The US Defense Department’s grand strategy for protecting Taiwan from a massive Chinese military offensive involves flooding the zone with thousands of drones.
I feel like we should at least consider that DJI is a mainland Chinese company and nearly all drone innovation in the past decade has originated there. They are no strangers to extreme manufacturing or advanced automated drone technology.
Quadcopters are actually insanely simple devices. I dont think the west would have any issue making hundreds of thousands of them without the help of china. Maybe the chips could be an issue but im sure taiwan would be happy to provide.
I dont think the west would have any issue making hundreds of thousands of them without the help of china.
Insanely simple devices still require a certain minimal amount of materials and manpower to assemble. The terrible secret of the Chinese economy is that they simply have more people doing more manufacturing labor. Sure, they often have state of the art equipment and a robust, heavily industrialized logistics system (one reason why western efforts to pivot off-shore manufacturing to Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the Indochina Peninsula haven’t been particularly successful). But first and foremost, you need physical labor. Americans don’t have a superabundance of domestic labor, so they’re not capable of rapidly churning out lots of low-cost, disposable weapons systems at a rate comparable to the Chinese mainlanders.
And that’s before you get into the cost of deploying, maintaining, and upgrading a large network of low quality units over a long time frame. Imagine building and deploying an entire fleet of Mark 1 Defense Drones to the island, only to discover a major security vulnerability that renders them easily inoperable. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of these units in the field, all of which need to be recalled, patched, and re-tested. That takes manpower, too.
The reason these low cost easily distributed systems work for, say, Houthi Rebels and Palestinian dissidents is that they’ve got these diffuse cells of insurgents with very little else to do except fight. These large ad hoc guerrilla forces are more a consequence of the deplorable state of the local economy than the fighting power of the region. Idle hands, etc.
Americans don’t have that. We’re at near full-employment. We can’t peel off a tens of thousands of young men to go work on the drone assembly lines without suffering economic shortfalls. Hell, neither can Israel, which is why their domestic economy is tanking while they try to make war with virtually all of their Arab neighbors.
The Chinese economy has capacity to spare. The American economy does not. That’s the same problem the Japanese ran into during WW2, and a big reason why they got washed in Mainland China after a decade of horrifying genocidal occupation.
Its funny but when I think of drones and innovation I don’t think of china. China just mass produces but for the most part when the current class of true drones were being created I remember a lot of amateurs working on it and others, china being one of them stealing the base tech. Just like 3d printing.
When I think of China I think of serious medical innovations including the cure for fucking HIV and herpes. Idk that they are so great with robotics but I wouldn’t really underestimate them.
I think of thieves and I am not underestimating them nor am I giving them credit for most of things they ‘discover’ Since its based on tech they stole. I also know that much of the HIV research did not originate in china.
Hmm, sounds bigoted. One way I can tell this is bigoted, is that you’re making Chinese people out to be both ultra competent (at stealing) while also being ultra incompetent (at science). This boogeyman who will “get you,” but is also way beneath you and who you obviously can “get back,” has existed towards Jewish people, black people, Islamic people, Latinos, women, gay people, etc etc.
All innovations are based on the people who came before us. Or are you saying the West should give all Arabic people the money we make in hospitals since the origin of the hospital is from there and they were originally free. The origin of our numbers themselves comes from Arabic countries.
Do you think America’s patent system is just? Do you think the patent system stifles innovation? Do you think the inventors of Crispr Gene Editing have more rights to this bone marrow transplant cure for HIV than the actual people who thought of it and implemented it?
Or are you saying the West should give all Arabic people the money
That’s sort of been our policy with the Petro-dollar since the 1950s. But, tbh, we shouldn’t just stop at hospitals. Since our numeral set is Arabic and modern mathematics is routed in Al-Jabr: The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing…
Do you think America’s patent system is just?
Absolutely. Here, let me dig through my PLEX server, I’ve got thousands of hours of legally acquired videos and pdfs arguing this very point.
Do you think the inventors of Crispr Gene Editing have more rights to this bone marrow transplant cure for HIV than the actual people who thought of it and implemented it?
The people of China should pay the patent holders of the modern iterations of Penicillin, Insulin, and Hormonal Contraception eleventy zillion dollars forever an into perpetuity or voluntarily choose to fuck off and die. Otherwise, I’ll call them thieves and make farting sounds in their general direction.
This, I believe, is what the original pioneers of these medications would have wanted. Same goes for any kind of treatment for current and future epidemics. If an American thought of something first, Chinese people aren’t allowed to have it. And if a Chinese person thought of it first, no they didn’t, they’re not smart enough.
China just mass produces but for the most part when the current class of true drones were being created I remember a lot of amateurs working on it and others, china being one of them stealing the base tech.
Wait… you think amateur hobbyists out in the American suburbs are inventing new forms of independent flight technology from kits they bought on Amazon. And then some of the largest and most well-financed universities in the world are stealing the technology?
Nope. I was involved and it was people all over the world who started building autonomous and semi autonomous drones them starting back in the mid 2000’s when cheap inertial and gyro stabilizers started appearing. I remember the open source projects that eventually matured into commercial products. China was by no means at the forefront of that. It was hobbyist the world over. Some were students at universities. Some lived in the suburbs and villages and big cities. The world over. Way before the alpha tech in that article. That they have taken those first steps and mass produced them by no means implies they invented it all.
