Russia and Ukraine have been making extensive use of drones in the conflict so far, with many of those being provided by China, or at least containing a significant proportion of Chinese-made components. In particular, Chinese off-the-shelf drones have proven highly popular, both for surveillance as well as for launching strikes — as seen below in a recent hit on a Russian T-80 tank.
Now, Ukrainian officials fear that there could be a drone shortage for its force, due to Beijing announcing restrictions on exports.
The concerns have been mirrored somewhat in Russia, too, where Finance Minister Anton Siluanov recently claimed that most of Russia’s drones were being sourced from China. To address this, Siluanov said that Russia will invest more than $618 million on a new project to kickstart the development of domestic drone manufacturing.
Yeah, this is something that I’d seen some concern over, that China has a lot of civilian drone production capacity, that that’s dual-use technology, and that we (the US) didn’t have great defenses against masses of drones. In low-end drones, they have a lot of clout.
I know that Ukraine’s talked recently about spinning up domestic drone production. I’m a little pessimistic there. I can believe that Ukraine can do drone design just fine. But if they want to manufacture at scale, a la DJI, I think that it’s going to be increasingly difficult to keep production facilities hidden. Those are going to be priority targets for Russia’s strategic missile attacks. And they cannot easily relocate.
Doing small-scale production of a variety of types might help somewhat for making it hard to produce counters, but I’m pretty sure that large scale is going to be needed for really expendable drones, to keep costs down.
If Ukraine has sufficient air defense that they can brush aside Russian long-range weapons, okay, but that’s a high bar to meet.
Maybe it’s possible to design production facilities that are sufficiently-resillient that absorbing any attacks is okay. Like, disperse them enough that no one weapon can hit much, put lightweight coverings up, like canopies, so that there’s not much to collapse. Use revetments, warn workers of incoming air raids, have foxhole shelters. I think that one would have to account for the risk of Russia using or developing long-range weapons that employ cluster munitions, air-dispensed mines, or delayed-fuse munitions.
I don’t know how Germany dealt with our and the UK’s strategic bombing campaigns in WW2. Some of it was a not very successful attempt to move production to caves.
I still think that given the option, it’d be easier if Poland or someone could set up an SEZ right across the border and just let Ukraine do military production work there. That renders production immune to air attack, unless Russia intends on a shooting war with NATO.
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