Just 13 days after the world was surprised by Operation Spiderweb, where the Ukrainian military and intelligence forces infiltrated Russia with drones and destroyed a major portion of Russia’s long-range air offensive capabilities, last night Israel began a major operation against Iran using similar, novel tactics.
Similar to Operation Spiderweb, Israel infiltrated Iran and placed drones near air defense systems. These drones were activated all at once and disabled the majority of these air defense systems, allowing Israel to embark on a major air offensive without much pushback. This air offensive continues to destroy and disable major military and nuclear sites, as well as eliminating some of the highest ranking military officials in Iran with minor collateral damage.
June 2025 will be remembered as the beginning of a new military era, where military drones operated either autonomously or from very far away are able to neutralize advanced, expensive military systems.
A probable consequence, from this and other things; China is likely the greatest military power on Earth. Perhaps not in the sense of currently deployed forces, but at least the sense of it’s ability to spin up and produce force, should it wish to do so.
The US military has about 10k drones of all sizes. Ukraine alone builds 2-4 million drones a year, mostly smaller. Most of the production involves assembling chinese made components. China has something like ninety percent of the global market share for components of small drones.
There is not a single NATO country currently thathat is building drones at scale.
I don’t think “number of drones produced” is a good proxy for “aggregate quality and usefulness of drones produced if a country decided it’s important”.
I thought the U.S. had by far the world’s most advanced military manufacturing industry, with approximately all cutting edge military technologies (including most drone designs) being developed here. Seems like this would apply straightforwardly to drones. There is possibly an unspoken argument here that drones do not require much technological innovation to make good, or less technological sophistication, as it’s more important to just mass produce them, but I don’t currently buy it. In as much as drones will be a really crucial military technology, I expect you will get substantial returns to quality, and the U.S. won’t be bottlenecked on literal volume of production.
In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.
Yes, I would predict that. My understanding for high-end military drones, which to be clear cost $100k+ each, the US is undisputedly the world leader. You linked to a random subreddit for consumer drones, which of course have almost nothing to do with the specific point of the U.S. being ahead on the cutting edge frontier.
My understanding is that American military technology is extremely expensive, and also at the frontier miles ahead of the competition. The thing you linked at are not at all in a comparable market (and again, yes, if mass production might turn out to be a bottleneck things are different, but I am disputing the cutting-edge point, not the mass production point).
Read the other link about how Ukraine preferred their consume-derived drones to the high-end military drones, which indeed cost 100k+ but nevertheless sucked.
Tbc this is just one link but I’ve seen this sentiment across several platforms.
That link is helpful! It does seem like cost was one of the big complaints, though other quality complaints also seemed pretty substantial.
Reading what is implied by the transcript, it seems like what happened is that the U.S. has not had that much investment into small + cheap drones, which is the market segment that ukraine really wanted. The big battle-tested drones probably worked, but really weren’t what Ukraine needed or wanted.
I also got a sense that most of the drones that didn’t perform well were from new private companies in the US. It’s a bit unclear to me how much that reflects what the US cutting edge ability is.
My current prediction is that by the end of 12 months, the best small drones will be U.S. manufactured, though far from price-competitive with other country’s drones. To be clear, I am not super confident on this. My guess is it’s also already true, it’s just not what Ukraine currently needs given their economic position.
Relevant sections of the transcript for convenience:
Heather Somerville: Starting about two years ago at the onset of the war in Ukraine, many US startups shipped their drones to Ukraine, and things went very poorly right from the start. They were very glitchy. They were very fragile in this electronic warfare environment, and these drones could not perform. Oftentimes, they couldn’t even take off. If they took off, they couldn’t complete missions, they couldn’t return home. They lost the signal between the pilot and the drone, and the drones fell out of the sky. This happened time and again. And they could not carry heavy payloads, in this case being an explosive, a grenade or something else that you drop on the enemy to blow them up. And that, of course, was a problem. They were very difficult to repair, they didn’t have parts for them. And that’s a lot of problems to contend with if you’re a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines.
