logoalt Hacker News

mothballedyesterday at 7:48 PM1 replyview on HN

I see, you think my argument is moot because a successful sabotage or halt of domestic drone production is a victory condition for war.

It's an interesting strategy to sidestep the conversation; rather than acknowledging the superiority of having redundant international supply chain you can just suggest it doesn't really matter anyway if US drone capacity is gone because at that point the war is lost.

I don't see the evidence for why this must be true, whether you think it is a 'small feat' or not.


Replies

jjk166yesterday at 10:03 PM

> I see, you think my argument is moot because a successful sabotage or halt of domestic drone production is a victory condition for war.

No, I claimed that to fubar the domestic supply chain was a victory condition of the war. Sabotage can be repaired or bypassed, halts can be unhalted. But to fuck up beyond all reason the US domestic industrial capacity, i.e. to render it so that it can not assemble basic electronics of the sort that are used in drones at all with no ability to get production back online within a strategically meaningful period of time, yes that means the war is over. At that point drones are the least of our concerns. Everything you are fighting for has already been destroyed, the death toll is already catastrophic, the enemy is clearly superior by a massive factor, continued fighting at that point would be suicide.

Now I am not arguing that a redundant international supply chain is a bad thing, I am opposed to banning all foreign drone firms. But that being said, the claim that it is obviously superior is the extraordinary claim requiring evidence. As we clearly saw in 2020, international supply chains are incredibly vulnerable to disruption. Can you be confident that a foreign nation supplying us drones would be on our side in the event of a major conflict? Would all of their suppliers be on our side? Even if they are all on our side, would they be able to ship materials and products between themselves and to us unimpeded? Would they still be able and willing to do so when we are being beat so bad that our domestic industry has collapsed? A strong international supply chain is a good supplement to domestic production capacity, but the claim it is a superior alternative can not be taken as a given.

show 1 reply