said (7mo ago #1942 ):
The Drone Question. Is America screwed by lack of industrial capacity?
The war in Ukraine is teaching us that explosive hunter-seeker drones, FPV piloted or autonomous, are shockingly overpowered. Flying panzerfausts are wrecking armor for fractional cents on the dollar, and flying grenades are blowing the legs off of boys who can do nothing in response but beg for their lives or kill themselves first. Artillery matters a great deal still, but these things are like hyper-precision artillery you can't hide from.
I see a lot of cope about jamming and birdshot and so on, but it feels like cope, not defensive solutions. Is there any merit to that? Some decisive counter that is not being deployed here or is holding back an even worse tide?
But the real matter seems to be this: ability to mass manufacture hunter-seeker munitions for mere hundreds of dollars a kill is going to be decisive in the next war. With AI targeting and swarming it's only going to get worse. The hunter seeker drone is the rifle of the 21st century, and makes our guns look like swords. If all you have is guns, you might as well be Tokugawa Japan.
But America doesn't manufacture cutting edge drones of the type that are being deployed in Ukraine. That's only China. The humble DJI FPV drone, strapped with a grenade, becomes a decisive weapon. An anon in another thread (>>1940. I thought this deserved its own thread) asks:
>Why is it that US made hardware is so bad and Ukraine is snapping up DJI drones?
One answer is that America's industrial capacity is severely decayed, at least 10x behind China. Meanwhile America is sabotaging European industrial capacity with this stupid war against European energy access. And how could this be turned around? American labor is on drugs and/or priced out by financial or ZIRP email jobs, and when money comes around to build something industrial, it is sabotaged by payoffs to too many cartels (unions, DEI, women, local vetocrats, NIMBYs, etc).
Someone put it well recently: fixing America's industrial problem would benefit American workers and middle class, but come at the expense of the financial and political elite. I fear that means it's going to take a lot more than some "American Dynamism" memes and investments to fix it (though that surely helps).
Seems to me that this Ukraine drone thing is our Admiral Perry moment. If we don't take it that way, we're going to have a worse one much later than we'd like. Tokugawa problems call for Meiji-Showa solutions. We need to speedrun our glorious restoration and go nuts modernizing America for national strength. How else can we interpret this situation?
I see a lot of cope about jamming and birdshot and so on, but it feels like cope, not defensive solutions. Is there any merit to that? Some decisive counter that is not being deployed here or is holding back an even worse tide?
But the real matter seems to be this: ability to mass manufacture hunter-seeker munitions for mere hundreds of dollars a kill is going to be decisive in the next war. With AI targeting and swarming it's only going to get worse. The hunter seeker drone is the rifle of the 21st century, and makes our guns look like swords. If all you have is guns, you might as well be Tokugawa Japan.
But America doesn't manufacture cutting edge drones of the type that are being deployed in Ukraine. That's only China. The humble DJI FPV drone, strapped with a grenade, becomes a decisive weapon. An anon in another thread (>>1940. I thought this deserved its own thread) asks:
>Why is it that US made hardware is so bad and Ukraine is snapping up DJI drones?
One answer is that America's industrial capacity is severely decayed, at least 10x behind China. Meanwhile America is sabotaging European industrial capacity with this stupid war against European energy access. And how could this be turned around? American labor is on drugs and/or priced out by financial or ZIRP email jobs, and when money comes around to build something industrial, it is sabotaged by payoffs to too many cartels (unions, DEI, women, local vetocrats, NIMBYs, etc).
Someone put it well recently: fixing America's industrial problem would benefit American workers and middle class, but come at the expense of the financial and political elite. I fear that means it's going to take a lot more than some "American Dynamism" memes and investments to fix it (though that surely helps).
Seems to me that this Ukraine drone thing is our Admiral Perry moment. If we don't take it that way, we're going to have a worse one much later than we'd like. Tokugawa problems call for Meiji-Showa solutions. We need to speedrun our glorious restoration and go nuts modernizing America for national strength. How else can we interpret this situation?
