I'm honestly much more worried about the fact that China has access to production lines for zillions of the things than what they'd do with existing ones, but I did make the comment so I'll run with it =).

Let's put on our fun James Bond villain hats for a bit.

The US has around 1.75MM drones that people have bothered to register. DJI has around 75% of that, so call it 1.25MM. This registration program is relatively new so let's say 750K of those are still operable.

How many of those are in the air at any given time? Keep in mind many of these bigger registered drones are used by businesses.

Let's say it's 1%, so 7,500 drones suddenly open some backdoor and get commanded to do a nose dive for the nearest power line. Now add in the smaller ones that are less likely to do damage, but there are 10x as many. Now combine it with a simultaneous cyber attack on infrastructure, and some pre-planned terror attacks.

Is it going to end the country? Of course not. Is there potential for that to cause huge chaos? I think so.

Is that more absurd than the Hezbollah pager bombings? I don't think so.

So yeah, I'd pay more for my drones, my cars, my cell phone towers, etc etc to avoid them being controlled by a country that we might end up in a stupid war with. I'm not saying you can make everything locally in the modern world, that's absurd. But there are valid strategic and natsec concerns about the US/China trade relationship in 2025.

THIS.