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.
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.