Alex Ossola: US companies have made drones for a while. Why is Ukraine a particularly notable test?
Heather Somerville: Ukraine is the first war where small drones are very prominent. We’ve seen small drones being used by militias, by terrorist organizations before this, but this is the largest scale, the largest theater where they have played an extremely prominent role. And there’s also the rush among American corporations to try to help the Ukrainians. And in the beginning of the war, they could very easily find Ukrainian soldiers who were like, “Yeah, give me it. I’ll take anything.” And so, they had willing partners to use their drones, and these American companies thought, this will be our badge of being battle-tested, and we’ll start getting orders. We’ll be able to sell to the US military, to allied militaries. This is going to be great. And none of that panned out.
Alex Ossola: How much have US drone startups received in venture capital funding?
Heather Somerville: I estimated about $2.5 billion has been invested by venture capitalists into drone technology startups in the US in the last 24 months. So, they’re getting money, but that only lasts so long, of course, at a certain point, you need to start to make money. And having a customer continues to be a big problem for these companies that cannot sell to hobbyists. And that is because China has dominated the hobbyist industry. They can sell some to police officers and fire departments and search and rescue crews, and that’s great, but you only need so many drones for that purpose. They can sell some to utility companies and farmers who want to survey the land from the sky, but they were hoping that the cash cow would be the DoD with its big, huge budget, and there’s no indication that is the direction that this is going.
Alex Ossola: What will it take for US-produced drones to do better on the battlefield.
Heather Somerville: They have to reimagine what they’re building. And in the case of company Skydio, this is a drone company where I am in Silicon Valley, that’s raised a lot of money. They have built a new drone. They tell us that they have fixed the problems. They’re very clear that this is based on feedback largely from the Ukrainians, and they say it’s going to function in the electronic warfare environment. There’s another company in Utah called Teal Drones that says it has a drone there that is working and is hopeful the Ukrainians will buy it in large number. So, we’ll see if these companies make good on this.
I think most new cutting-edge stuff comes from refinement of new, non-cutting-edge technology. So if your country makes 90% of worldwide production a new-ish technology (like drones) it will also probably make the best ones, and if you decide you want to make military ones you’ll probably make the best military ones. And China just makes a ton of electric drone motors, control hardware, etc, that the US makes in much much smaller quantities.
(The technological areas where the US does seem ahead (i.e., say, quiet nuclear submarine technologies) are areas where the US has been manufacturing actively for 80 years, and where we don’t have a history of manufacturing in China; but even this isn’t a guarantee, as a handful of smaller, cheaper unmanned subs sidestep this advantage, in the same way they can sidestep other things.)
(The technological areas where the US does seem ahead (i.e., say, quiet nuclear submarine technologies) are areas where the US has been manufacturing actively for 80 years, and where we don’t have a history of manufacturing in China; but even this isn’t a guarantee, as a handful of smaller, cheaper unmanned subs sidestep this advantage, in the same way they can sidestep other things.)
I thought the U.S. was also ahead in fighter jet manufacturing, missile manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, aircraft carrier design and capacity, and many other things that seem like they would more directly translate into drone manufacturing. In as much as I am wrong about that, that would be a substantial update, but my sense is despite its pathologies, the U.S. is really where a huge fraction of cutting edge military technology gets developed and built, in basically every domain.
In general this story of “most new cutting-edge stuff comes from refinement and so if you make a lot you will also make the best” really doesn’t seem true to me. The U.S. produces the best software for approximately every single domain, even if the industry in which that software is used is much smaller in the U.S. than anywhere else. A far better predictor of whether you will produce the cutting edge stuff is whether you have an industry specialized in producing the cutting edge stuff. China and India have been copying American innovation for decades in dozens of industries, from software, to medical, to manufacturing, to construction, and they have not generally been the drivers of innovation in those domains, despite their markets for those things being much larger than the U.S.
