China produces somewhere in the range of 10 million or more drones per year across its industrial base, with DJI alone manufacturing millions of units annually out of Shenzhen — a single city with over 1,700 drone manufacturers generating $13.4 billion in output. The United States, by contrast, produces roughly 50,000 military drones a year. That's not a gap — that's a rounding error. China outproduces the U.S. by something like 200 to 1, at a third of the cost per unit, while exporting 40 million drones globally including 600,000 to America itself. The U.S. Army's ambitious goal is to hit 120,000 drones per year by 2026 through its Sky Foundry program — a number that would still leave it outproduced by a factor of roughly 80 to 1. And 90% of the components in those American drones? Sourced from China and Taiwan. The country the U.S. is most likely to fight is also the country it literally cannot build weapons without.
And there's no way out. Domestic manufacturing can't scale because the supply chains, rare earth processing, motor production, and circuit board fabrication simply don't exist in the U.S. and would take a decade or more to build from scratch. The only allied nations with relevant electronics manufacturing capacity — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan — all sit directly within range of Chinese ballistic missiles, making them strategically worthless in the exact conflict scenario where drone production would matter most. The U.S. defense industry is structurally designed to build small batches of multi-million-dollar platforms through glacial procurement processes, not churn out cheap expendable drones by the million. China stumbled into drone supremacy as a side effect of becoming the world's consumer electronics factory. The U.S. is now trying to brute-force that same advantage from behind, with triple the labor costs, no supply chain, hostile geography, and a procurement bureaucracy that takes longer to approve a contract than China takes to build an entire factory. The gap isn't closing. It's widening.
I think the US loses guys. Thanks
@narendramodi and
@elonmusk0283899 for informing
@realDonaldTrump.
Let's get rid of this hellhole of a system. The Rothschilds an Rockefellers are next.