 1 year ago

seanobannon.substack.com

xnx2• 1 year ago

It's shocking to me the Secretary of Defense confirmation hearing only mentioned "drone" once, and that was not in reference to the future of warfare.

Ukraine has made pretty clear that drones will play a huge roll in future major conflicts. It's crazy that we haven't already shifted major portions of the defense budget from legacy weapons systems (e.g. tanks) to drones.

robertlagrant3• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure the US had drones before Ukraine occurred. The US does invest in drones. Maybe they will more, but we're probably a little way away from them assuming the role of tanks any time soon.

jcgrillo2• 1 year ago

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.

pjc504• 1 year ago

"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.

V__• 1 year ago

I would be really interested in a deep analysis. Ukraine doesn't have air superiority and the war has evolved into trench warfare.. thus drones are a very usefull tool.

But would this still be the case for a conflict with US involvement?

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

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.

tim3334• 1 year ago

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.

moduspol• 1 year ago

Yep. It boggles my mind that we still do aircraft flyovers at big football games. Those should be drones doing coordinated light shows--even in heavy winds, rain, and unfavorable conditions. Just to show that we've mastered it, and that we can do it easily even when there are no stakes.

My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it, but I don't think that's the way forward. It needs to be known that we've absolutely mastered them.

You know, kind of like the Chinese have done with their drone shows at the Olympics and similar events.

Syonyk• 1 year ago

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.

jandrewrogers2• 1 year ago

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.

nradov5• 1 year ago

I guess you haven't been paying attention. The Marine Corps has divested its tanks in preparation for fighting an island-hopping campaign against China.

https://www.marines.mil/News/News-Display/Article/2857680/fo...

euroderf4• 1 year ago

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."

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

I saw someone claiming drones are the biggest military invention since the stirrup!

The US would do well to start catching up on that technology.

BTW, I assume that when/if the Ukraine war ends, the Ukrainian drone industry will be the best in the world.

floatrock2• 1 year ago

The aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete, and I think most war strategists acknowledge that drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war. We haven't seen one of those sink yet, but well, Russia controls the historically strategic port of Sevastopol, and yet what's left of their Black Sea fleet has retreated to ports back behind Stormshadow range. Taiwan plans are definitely looking at cruise-missile-vs-airplane-range ratios.

So yes, drones and other unmanned munitions are game changers. I just wish the argument wasn't "increase civilian drones so we have a rich and vibrant military industrial complex ready for when we get to destroy things."

Then again, some of what the article is kinda saying is "if there's civilian applications for this, you don't need to have a military industrial complex (until you're forced to on a wartime footing, at which point you're not starting from zero)." Which is basically the strategic-importance argument that is keeping Boeing afloat these days...

pjc504• 1 year ago

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.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

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.

runsWphotons• 1 year ago

I will take the other side of that bet.

lawn3• 1 year ago

BTW, I assume that when/if the Ukraine war ends, the Ukrainian drone industry will be the best in the world.

I'd say it already is.

palata6• 1 year ago

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

clvx• 1 year ago

I’m just baffled how Russia switched the frontline using fiber drones. It’s genius and worrisome at the same time.

tim3334• 1 year ago

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

klipt• 1 year ago

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

euroderf4• 1 year ago

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

dfadsadsf• 1 year ago

Unlikely. Ukraine does not have scale, manufacturing base and talent for that - right now it's mostly assembling drones from Chinese parts with very little innovation on top of that. People talked about AI swarms but very little of that materialized at the front line. Larger drones require satellite connections, advanced materials, etc - Ukraine does not have that either. I expect Ukrainian expertise in war drones will stagnate and become obsolete very quickly after the war.

slimjimrick• 1 year ago

Interesting read

TheBicPen2• 1 year ago

This reads like a piece of defense propaganda. "Undoing the 1990s decision" - should we really return the US defense industry to cold-war levels? The world has changed, and the threat of outright war with the US is dramatically lower than 4 decades ago. Yes, China is an adversary, but to say that it's an existential threat to the US the same way the Soviet Union was is absurd.

uejfiweun• 1 year ago

[deleted]

ok_dad• 1 year ago

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.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

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.

TheBicPen2• 1 year ago

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.

yimby2001• 1 year ago

I think the weakness of this argument is that “domestic American drones” will just be using parts, or entire drones, made in China

“Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.“ What is that supposed to mean? A drone has a lot of parts. I can make 2 1/2 drones a day if I have the parts.

danielvf• 1 year ago

Ukraine announced a two weeks ago that they built 2.5 million drones last year. Maybe that number got garbled somewhere?

lawn3• 1 year ago

Ukraine is producing way more that that: they're up to millions per year: https://thedefensepost.com/2024/10/03/ukraine-produce-millio...

palata6• 1 year ago

The problem I have with the idea of subsidising small drones as a proxy for defense is that they solve very different problems: Making a small quadcopter that flies is now entirely solved: you take an open source autopilot, put it on some open source autopilot board, and that's it.

If you go further than that, successfully producing delivery drones means that they need to carry a payload safely to some destination, deliver the payload nicely (as in, smoothly leave a parcel on the ground), come back and be reusable. The drone flies by GPS, but doesn't really need a radio signal (ideally there is no operator, the drone just goes, delivers and comes back).