I think whether you have a healthy industry that incentivizes innovation and can build new things will be much more indicative of who will be at the frontier here (as it’s been in basically every other industry). The strongest argument against this mattering in the drone case is that volume of production is more important, but my guess is the U.S. is in a better position to incentivize large volume production of drones than China, because the U.S. has a functioning market economy where the U.S. can incentivize things by paying for them, in a way that China cannot reliably.
U.S. has a functioning market economy where the U.S. can incentivize things by paying for them, in a way that China cannot reliably.
I think your model of the world is just flat wrong if you think this. Like—China interferes in China’s economy a lot. The US interferes in the US’ economy a lot. But—surely—China has a functioning market economy, where you can incentivize things by paying for them? Sure it’s “Communist” but it’s not communist like that.
Like Russia didn’t have a functioning market economy. A sign of this was that the Russian cars sucked and found little traction as exports. That’s because non-market economies produce bad products at high prices.
On the other hand, BYD sells more cars than Tesla (but competes against many other EV makers inside china). DJI sells more drones than the rest of the world combined (but also competes against other Chinese companies like Autel, etc). Huawei is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer since ~2020 or so, I think (and competes against other Chinese companies, and Apple, and Samsung). In general, many Chinese products are of high quality, to the degree that people in countries like Germany want to ban them from their markets because they are taking too much market share. And that’s because—unlike Russian cars—they come from something that’s at least a reasonably functioning market economy.
The Chinese government has surely subsidized this for various reasons, just like the US has subsidized the soybean farmers. They’ve surely made it less efficient in many ways. But these companies nevertheless compete on an marketplace internal to China, compete on marketplaces external to China, and have their success largely because they make products that are excellent while doing so efficiently.
And so it appears to me it would be much easier for China to scale drone production from a base that is ~20x higher than the US’ production to continue to maintain absolute and overwhelming numerical superiority.
But—surely—China has a functioning market economy, where you can incentivize things by paying for them? Sure it’s “Communist” but it’s not communist like that.
I have lots of uncertainty about this! For example, it does appear that China basically gutted its software startup industry a few months ago, and this is really costly, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this will have large negative effects on Chinese drone effectiveness, since software seems like a non-trivial fraction of the difficulty, especially for coordinating drone swarms.
My current model is that overall, all things considered, the Chinese market economy is a lot weaker. This doesn’t mean there are no domains where China excells at building great products in their market economy, but I have a much higher likelihood that something will mess up their efforts to do something in the market than I have for the U.S.. IDK, I am at like 65% that the US market economy is sufficiently stronger here to produce a long-run advantage in drone manufacturing if the US government decides to spend heavily on it, which really isn’t that confident.
Since I feel like these kinds of discussions can often feel thankless, I felt like I wanted to write an explicit comment saying I am grateful for @1a3orn’s, @JohnofCharleston’s, @Thomas Kwa’s and @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comments on this thread. I disagree with many of you, but you presented a bunch of good arguments evidence on a thing that does actually seem quite important for the future of the world.
You might be interested in my old shortform on the military balance of power between US and China too. It’s a bit dated by now—the importance of drones has become much more clear by now [I think the evidence that we are in a military technological revolution on par with the introduction of guns] but you may find it of interest regardless.
That video seems like a kind of terrible source to me. A russian drone developer isn’t going to be neutral on the state of U.S. drone manufacturing, he might literally face persecution if he praises the U.S. military.
He praises specific aspects of the Ukrainian forces and goes into technical details in ways which seem much more consistent with ‘guy who is relatively straightforwardly trying to represent reality’ than the model where he’s a mouthpiece. If you didn’t watch it and just bounced off the speaker, consider watching, it’s pretty info dense and feels non fake to my senses (though non zero bias).
(and this is compatible with a bunch of other data points I’ve picked up from elsewhere, it’s just a nice package with more detail)
Ah, that is pretty decent evidence. I watched like 5 minutes then stopped, but if the author also criticizes the Russian drone efforts then that suggests much more freedom to express himself than baseline.
