If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.
> You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated factory if you're selling at a massive scale. Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
And it's also dumb to fund your opponent's war production lines.
I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.
which, the factory that builds drones or the drones themselves?
What would stop someone from building their own cargo container sized drone factory that takes parts like motors, pcbs, batteries in one end and spits out finished drones on the other?
The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
I am of the opinion that the US made a very serious mistake by opening up tariff-free trade with countries which do not have comparable labor and environmental safety laws. The Feds should have come up with reasonable estimates of what foreign manufacturing was saving by cheating that way, and charged them that amount of money to sell products in the US. Factories which wanted to avoid those tariffs could pay for, and submit to, an independent audit of their factories.
Instead we decided that it was fine for US manufacturing to compete on an "even" basis with nations who are fine with laborers losing fingers and/or getting paid slave wages, and manufacturers dumping their waste stream into a nearby river. We've paid a severe price for that misguided egalitarianism, and it's time to change course.
As duties and trade restrictions were dropped in the late 70s and 80s, the mantra was that by doing so, the West would "uplift" poorer countries such as China. The goals to improve quality of life, transform the third world from agrarian to mass production, with a hope of spreading democratic principles as well.
And yes, over and over this was the desireded goal, I remember the election campaigns, the speeches, the white papers, the think tanks.
This has mostly been a success, looking at many such countries. The standard of living has gone up, for example China now has a "middle class" of sorts.
Environmental concerns were not on the radar at the time, not 50 years ago, not like today.
The intentions were reasonably positive and well founded. Of course, I agree reassessment is necessary, and it really should always be.
It was great for short term profit and stock value and everyone involved in making those choices is either dead or soon to be dead and doesn’t have to deal with the fallout.
>The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
In the consumer market, if the $1000 drone has a significantly worse user experience then people just won't buy it. Before DJI the consumer drone market was much smaller; by creating a cheap, high-quality product DJI caused more people to purchase drones, growing the market. If there's no competitive alternative the market will just shrink again; consumer drones aren't a necessity.
By all reports, Skydio drones offer an excellent user experience.
The DJI Mini 3 Prop is currently $899, and Skydio can't manufacture something like that in the US, and sell it for that amount of money. But I bet they could make something comparable at a sale price of $1100-1300.
Allowing Communists to dump goods in our market is optional. I don't know that I support a ban on DJI products, I have a Mini 2: I like drones, but not enough to drop a couple grand on a Skydio 2 (and note that they exited the consumer market, presumably because of the aforementioned price dumping making it infeasible to compete). I would be pissed off if it was permanently grounded. But at minimum I support tariffs which are heavy enough to give domestic industry a chance to compete on an even footing.
And given the evident relationship between drone technology and national security, I could be persuaded that a full ban is in the national interest. Perhaps (this is only sort of a joke) the NSA could release a full open-source jailbreak of every DJI product, and publish an API for the cloud components which any American compute provider could then offer.
Then block their servers. Let 'em know that we'll let them back in the country when Facebook can operate in China, and not before.
At this point China is about as communist as FedEx is federal. They are “state capitalist” which pretty much means the government owns or has controlling stakes in a lot of companies. Singapore’s is similar.
They copied Lenin’s NEP, which was copied later by the German fascists. As it happens, Sun, Yatsen, on his deathbed, met with Mao one time in Guangzhou and they both agreed a fascist (or state capitalist) system would be best for the Chinese people. That was after NEP but before German fascists rose to power. Of course Stalin put an end to NEP and powered and willed full on communism after Lenin’s death.
> The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
the time when the US could actually decide this sort of thing at close to planet scale is long gone. if you ban those devices, there will be countless other nations (including close friends of the US) where you will be able to buy them no problem.
Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.
I don't understand why every estimate assumes Russian and Iranian engineers work for free and only include the raw material/components cost of these weapons systems.
R&D costs makes up the vast majority of the cost of Western weapons systems.
> I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points.
I think you're 100% right here.
It may seem absurd, but something that can take out a main battle tank would be well worth $20,000. An M1A2 Abrams costs $24 million. The latest model Russian T-90 is around $4 million. A Chinese Type 99 is around $2.5 million. The asymmetry is clear.
Some of that $20,000 is making sure it works reliably under any conceivable weather conditions, after it's been stuck in a storage container at +50 C/-30C for weeks or months, etc.
On the other hand, if you're just doing reconnaissance, maybe you'd rather send a swarm of 20 $1,000 drones instead (in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy's countermeasures).
UA is showing the world what can be done with <$1k drones. China has that market locked down right now, presumably this legislation is aiming at that market. This isn't about Reaper-scale drones.
>This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.
Single use drones could exist without subsidizing by the consumer industry. Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands. Anything else would simply lead to overdesign and basically the same problem we have now where the enemy is simply lobbing cheap artillery in volume while we simply do not have smart missiles to spare for Ukraine, nor for ourselves if we got into such a war. Lmao.
The American MIC is largely...maliciously incompetent. I work in this sector.
Overdesigning, so you can slap a 500% profit margin on something with more features than ever needed. Then you lobby the generals in charge of project funding with dinners, gifts and more.
I'm under the impression that the supply-chain for Ukrainian drones basically leads to China in the same way that it does for Russia. For a "small" regional conflict, this isn't a problem to Ukraine because there's no way China could or would restrict supply of their cheap drones. But for a large-scale conflict, it would be a problem for the US to not be able to source drone motors by the 10,000's.
> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
1. It is a bad idea to use national defense in this manner. There are more honest tools that can be used, see two.
2. Using tariff or other trade tools can blunt the impact of DJI's market position and allow for US entrants to develop. [0]
A weakness of both nat-sec bans and tariffs is that they don't actually do anything to encourage a company like Anduril to make the pro/sumer stuff needed for volume sales to develop broad acceptance, fast iteration and well founded supply chains.
> The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale
But yet they have no trouble procuring single-use (by definition) artillery shells that cost an order of magnitude more and require even more production volume?
Except - they have. All Artillery Shell Plants in all NATO countries combined (minus Hungary, because f* Orban) are unable to produce enough shells just for the War in Ukraine.
The US has completely gutted their manufacturing base, and currently won't be able to compete in a peer conflict on a ling term basis.
Not enough shell and ammo production, not enough logistical capability, not enough ships, not enough dock capacity...
High volume single-use drones and DJI drones are almost completely orthogonal in terms of technology, production, and procurement. The only thing they really share is MEMS gyroscopes and brushless motor windings. Making a million FPV bomb drones and making a million consumer camera drones are such dramatically different tasks that there is not a chance this theory holds water.
You should look at see what kind of drones are dominating Ukraine's skies. You'd see some water being held. And you probably should have googled this before making this comment.
DJI drones are being used in significantly lower quantities as "base stations" and long-range reconnaissance applications, with the occasional bomb-dropping side run.
FPV drones are being used in much, much, much higher quantity than DJI drones, owing to their massively lower cost to produce due to ... the simpler and mostly orthogonal supply chain!
Financing a consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability with an end goal of enabling the construction of large quantities of one-way FPV drones, as the parent post to mine suggested, would not be a good strategy, IMO.
Having domestic consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability at all is of course a good idea, but the quantity needed in war fighting is significantly lower, at least with the current tools and techniques seen in Ukraine.
I have the last consumer Skydio model, and I'm thinking of selling it to buy a DJI. Skydio has way more intelligence, but the camera quality just isn't there. Footage is ok for social media and that's about it.
This is why Western drone startups keep failing against DJI. The consumer and prosumer drone market do not want AI-driven flying autonomous robots. They want high-quality cameras that can fly.
When the Western drone startups fail at that they will turn to AI, agriculture, LIDAR/mapping etc. But all the money is in the consumer/prosumer market where DJI is earning billions every year which also makes them able to outspend competitors in the professional drone markets.
> How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine?
It will not.
> Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
No.
This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing.
> This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing.
I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be getting drones built to order from a military contractor anyway, so I don't think it really matters what the leading consumer manufacturer of drones is to the US military from that perspective.
Chip manufacturing seems like a slightly different situation in that if another country restricted US access to chips it would affect the entire US economy, so I think it has security implications in a broader sense where security is interpreted to include the stability of the US economy as a whole, rather than military supply specifically.
"I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them?"
Yes, because if you have no drone manufacturing in your country, you can't just spin on a dime and suddenly have military-grade drone manufacturing. Technology is a lot less about knowing what the atomic weight of cesium is and a lot more about employee A knowing that B knows how to solve instability problems and their contact at company C knows what to do when the blades spin apart. You can't build the massive networks of those relationship by just passing a law today and expecting to have a best-of-class industry tomorrow, no matter how much money you throw at it.
>I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be getting drones built to order from a military contractor anyway, so I don't think it really matters what the leading consumer manufacturer of drones is to the US military from that perspective.
They rather famously switched to an Xbox controller for their rolling drones, and for their submarine controls, because they just work better. For quite a while, military-issued camelbaks still had bright blue caps because the contract to custom build the systems hadn't been settled yet. There are in fact plenty of electronics that they use that are not purpose built, that are bought more or less off the shelf.
All of that said, I still agree that the US military is unlikely to allow off-the-shelf drones at this time. Parts availability is the driver there. Its better to pay a contractor $3k a pop to buy a bunch of a DJI Mavics, spray paint them olive drab, and issue them to each platoon than it is to give every platoon $3k and say "go buy a drone", because then you can buy 6000 of the same replacement rotor or whatever.
The shortcoming of the control scheme was that they wired the motors to respond to the controller wrong. That is, pitch was wired to yaw and vice versa. The controller just sends signals (digital values, specifically), what you do with them is up to you.
If you don’t need accurate force-feedback, just highly reliable transmission of inputs, why wouldn’t you use the final iteration of a controller that millions of players have spent billions of hours using and abusing?
It’s not even a Bluetooth controller, it’s just standard USB. The folks who were shitting on that design decision (and not the carbon fiber hull decision), have no sense of what’s common, or even possible, on a microcontroller device.
Ukraine goes through hundreds if not thousands of drones a day. Most are DIY or consumer grade at <$500 including warhead. Recent comments from DoD suggest their plan for defending Taiwan is hundreds of thousands of drones taking out any invasion fleet. At defense contractor prices that's a bitter pill to swallow even for the Pentagon. The M982 Excalibur (GPS/INS guided artillery shell) is ~$100k per boom. I largely agree a domestic supply chain for this stuff is important, even if Stefanik is ham fisted as always.
FWIW, we might be at peak drone for warfare anyway. At least vehicle based countermeasures are pretty obvious and will be put in place soon, although that won't be cheap either.
It has to do with spurring US manufacturers as the primary outcome. It’s not about affecting Ukraine in the short term or stopping them from being used against the US.
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