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Quadcopters are actually insanely simple devices. I dont think the west would have any issue making hundreds of thousands of them without the help of china. Maybe the chips could be an issue but im sure taiwan would be happy to provide.
The future of drone warfare will be determined by software. That's the one thing where the US still have a huge lead.
We don't have a lead in software and for an Unmanned Aerial System we need hardware with the software.
In terms of future AI stuff maybe, but for current year practical purposes there is no relevant difference in software capabilities for controlling a bunch of drones in the way it is being done in ukraine.
The Ukrainians are controlling the drones one at a time. One drone, one pilot, operating remotely over wireless link. They’re having an absolutely devastating effect on Russia’s troops and equipment.
Autonomy is the future. It’s how you get to thousands or even millions of drones without the need for millions of human pilots. Trying to attack into a space which is defended by millions of drones absolutely will be a hellscape!
The hard part of good automation is onboard sensor processing. Takes a reasonable amount of compute onboard, which is expensive. Im told the US has a fat wallet though.
Swarms are the next evolution. PTI is the main blocker
They're already working on autonomous drones. That's still in its early stages but that will be a decisive factor in the future.
Dji has the best drone software as well...
Insanely simple devices still require a certain minimal amount of materials and manpower to assemble. The terrible secret of the Chinese economy is that they simply have more people doing more manufacturing labor. Sure, they often have state of the art equipment and a robust, heavily industrialized logistics system (one reason why western efforts to pivot off-shore manufacturing to Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the Indochina Peninsula haven't been particularly successful). But first and foremost, you need physical labor. Americans don't have a superabundance of domestic labor, so they're not capable of rapidly churning out lots of low-cost, disposable weapons systems at a rate comparable to the Chinese mainlanders.
And that's before you get into the cost of deploying, maintaining, and upgrading a large network of low quality units over a long time frame. Imagine building and deploying an entire fleet of Mark 1 Defense Drones to the island, only to discover a major security vulnerability that renders them easily inoperable. You've got hundreds of thousands of these units in the field, all of which need to be recalled, patched, and re-tested. That takes manpower, too.
The reason these low cost easily distributed systems work for, say, Houthi Rebels and Palestinian dissidents is that they've got these diffuse cells of insurgents with very little else to do except fight. These large ad hoc guerrilla forces are more a consequence of the deplorable state of the local economy than the fighting power of the region. Idle hands, etc.
Americans don't have that. We're at near full-employment. We can't peel off a tens of thousands of young men to go work on the drone assembly lines without suffering economic shortfalls. Hell, neither can Israel, which is why their domestic economy is tanking while they try to make war with virtually all of their Arab neighbors.
The Chinese economy has capacity to spare. The American economy does not. That's the same problem the Japanese ran into during WW2, and a big reason why they got washed in Mainland China after a decade of horrifying genocidal occupation.