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The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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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.
The future of drone warfare will be determined by software. That's the one thing where the US still have a huge lead.
We don't have a lead in software and for an Unmanned Aerial System we need hardware with the software.
In terms of future AI stuff maybe, but for current year practical purposes there is no relevant difference in software capabilities for controlling a bunch of drones in the way it is being done in ukraine.
The Ukrainians are controlling the drones one at a time. One drone, one pilot, operating remotely over wireless link. They’re having an absolutely devastating effect on Russia’s troops and equipment.
Autonomy is the future. It’s how you get to thousands or even millions of drones without the need for millions of human pilots. Trying to attack into a space which is defended by millions of drones absolutely will be a hellscape!
The hard part of good automation is onboard sensor processing. Takes a reasonable amount of compute onboard, which is expensive. Im told the US has a fat wallet though.
Swarms are the next evolution. PTI is the main blocker
They're already working on autonomous drones. That's still in its early stages but that will be a decisive factor in the future.
Dji has the best drone software as well...
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.
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?
You know they can't include Chinese innovations if they want to single out China and make them the enemy. The fact is the Chinese own 90% of the consumer drone market because of their innovations. I assume they have good military drones too.
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.
Those are being tested, not proven treatments for those diseases.
A few people have been cured of HIV from bone marrow transplants but it has to be a super specific set of circumstances like their blood type has to be a certain type and things like that.
And you don't find that remarkable compared to before, when no one had been cured?
So completely not true... there have been multiple cases. First, apparently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ray_Brown
cnn.com/cnn/2019/09/13/health/china-crispr-hiv-intl-hnk
The argument isn't whether the west has innovation, it's whether China does, and they do including this cure for HIV which doesn't rely on donor cells unlike the London & Berlin patients
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.
It’s just not true to say that China is relying on copying other’s technology anymore. In the last decade, they’ve caught up and are now at the cutting edge of research in many fields. I think this shift is catching a lot of people off guard including many western journalists and pundits.
Japan, and S. Korea used to be the thieves and copycats, and now China. That's how these countries keep up with the current techs and build up their foundation for the future technology, and now are surpassing their counterparts. People need to accept that's how things work and it won't change nothing even if they keep whining.
The thing with China now is how people has been underestimating them. All they can think are on their human right issues, Uyghur, child labours etc. And they think that China people are stupid, can't think and can't innovate. Sorry to say - currently they have the highest ranking for research yield, Scopus and Nature Index, and not to mention how many PhD graduates they are producing each year. Many people are just in denial. By the time they realize the reality, it's might be too late to hit back.
I do not support the PRC's foreign policy but I absolutely envy their commitment to funding research.
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.
You missed one of my questions
If the US patent system is just, then should we pay reparations to Native Americans and black people?
If the US patent system is just, then Chinese companies could just buy the parents here and be the "inventors" of. Is that just to you? Is it just when Google does it?
So is it stealing when Google buys the patents from small inventors and says it's theirs?
Was it stealing when Thomas Jefferson stole his slave's ice cream recipe and said it was his? Should the Hemmings family be given compensation?
No. It's monopolization.
No. It's slavery.
There's such a gulf of difference between a DJI drone and an American Predator or Reaper drone that I actually kinda feel bad for you for bringing DJI into the conversation.