Why America fell behind in drones, and how to catch up agaon

Misspelling in headline: agaon > again.

America is probably not behind in long-range strike drones, esp those that are supersonic, carrying high payloads and with stealth characteristics (hard to detect).

But we are very much behind on short-range dual-use quadcopters, which are produced for a massive global market and DJI has achieved economies of scale.

People on HN should know that DJI has built-in advantages in tracking its own drones (Aerospace), and most certainly backdoors to access data that users would prefer to hide. China has used that edge to Russia’s advantage in the Ukraine war. We should ban them from the West.

At the same time, it is possible to assemble an FPV from Chinese and Taiwanese parts for about $350, if you do it in the right country. Skydio will not achieve that, but someone else could.

US won’t catch up, if anything the gap will continue to widen. You can’t offshore all the industry except the thin layer of bloated military subcontractors and hope to stay competitive.

Anyone who’s used Skydio will tell you the only thing it’s good at is obstacle avoidance - it’s a one trick pony. And while recent DJI drones have improved their obstacle avoidance, Skydio has shattered its consumer product division, so the only thing you would expect after DJI ban is overpriced shittier drones from Skydio and grey market imported ‘not DJI’ drones that DJI has ‘licensed’ to such brands as ‘Cogito’ - basically, a carbon copy that’s technically not DJI.

I think too many have forget a lesson: automotive is the locomotive of ALL industries. If automotive is not there/is falling behind some competitors a country can't sustain it's own whole industry.

Automotive back al the other industries because of scale and tech:

- it's not the top-tech of the industry, but it still demand in large batches a significant amount of tech, making it cheap thanks to the scale;

- by volumes it's the first manufacturing industry.

For some decades the financiarisation of anything remove substantial research and development, we have seen just improvement in what's already there, period. As a result industry stop it's base growth, it grow in services, marketing etc but loose the most important asset, the knowledge and the ability to use it. Just try talking with people, most want old homes, cars, petrol, gas, not something new. That's a good thermometer of the current disaster. In the past while not less reactionary in tech terms mean people was enthusiast, they dream flying, going for deep space exploration, ... now some dream a farm, some others dream a modern city full of services, nothing more. Now people want to be influencer, not scientists, explorers and so.

Long story short: the society lost the taste for innovation, the automotive lost it's status, anything else will collapse at different speed but will due to that. Drones are nothing new in mere tech, we have choppers since decades and drones are kind of very cheap simple, helicopters. But drones on scale are a relatively new thing that start the switch from roads to air, and people do not accept, fear that https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and also fail to se the path, just playing with some toys with or without cameras. Having a failed automotive sector there is no way to mass produce anything new and having lost the taste for evolution makes a large scarcity of innovative people.

Only a MASSIVE public action to re-create large research labs led by researchers not by manager, to advance, not to make new short-time-to-market stuff, can change that in a generation with results really felt at the next one generation. Being quicker is next to impossible.

This article seems not to actually answer its own headline - it doesn't really go into the details of why the US fell behind. I think it is important to keep that reason front and centre.

China made a lot of sacrifices. It opened sweatshops, allowed the skys above various key cities to be blackened with horrible smogs, and who knows what other evil deeds were done in the name of their industrial policy. The result is that they are a manufacturing superpower. If you follow real metrics like energy production, the figures suggest they've built >1 US economy in the last 50 years, while the US appears to have built 0 US economies and are carrying on with momentum left over from before the 70s [0]. It is not surprising that new industry is based in China.

DJI is not a tactical problem, the US is failing here on a strategic level. Probably with an epicentre in Washington, but possibly from the citizenry deciding they don't want to be the leading industrial power any more. I don't think it was ever a contender for taking the lead in mass producing the next cheap military technology.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-cons?tab=c...