Yeah, he does pretty harshly criticize the slowness and lack of iteration speed that Russia had near the start, and points at several ways Ukraine has lead innovation. Him being commercial selling to the army rather than officially part of the state or military makes him at least think he can get away with this, I think.
he might literally face persecution if he praises the U.S. military
To my best knowledge, it is false when interpreted literally. It is true that public praise for US military happens to be correlated with other activities which are deemed illegal like publicly expressing disdain for Russian military. It is true that public praise for US military gets a public non-thinking push-back which makes the issue worse.
Meta: correction stated under Scott’s IIWYTLIWMTTCI policy.
I don’t understand? Russia does not have stable rule of law. If you praise the US military as a Russian military official, you would almost certainly face serious personal and professional consequences, this just seems really obvious from how Russia operates.
This proves too much. If you consistently require there be no “serious personal and professional consequences” before you trust a source, you’d have to dismiss almost all of them.
And outside the US, statements the government finds offensive often run the risk of criminal prosecution as well. The existence of “stable rule of law” doesn’t preclude this.
This proves too much. If you consistently require there be no “serious personal and professional consequences” before you trust a source, you’d have to dismiss almost all of them.
I think the heuristic of “do not trust a source to accurately report X if it faces serious personal and professional consequences for many plausible beliefs about X” is not a particularly weird heuristic? That seems extremely normal to me, and I am confused what’s going on here. Most people, especially in the US do not face serious personal and professional consequences for most beliefs they express, and when they do, you should absolutely dismiss them as a source.
Defense technology production is no longer about manufacturing. It’s culturally artisanal. In peer competition, the ability to scale is typically more decisive than artisinal quality (with the notable exception of the Manhattan project).
I think you’re right that American drones would likely be several times better, perhaps an order of magnitude better, than Chinese comparators. But we would have substantial bottlenecks on scaling production, could not simply resolve those bottlenecks with money, and even if we manage to scale appropriately would face huge cost disadvantages.
That’s a huge problem when the use case is swarm tactics. China could probably afford a strategy to saturate defenses with its drones, we probably could not, with our current mindset and processes.
Yeah, that’s the case I find most compelling. I think the key thing that makes me not sold on this being a defeater, even if swarm tactics dominate, is just the ability for the U.S. to direct it’s extremely strong and powerful open market to this problem. My guess is if the U.S. was buying military drones from private U.S. companies en-masse, we would see enormous scale-up, and my guess is more responsively than the Chinese economy would, since the market is healthier. I am not sure of this, but this is how it’s gone in many other domains.
It’s certainly plausible that you’re right, but I worry about this a lot more now after the supply chain disruptions from Covid and tarrifs. I worry that we’d have real cold-start bottlenecks that would take years to resolve, not weeks or months, in any scenario where we lose access to Chinese parts. Scenarios in which ocean shipping is substantially disrupted are even scarier in one sense, though China would probably be symmetricaly affected, or worse.
The best counter-argument to my worry, and biggest update I’ve had on this in recent years, is the success of the TSMC chip fab in Arizona. I predicted it would not go well. I’m delighted to have been wrong.
According to Ukraine drone operators western drones are often not even regarded as very good. Expensive, overengineered, fail often, haven’t kept pace with rapid innovation during the Ukraine war.
Just 13 days after the world was surprised by Operation Spiderweb, where the Ukrainian military and intelligence forces infiltrated Russia with drones and destroyed a major portion of Russia’s long-range air offensive capabilities, last night Israel began a major operation against Iran using similar, novel tactics.
Similar to Operation Spiderweb, Israel infiltrated Iran and placed drones near air defense systems. These drones were activated all at once and disabled the majority of these air defense systems, allowing Israel to embark on a major air offensive without much pushback. This air offensive continues to destroy and disable major military and nuclear sites, as well as eliminating some of the highest ranking military officials in Iran with minor collateral damage.