Killer drones are "one-way". They are defined by a lifetime of like 25min, ending up violently in a place where the operators care about maximising damage. They fly in war zones. Nobody really cares if some percentage of the drones falls from the sky or doesn't explode upon contact. They need to fly in GPS-denied mode, and they probably need a radio for the operator to select the target when the times comes. This has to be a military-grade radio that works in the presence of jamming to some extent.

Those are very different projects. Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.

cutemonster2• 1 year ago

Bomb and kamikaze drones based on civilian drones are already a reality though, Ukraine uses to defend itself. Don't know why you're talking as if that wasn't possible, when it's happening already.

palata6• 1 year ago

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.

potato3732842• 1 year ago

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.

toss13• 1 year ago

>Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.

Funny you should say that. The US had in 1938 a grand total of about 38 tanks. WWII started a few years later, and after converting prewar automobile factories to tank factories, the USA built more tanks than every other nation combined.

Pretty much the same thing happened for airplanes, as mentioned in the article.

US industrial production was literally the arsenal of democracy.

It is a LOT easier to convert commercial manufacturing base to military purposes than to start from scratch. So, yes, subsidizing commercial production to stay in-country is definitely good for mil readiness (and ultimately, the tank business).

nradov5• 1 year ago

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.

CrimsonCape• 1 year ago

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.

klooney• 1 year ago

Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.

I mean, in WWII, a lot of car manufacturers made tanks instead. Buick made the Hellcat, Chrysler, Ford and a variety of train manufacturers made the Sherman, and on and on. The skills are much more transferable than a lot of other fields.

In fact, this is explicitly why the US and others subsidize their passenger car industries.

This probably wouldn't work as well today, because most modern automakers just do engine design, assembly, and pick some parts out of a Bosch catalog, but I bet the more ambitious, vertically integrated automakers like BYD or Tesla could do an OK job in a pinch.

mytailorisrich• 1 year ago

For offensive drones in hot military situations I think one key area of study is swarming. To inflict real damage and evade defenses you need to throw a swarm of drones at the objective. If you that to be robust against jamming you may also want a level of autonomy.

maximusdrex• 1 year ago

While I agree with the ultimate conclusion of the article, that FAA regulations need to be modernized for commercial use of sUAS systems, it completely fails to analyze any of the other relevant dynamics facing the American drone industry. There are a plethora of American companies building drones for commercial and/or defense purposes (I work at one) but this article reads like the author knows only about the most publicized one and another company they heard about on a podcast. The article would benefit from an understanding of the Probably the most major blocker for the authors dreams of swarms of millions of American military drones is the following: jet engines and rocket motors can be produced in the US profitably, the American economy just isn’t set up to build drones motors, props, etc. in an economically efficient manner. Because of this, the cost-optimized drones developed for the commercial sector will never be acceptable for the us military. Secondly, the author seems to think that self-organized systems are a brand new innovation and would trivially port to a battlefield environment. However, these techniques rely on 5G connectivity and gps, whereas military sUAS systems need GPS-denied autonomy and the ability to communicate in a heavily jammed environment.

tim3334• 1 year ago

But look, Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now.

That seems way off. See the recent euromaidanpress headline:

Defense News: Ukraine plans 15-km unmanned “kill zone” along Russian front as drone production hits 4,000+ daily https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/02/defense-news-ukraine-...

Which is kind of interesting strategically. I was thinking Ukraine can't really afford to keep losing large numbers of soldiers and will probably try switching to drones to hold the Russians back. It's probably a technology that favours defenders over attackers as the defenders can work from hidden bunkers but the attackers have to move above ground.

throwup2384• 1 year ago

It’s not being talked about much outside of military analyst circles but those small drones have significantly changed the logistics of modern warfare possibly more than anything in the 21st century. Before, with cover and conceal warfare, armies had to deliver massive firepower to even have a chance of hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military, with ever more expensive precision munitions to make up for that fact. Now a small drone can drop a grenade and do the same amount of damage at similar distances between combatants. It makes a huge difference when a combat engineer slash drone pilot can carry 20kg of drones and small explosives into the battlefield as part of a small team instead of manning an entire artillery unit.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

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.

tim3334• 1 year ago

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)

Jtsummers2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised no one else noticed that this is a submarine article for Anduril and called it out. "Sean's Substack" was created 2 days ago (at the time of writing this comment) and has just this one article, no history to establish credibility either.

The main story is about Manna, an Irish company, but that doesn't help the US itself as they aren't made in the US. The article is advocating for a similar regulatory regime as Manna (and presumably others) have received in Ireland here in the US, and then name drops Anduril near the end.

Anduril's current business is to become part of the military industrial complex, but if regulations are changed they could shift their production towards commercial projects and expand their business.

ecshafer• 1 year ago

So? It might be a submarine article for Anduril, but their point still stands. The FAA regulations on Drones needs to be rewritten to allow innovation for both commercial and defense purposes.

moregrist• 1 year ago

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

Braxton1980• 1 year ago

What evidence exists to show FAA regulations are hampering innovation?

Jtsummers2• 1 year ago

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?

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

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