I do. It's painful to watch. Beyond painful. I don't get angry about much, but this...
I was just yesterday describing China in two words to a couple friends that think I'm hallucinating. The two words... competence and adaptability. I even see it with waitstaff in restaurants, the women that pump gas, the guys that worked on our apartment, corporate, you name it. Competence and adaptability.
What a load of rubbish. This argument fails by conflating early-cycle procurement friction with strategic incapacity: peacetime reliance on Chinese COTS components reflects industrial math, not wartime vulnerability, since stockpiles, redesign authority, and allied manufacturing bypass commercial supply chains under conflict conditions; Ukraine’s disposable-drone doctrine is not a universal benchmark but a constraint-driven adaptation, whereas the United States Department of Defense optimizes for integrated ISR, EW resilience, and cross-domain escalation control that Ukraine does not require; isolated test failures and selective anecdotes do not falsify classified performance or deterrence outcomes; and attacking valuations or firms like Anduril is irrelevant, as stock prices are not proxies for battlefield effectiveness.
I might think about this reflectively and allow as to how it may be relevant or even completely accurate...then I remember our DOD is now headed by a tatted baseline competent media personality playing war, an administration that changes policy to maximize revenue for its favored sons and their associates, and ignores the proven excellent quality products, managerial competence, adaptability, and resilience of our supposed "enemy" toward which all this nonsense is ostensibly directed.
We fail to learn from China.
China went through a time when CONNECTIONS 关系 were the key to winning contracts.
China has learned that COMPETENCE is far more important than than political CONNECTIONS.
So the command and control economy produces bad drones. The surprise is, the command and control economy is the USA.
Bingo. With your background and experience, you must find this exceptionally frustrating and idiotic.
I am like you. I suffer as I watch.
I do. It's painful to watch. Beyond painful. I don't get angry about much, but this...
I was just yesterday describing China in two words to a couple friends that think I'm hallucinating. The two words... competence and adaptability. I even see it with waitstaff in restaurants, the women that pump gas, the guys that worked on our apartment, corporate, you name it. Competence and adaptability.
😀 😃
What a load of rubbish. This argument fails by conflating early-cycle procurement friction with strategic incapacity: peacetime reliance on Chinese COTS components reflects industrial math, not wartime vulnerability, since stockpiles, redesign authority, and allied manufacturing bypass commercial supply chains under conflict conditions; Ukraine’s disposable-drone doctrine is not a universal benchmark but a constraint-driven adaptation, whereas the United States Department of Defense optimizes for integrated ISR, EW resilience, and cross-domain escalation control that Ukraine does not require; isolated test failures and selective anecdotes do not falsify classified performance or deterrence outcomes; and attacking valuations or firms like Anduril is irrelevant, as stock prices are not proxies for battlefield effectiveness.
I might think about this reflectively and allow as to how it may be relevant or even completely accurate...then I remember our DOD is now headed by a tatted baseline competent media personality playing war, an administration that changes policy to maximize revenue for its favored sons and their associates, and ignores the proven excellent quality products, managerial competence, adaptability, and resilience of our supposed "enemy" toward which all this nonsense is ostensibly directed.
Maybe the Ukrainians can still use them as decoys, to allow the real drones to get through.
The poster showing a Chinese missile wrapped in an American banana peel sums up the matter perfectly.
As always, an outstanding report. Thank you.
Cheapest turbojet engine for drones: $20,000 (Czech manufacturer) $3,000 (Chinese).