June 2025 will be remembered as the beginning of a new military era, where military drones operated either autonomously or from very far away are able to neutralize advanced, expensive military systems.
A probable consequence, from this and other things; China is likely the greatest military power on Earth. Perhaps not in the sense of currently deployed forces, but at least the sense of it’s ability to spin up and produce force, should it wish to do so.
My guess would be the US is in a much better position to build large numbers of cutting-edge drones? Am I missing something?
The US military has about 10k drones of all sizes. Ukraine alone builds 2-4 million drones a year, mostly smaller. Most of the production involves assembling chinese made components. China has something like ninety percent of the global market share for components of small drones.
There is not a single NATO country currently thathat is building drones at scale.
I don’t think “number of drones produced” is a good proxy for “aggregate quality and usefulness of drones produced if a country decided it’s important”.
I thought the U.S. had by far the world’s most advanced military manufacturing industry, with approximately all cutting edge military technologies (including most drone designs) being developed here. Seems like this would apply straightforwardly to drones. There is possibly an unspoken argument here that drones do not require much technological innovation to make good, or less technological sophistication, as it’s more important to just mass produce them, but I don’t currently buy it. In as much as drones will be a really crucial military technology, I expect you will get substantial returns to quality, and the U.S. won’t be bottlenecked on literal volume of production.
In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.
Doesn’t this predict the US would currently produce the world’s best drones? Which by pretty universal acclaim is simply not true.
Or consider, for instance, the drones that American companies sent to Ukraine, which were largely duds.
Yes, I would predict that. My understanding for high-end military drones, which to be clear cost $100k+ each, the US is undisputedly the world leader. You linked to a random subreddit for consumer drones, which of course have almost nothing to do with the specific point of the U.S. being ahead on the cutting edge frontier.
My understanding is that American military technology is extremely expensive, and also at the frontier miles ahead of the competition. The thing you linked at are not at all in a comparable market (and again, yes, if mass production might turn out to be a bottleneck things are different, but I am disputing the cutting-edge point, not the mass production point).
Read the other link about how Ukraine preferred their consume-derived drones to the high-end military drones, which indeed cost 100k+ but nevertheless sucked.
Tbc this is just one link but I’ve seen this sentiment across several platforms.
That link is helpful! It does seem like cost was one of the big complaints, though other quality complaints also seemed pretty substantial.
Reading what is implied by the transcript, it seems like what happened is that the U.S. has not had that much investment into small + cheap drones, which is the market segment that ukraine really wanted. The big battle-tested drones probably worked, but really weren’t what Ukraine needed or wanted.
I also got a sense that most of the drones that didn’t perform well were from new private companies in the US. It’s a bit unclear to me how much that reflects what the US cutting edge ability is.
My current prediction is that by the end of 12 months, the best small drones will be U.S. manufactured, though far from price-competitive with other country’s drones. To be clear, I am not super confident on this. My guess is it’s also already true, it’s just not what Ukraine currently needs given their economic position.
Relevant sections of the transcript for convenience:
I’m curious whether the US will end up working with Ukraine’s drone manufacturers to build up our own drone manufacturing capabilities.
I think most new cutting-edge stuff comes from refinement of new, non-cutting-edge technology. So if your country makes 90% of worldwide production a new-ish technology (like drones) it will also probably make the best ones, and if you decide you want to make military ones you’ll probably make the best military ones. And China just makes a ton of electric drone motors, control hardware, etc, that the US makes in much much smaller quantities.
(The technological areas where the US does seem ahead (i.e., say, quiet nuclear submarine technologies) are areas where the US has been manufacturing actively for 80 years, and where we don’t have a history of manufacturing in China; but even this isn’t a guarantee, as a handful of smaller, cheaper unmanned subs sidestep this advantage, in the same way they can sidestep other things.)
