Adding more people to a late project makes it later ...

A drone made by Neros, a start-up in El Segundo, Calif., took off during a military exercise in the Yukon Training Area in Alaska.Credit...Video by Ash Adams

Yours truly flies a drone, a Mavic 3 Pro, tech made in, you guessed it, China. Sleek, 4K video, 3 lenses, and easy to fly, with caution of course, is something the US can't make, something similar to not building high speed rail, but you already know that, right? Well, let's thanks Ronnie for doing this, you know, off shoring manufacturing in order to gin profits for stockholders with the end result, the US can't make anything of consequence any more, including cheap, effective drones, a most disquieting circumstance but don't worry, Trump and company will make it better by gutting science and basic research, the two prerequisites required to develop tech like the entity seen above.

On a patch of dirt in the vast wilderness in Alaska, a long-range drone roared like a lawn mower as it shot into the sky. It scanned the ground for a target it had been programmed to recognize, and then dived, attempting to destroy it by crashing into it. But it missed, landing about 80 feet away.

On another attempt, a drone nose-dived at launch. On a subsequent try, a drone crashed into a mountain.

These drones weren’t flown by amateur hobbyists. They were launched by drone manufacturers paid by a special unit of the Department of Defense as part of an urgent effort to update U.S. capabilities. For four days last month, they tested prototypes of one-way drones by trying to crash them into programmed targets, while soldiers tried to stop the drones with special electronic equipment.

The exercise aimed to help U.S. defense contractors and soldiers get better at drone warfare. But it illustrated some of the ways in which the U.S. military could be unprepared for such a conflict. The nation lags behind Russia and China in manufacturing drones, training soldiers to use them and defending against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. military officials and drone industry experts.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged that the country has fallen behind, and he announced a series of new policies and investments in drones that he vowed would close the gap. In a video released on Thursday, he cited outdated rules and procurement processes as making it too difficult for commanding officers to buy drones and train their soldiers to use them.

“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones,” he said, “we were mired in bureaucratic red tape.”

The video came on the heels of an executive order signed by President Trump last month called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” which directs federal agencies to fast-track approvals for American drone manufacturers and protect the U.S. drone supply chain from “undue foreign influence.”

This is all well and good but Fred Brooks' Law rules.

Adding more people to a late project makes it later.

Photo by Triston Dunn on Unsplash

Can the US eventually build cheap and effective drones? Yes but it takes time, research, manufacturing prowess and manufacturing capability, something a company by the name of DJI has, in spades.

Drones have become a weapon of choice on modern battlefields. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, soldiers beat back the Russian invasion by adding deadly modifications to the Mavic, a drone sold to hobbyists by DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Versions of the Mavic cost between $300 and $5,000, according to online retailers.

DJI, of Shenzhen, China, accounts for about 70 percent of all commercial drones sold globally for hobby and industrial use, such as aerial photography, package delivery and weather research. The privately held company sells its equipment to customers in the United States — there’s even an authorized store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — but U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones. The company declined to share market data, but industry experts estimate that DJI’s output far exceeds that of any other drone manufacturer.

“No one even comes close,” said Bobby Sakaki, chief executive of UAS NEXUS, a drone industry consultant. “DJI can make millions of drones per year. That is a hundred times more than anybody in the United States can make.”

Adding people to a late project makes it later.