[Planktonne]

> However, procurement times on new equipment is on the order of several years to nearly a decade. There's not enough time to produce nor acquire this hardware.

This has not seemed to be a problem for the countries using them; what makes the US so uniquely inefficient?

[SirFatty]

Unlike Iran and Ukraine, the US military weapons are not manufactured in someone's garage or basement.

[Planktonne]

But Iran and Ukraine are being very effective with their basement drones. If the US's manufacturing is fancier but not faster, meaning that it takes longer to get weaponry, that's not a good thing. It sounds like waste more than industry.

[inglor_cz]

US-produced Hornets (ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt is the CEO) are very modern and are now destroying Russian logistics to Crimea. From what I have heard, they are iterating fast based on what the Ukrainian operators report back.

This shows that the US private sector can well produce contemporary drones on a compressed time scale.

It is the Pentagon which is not interested in overhauling settled vendor relations.

[rbanffy]

That should only make the US able to churn a lot more drones than a couple people working out of a basement. Assembly lines can work wonders.

[everforward]

Assembly lines are much faster but less flexible, which is probably a bad fit for something evolving as quickly as drone weapons.

A basement lab can start making new drones as soon as you can get them the components. An assembly line will take months to get any new machinery it needs, set it up, ensure production works, figure out how to QA it at scale, etc.

It doesn’t matter if you can make 8 million drones if the enemy already has a way to counter that particular kind of drone. Eg I think Ukraine has been through a bunch of iterations as they adapt to Russian tank armor, jammers, extended range, etc.

[rbanffy]

You need to make the hardware modular and the lines easy to change.

[brokenmachine]

So obvious! Why didn't they think of that?

[genxy]

Are you sure it is because they aren't manufactured in a garage are they they are manufactured by MIC. The MIC is working as intended, it turns tax payer debt in MIC dollars. That by definition, can't happen in a garage.

[inglor_cz]

Quite a lot of Ukrainian-designed drones are nowadays produced in Western Europe in normal factories and sent to Ukraine. That is one of the reasons why Russia cannot simply destroy Ukrainian factories.

Ukraine deploys several million drones a year, you can't get there by mere artisan workshops in garages.

Sure, the designer teams back in Ukraine are lean, their members wear tracksuits and don't have a 50-head Human Resources to watch their behavior, nor three levels of managers wearing Philippe Patek above them. That is part of the efficiency and lower cost.