I thought the U.S. was also ahead in fighter jet manufacturing, missile manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, aircraft carrier design and capacity, and many other things that seem like they would more directly translate into drone manufacturing. In as much as I am wrong about that, that would be a substantial update, but my sense is despite its pathologies, the U.S. is really where a huge fraction of cutting edge military technology gets developed and built, in basically every domain.
In general this story of “most new cutting-edge stuff comes from refinement and so if you make a lot you will also make the best” really doesn’t seem true to me. The U.S. produces the best software for approximately every single domain, even if the industry in which that software is used is much smaller in the U.S. than anywhere else. A far better predictor of whether you will produce the cutting edge stuff is whether you have an industry specialized in producing the cutting edge stuff. China and India have been copying American innovation for decades in dozens of industries, from software, to medical, to manufacturing, to construction, and they have not generally been the drivers of innovation in those domains, despite their markets for those things being much larger than the U.S.
I think whether you have a healthy industry that incentivizes innovation and can build new things will be much more indicative of who will be at the frontier here (as it’s been in basically every other industry). The strongest argument against this mattering in the drone case is that volume of production is more important, but my guess is the U.S. is in a better position to incentivize large volume production of drones than China, because the U.S. has a functioning market economy where the U.S. can incentivize things by paying for them, in a way that China cannot reliably.
I think your model of the world is just flat wrong if you think this. Like—China interferes in China’s economy a lot. The US interferes in the US’ economy a lot. But—surely—China has a functioning market economy, where you can incentivize things by paying for them? Sure it’s “Communist” but it’s not communist like that.
Like Russia didn’t have a functioning market economy. A sign of this was that the Russian cars sucked and found little traction as exports. That’s because non-market economies produce bad products at high prices.
On the other hand, BYD sells more cars than Tesla (but competes against many other EV makers inside china). DJI sells more drones than the rest of the world combined (but also competes against other Chinese companies like Autel, etc). Huawei is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer since ~2020 or so, I think (and competes against other Chinese companies, and Apple, and Samsung). In general, many Chinese products are of high quality, to the degree that people in countries like Germany want to ban them from their markets because they are taking too much market share. And that’s because—unlike Russian cars—they come from something that’s at least a reasonably functioning market economy.
The Chinese government has surely subsidized this for various reasons, just like the US has subsidized the soybean farmers. They’ve surely made it less efficient in many ways. But these companies nevertheless compete on an marketplace internal to China, compete on marketplaces external to China, and have their success largely because they make products that are excellent while doing so efficiently.
And so it appears to me it would be much easier for China to scale drone production from a base that is ~20x higher than the US’ production to continue to maintain absolute and overwhelming numerical superiority.
I have lots of uncertainty about this! For example, it does appear that China basically gutted its software startup industry a few months ago, and this is really costly, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this will have large negative effects on Chinese drone effectiveness, since software seems like a non-trivial fraction of the difficulty, especially for coordinating drone swarms.
My current model is that overall, all things considered, the Chinese market economy is a lot weaker. This doesn’t mean there are no domains where China excells at building great products in their market economy, but I have a much higher likelihood that something will mess up their efforts to do something in the market than I have for the U.S.. IDK, I am at like 65% that the US market economy is sufficiently stronger here to produce a long-run advantage in drone manufacturing if the US government decides to spend heavily on it, which really isn’t that confident.
Since I feel like these kinds of discussions can often feel thankless, I felt like I wanted to write an explicit comment saying I am grateful for @1a3orn’s, @JohnofCharleston’s, @Thomas Kwa’s and @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comments on this thread. I disagree with many of you, but you presented a bunch of good arguments evidence on a thing that does actually seem quite important for the future of the world.
Much appreciated Habryka-san!
You might be interested in my old shortform on the military balance of power between US and China too. It’s a bit dated by now—the importance of drones has become much more clear by now [I think the evidence that we are in a military technological revolution on par with the introduction of guns] but you may find it of interest regardless.
The US looks way behind from all the major data points I’ve seen. This interview touches on a lot of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM
That video seems like a kind of terrible source to me. A russian drone developer isn’t going to be neutral on the state of U.S. drone manufacturing, he might literally face persecution if he praises the U.S. military.