I feel like we should at least consider that DJI is a mainland Chinese company and nearly all drone innovation in the past decade has originated there. They are no strangers to extreme manufacturing or advanced automated drone technology.
Quadcopters are actually insanely simple devices. I dont think the west would have any issue making hundreds of thousands of them without the help of china. Maybe the chips could be an issue but im sure taiwan would be happy to provide.
Insanely simple devices still require a certain minimal amount of materials and manpower to assemble. The terrible secret of the Chinese economy is that they simply have more people doing more manufacturing labor. Sure, they often have state of the art equipment and a robust, heavily industrialized logistics system (one reason why western efforts to pivot off-shore manufacturing to Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the Indochina Peninsula haven’t been particularly successful). But first and foremost, you need physical labor. Americans don’t have a superabundance of domestic labor, so they’re not capable of rapidly churning out lots of low-cost, disposable weapons systems at a rate comparable to the Chinese mainlanders.
And that’s before you get into the cost of deploying, maintaining, and upgrading a large network of low quality units over a long time frame. Imagine building and deploying an entire fleet of Mark 1 Defense Drones to the island, only to discover a major security vulnerability that renders them easily inoperable. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of these units in the field, all of which need to be recalled, patched, and re-tested. That takes manpower, too.
The reason these low cost easily distributed systems work for, say, Houthi Rebels and Palestinian dissidents is that they’ve got these diffuse cells of insurgents with very little else to do except fight. These large ad hoc guerrilla forces are more a consequence of the deplorable state of the local economy than the fighting power of the region. Idle hands, etc.
Americans don’t have that. We’re at near full-employment. We can’t peel off a tens of thousands of young men to go work on the drone assembly lines without suffering economic shortfalls. Hell, neither can Israel, which is why their domestic economy is tanking while they try to make war with virtually all of their Arab neighbors.
The Chinese economy has capacity to spare. The American economy does not. That’s the same problem the Japanese ran into during WW2, and a big reason why they got washed in Mainland China after a decade of horrifying genocidal occupation.
Its funny but when I think of drones and innovation I don’t think of china. China just mass produces but for the most part when the current class of true drones were being created I remember a lot of amateurs working on it and others, china being one of them stealing the base tech. Just like 3d printing.
When I think of China I think of serious medical innovations including the cure for fucking HIV and herpes. Idk that they are so great with robotics but I wouldn’t really underestimate them.
I think of thieves and I am not underestimating them nor am I giving them credit for most of things they ‘discover’ Since its based on tech they stole. I also know that much of the HIV research did not originate in china.
Hmm, sounds bigoted. One way I can tell this is bigoted, is that you’re making Chinese people out to be both ultra competent (at stealing) while also being ultra incompetent (at science). This boogeyman who will “get you,” but is also way beneath you and who you obviously can “get back,” has existed towards Jewish people, black people, Islamic people, Latinos, women, gay people, etc etc.
All innovations are based on the people who came before us. Or are you saying the West should give all Arabic people the money we make in hospitals since the origin of the hospital is from there and they were originally free. The origin of our numbers themselves comes from Arabic countries.
Do you think America’s patent system is just? Do you think the patent system stifles innovation? Do you think the inventors of Crispr Gene Editing have more rights to this bone marrow transplant cure for HIV than the actual people who thought of it and implemented it?
That’s sort of been our policy with the Petro-dollar since the 1950s. But, tbh, we shouldn’t just stop at hospitals. Since our numeral set is Arabic and modern mathematics is routed in Al-Jabr: The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing…
Absolutely. Here, let me dig through my PLEX server, I’ve got thousands of hours of legally acquired videos and pdfs arguing this very point.
The people of China should pay the patent holders of the modern iterations of Penicillin, Insulin, and Hormonal Contraception eleventy zillion dollars forever an into perpetuity or voluntarily choose to fuck off and die. Otherwise, I’ll call them thieves and make farting sounds in their general direction.
This, I believe, is what the original pioneers of these medications would have wanted. Same goes for any kind of treatment for current and future epidemics. If an American thought of something first, Chinese people aren’t allowed to have it. And if a Chinese person thought of it first, no they didn’t, they’re not smart enough.
Wait… you think amateur hobbyists out in the American suburbs are inventing new forms of independent flight technology from kits they bought on Amazon. And then some of the largest and most well-financed universities in the world are stealing the technology?
Just purely out of curiosity, who do you think Mingjing Qi, a professor of energy and power engineering at Beihang University stole this schematic from?
Nope. I was involved and it was people all over the world who started building autonomous and semi autonomous drones them starting back in the mid 2000’s when cheap inertial and gyro stabilizers started appearing. I remember the open source projects that eventually matured into commercial products. China was by no means at the forefront of that. It was hobbyist the world over. Some were students at universities. Some lived in the suburbs and villages and big cities. The world over. Way before the alpha tech in that article. That they have taken those first steps and mass produced them by no means implies they invented it all.
:-/
What planet is China on?
I’m assuming you’re saying this as a Beihang alumnus?