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.
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.
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).
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.
That said, I'd still say having one capability today still makes a far shorter path to convert from Civ-to-Mil output. I run a carbon-fiber composites shop that does everything from design through materials, CAD, CAM, moldmaking, forming with multiple technologies, CNC machining, and assembly. It would be a straightforward task to setup for new Mil products (and not just because we already do some Mil work), especially compared to not having it at all.
That is an excellent reason to subsidize maintaining convertible or dual-use tech in the civilian arena. e.g., make sure turbines are used in more civilian uses. Stockpile tech that is really civilian incompatible such as the depleted uranium armor.
Turbines are a good example of how a civilian tech could have gone differently. In the 1960s several turbine-powered cars were in development for street use and a turbine race car qualified and lead most of the 1967 Indianapolis 500 race. But then the USAC effectively disqualified it [0], and civilian development stopped for other reasons. But it arguably might have continued had turbine power been allowed to race and dominate.
Yet, turbines are used both for aircraft and for natural gas power, both stationary and portable, and there are many small turbines. So, of course, we would not go to an ICE engine builder but to the builders of aircraft and gas power plants. There are also manufacturers of small-scale turbines that might ramp up.
On the other hand, we can also look at how modern warfare has changed over the last three years. multi-million dollar tanks are being reliably destroyed by $800 drones. And drone tech is highly fungible. Many common computer chips and boards can be used to control it, many common lightweight motors will work, and composites or lightweight metals can make the bodies. All of these technologies are highly configurable, so it would be a short lead time to make new factories to turn out pretty much whatever shape drone we wanted, whether it is flying, rolling, or swimming.
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.
One of the previous defense minister was skeptical of their utility too and called them “wedding drones”, and now you can see very frequently in war footages mentions how they are using “wedding drones” in this or that reconnaissance or surveillance operation.
You absolutely need tens of thousands of drones in the air all the time to support modern warfare.
And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.
“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.
I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.
And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary
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.
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.
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...
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.
Russia's experience with drones vs. her guided missile cruisers has more than enough there to translate to more capable aircraft carriers.
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.
I'd say it already is.
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.
(recent sky new footage of them being sent off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEwObPT8zE)
Would note that Russia’s failure to execute combined-arms manoeuvre-based warfare technically makes it a static fighting force.
- 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.
Putin is in a hot war right now. Xi seems to be actively preparing for one. The chance of the US sitting aside a military invasion of Taiwan seems very low to me.
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.
https://www.marines.mil/News/News-Display/Article/2857680/fo...
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.
I'm not saying they do. I was replying to a comment.
Define "light". Ukraine is fielding FPV drones with EFPs attached that can easily slice into anything armored.
I'm not sure if I'd be rooting for this eventuality.
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.
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.
The US leads in larger drones, like the Global Hawk, which is the size of a regional airliner, can stay airborne for more than a day, and cover tens of thousands of kilometers in that time. The smaller and cheaper ones are just expensive toys, far behind what's seen in Ukraine in terms of actual usefulness. A cheap Chinese agricultural sprayer drone with equally cheap 3D-printed drum of infantry grenades or an anti-tank mine strapped to it outperforms most "military grade" commercial offerings like Switchblade that cost ten times as much and are good for only a single use, unlike the sprayer, which returns home after dropping its payload.
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.
But would this still be the case for a conflict with US involvement?
That's what those capabilities are designed to do ("SEAD"), but they're very expensive. And so strategic that the US wasn't willing to let the Ukranians have any.
“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.