He praises specific aspects of the Ukrainian forces and goes into technical details in ways which seem much more consistent with ‘guy who is relatively straightforwardly trying to represent reality’ than the model where he’s a mouthpiece. If you didn’t watch it and just bounced off the speaker, consider watching, it’s pretty info dense and feels non fake to my senses (though non zero bias).
(and this is compatible with a bunch of other data points I’ve picked up from elsewhere, it’s just a nice package with more detail)
Ah, that is pretty decent evidence. I watched like 5 minutes then stopped, but if the author also criticizes the Russian drone efforts then that suggests much more freedom to express himself than baseline.
Yeah, he does pretty harshly criticize the slowness and lack of iteration speed that Russia had near the start, and points at several ways Ukraine has lead innovation. Him being commercial selling to the army rather than officially part of the state or military makes him at least think he can get away with this, I think.
He also says that Chinese drones are low quality and Ukraine is slightly ahead of Russia.
To my best knowledge, it is false when interpreted literally. It is true that public praise for US military happens to be correlated with other activities which are deemed illegal like publicly expressing disdain for Russian military. It is true that public praise for US military gets a public non-thinking push-back which makes the issue worse.
Meta: correction stated under Scott’s IIWYTLIWMTTCI policy.
I don’t understand? Russia does not have stable rule of law. If you praise the US military as a Russian military official, you would almost certainly face serious personal and professional consequences, this just seems really obvious from how Russia operates.
This proves too much. If you consistently require there be no “serious personal and professional consequences” before you trust a source, you’d have to dismiss almost all of them.
And outside the US, statements the government finds offensive often run the risk of criminal prosecution as well. The existence of “stable rule of law” doesn’t preclude this.
I think the heuristic of “do not trust a source to accurately report X if it faces serious personal and professional consequences for many plausible beliefs about X” is not a particularly weird heuristic? That seems extremely normal to me, and I am confused what’s going on here. Most people, especially in the US do not face serious personal and professional consequences for most beliefs they express, and when they do, you should absolutely dismiss them as a source.
Defense technology production is no longer about manufacturing. It’s culturally artisanal. In peer competition, the ability to scale is typically more decisive than artisinal quality (with the notable exception of the Manhattan project).
I think you’re right that American drones would likely be several times better, perhaps an order of magnitude better, than Chinese comparators. But we would have substantial bottlenecks on scaling production, could not simply resolve those bottlenecks with money, and even if we manage to scale appropriately would face huge cost disadvantages.
That’s a huge problem when the use case is swarm tactics. China could probably afford a strategy to saturate defenses with its drones, we probably could not, with our current mindset and processes.
Yeah, that’s the case I find most compelling. I think the key thing that makes me not sold on this being a defeater, even if swarm tactics dominate, is just the ability for the U.S. to direct it’s extremely strong and powerful open market to this problem. My guess is if the U.S. was buying military drones from private U.S. companies en-masse, we would see enormous scale-up, and my guess is more responsively than the Chinese economy would, since the market is healthier. I am not sure of this, but this is how it’s gone in many other domains.
It’s certainly plausible that you’re right, but I worry about this a lot more now after the supply chain disruptions from Covid and tarrifs. I worry that we’d have real cold-start bottlenecks that would take years to resolve, not weeks or months, in any scenario where we lose access to Chinese parts. Scenarios in which ocean shipping is substantially disrupted are even scarier in one sense, though China would probably be symmetricaly affected, or worse.
The best counter-argument to my worry, and biggest update I’ve had on this in recent years, is the success of the TSMC chip fab in Arizona. I predicted it would not go well. I’m delighted to have been wrong.
According to Ukraine drone operators western drones are often not even regarded as very good. Expensive, overengineered, fail often, haven’t kept pace with rapid innovation during the Ukraine war.
Note also in PPP China is already 50% ahead of the US