This is the script from my 4/15/24 national radio commentary on
Ukraine's use of Chinese drones instead of U.S.-made drones, and the
implications for U.S. technology and our relationship with China.
There were some very minor wording changes that I made on-the-fly as I
gave this report, related to how the piece was introduced, etc.
= = =
So this is a great example of how complicated relationships with China
are and why some of the supposedly simple solutions like technology
bans often aren't practical in the real world.
As we know, in Ukraine's battles against Russia's invasion, Ukraine
has been using a lot of drones. And many of these are actually
apparently off the shelf Chinese drones mostly from DJI. I've
mentioned DJI before and they by far are the most used drones here in
the U.S., for law enforcement, other public safety organizations,
agriculture, utility inspections, all kinds of things including
recreational flyers of course. And it's DJI drones that the U.S.
government has pushed to prevent government agencies from buying, and
there are other legislative attempts to ban them entirely including
from recreational users.
And these bans seem to usually be predicated on claims that DJI drones
are a security risk because they're from China, even though there
appear to be no confirmed instances demonstrating that DJI drones are
stealing data, and in fact DJI has done quite a bit of work to store
data locally in the U.S. and provide ways to turn off telemetry
reporting, and other quite reasonable steps.
So there are suspicions in some quarters that these bans are more
about how successful DJI has been in a competitive sense with this
technology and the support structure they've built for it, compared
with U.S.-made drones that aren't as popular.
And this brings us back around to Ukraine. And it turns out there have
been efforts to send U.S.-made drones to the front lines of Ukraine,
and many have been, but they reportedly just don't perform as well
compared with Chinese drones like DJI. Reportedly there are problems
like being vulnerable to Russian control jamming and GPS jamming,
problems with how far they could fly and what payloads they could
carry, and so on. And this apparently is pretty disturbing to the
Pentagon too, because they need lots of drones, and if they're going
to ban the Chinese ones that work best, this puts them in a pretty
untenable situation.
Obviously any military force that is going to use drones wants the
best drones they can get at the best prices they can get. The Pentagon
of course wants to buy American but if you can't get what you need
from American manufacturers, that can present quite a dilemma.
So while we know that there's a lot of serious issues regarding China
with which we need to be very concerned, the fact that in certain
sectors their tech is considered to be superior doesn't seem to be
their problem, it looks more like our problem in terms of how we
choose to invest public and private funds into technology R&D and
manufacturing.
Because if you aren't going to build the technology yourself that in
this case military operations in, for example Ukraine can rely on,
those countries and even our own country will have no choice but to
use technology designed and manufactured elsewhere, and in some cases
that's probably going to be China.
And if we don't like that situation, we need to be rethinking how
we're going to help U.S. industries including high tech so that the
superior products are being made right here at home. Ultimately, it's
up to us!
= = =
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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