Keep pulling the thread on Drone Warfare.
The United States can still achieve dominance over its adversaries in the domain of deploying highly autonomous, AI-driven drones at scale.
Skydio won the U.S. Army's Short Range Reconnaissance program of record, which began around 2018-2019 and was officially announced in 2021.
In the Ukraine conflict, low-cost drones costing a few thousand dollars have been used to destroy high-value military assets, such as tanks, that cost millions of dollars, creating a massive cost asymmetry in warfare.
Ukraine has developed and is rapidly building and iterating on a wide variety of ground, air, and sea drones out of necessity during its conflict with Russia.
China has a vastly superior monthly production capacity for both military and dual-use commercial drones compared to the United States.
The United States' past policy decisions to outsource consumer electronics manufacturing to China are now considered a strategic military mistake because the technological gap between civilian and military systems is closing.
The gap in industrial capacity between China and the United States is so significant that it will be very difficult to close within the next decade.
Over the next decade, a fundamental shift in drone warfare will occur as drones transition from being remotely operated to being animated by advanced, on-board autonomy and inter-drone communication.
Ukraine is using millions of small, soldier-carried quadcopter drones annually, making them the primary tool for delivering strikes and conducting battlefield surveillance.
The U.S. military's procurement programs for small quadcopter drones operate at a scale of single-digit thousands per year, three orders of magnitude less than the millions used annually in the Ukraine conflict.
China has developed an asymmetric military strategy, including carrier-strike missiles, designed to destroy expensive U.S. assets like aircraft carriers with much cheaper weapons.
The U.S. Department of Defense has initiated "Project Replicator" to counter China's asymmetric military strategy by mass-producing autonomous systems.