Bureaucrats love bureaucrating. They live for this. Gumming up the works, making people and companies jump through hoops. Making procurement complicated. Even if it blocks the Pentagon from getting what they need to compete
Pentagon seeks to slash red tape for mass drone production
The Trump administration is slashing red tape to quickly equip troops with more small, easily replaced drones in a bid to keep up with the likes of Russia and China, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer told NewsNation’s Kelly Meyer in an exclusive interview.
Emil Michael, the under secretary of Defense for research and engineering, said the U.S. is speedily moving to reduce bureaucratic barriers and expand the quantities and types of drones U.S. troops can use to defend American bases, forces and interests.
“You’ve got to cut the red tape out,” when it comes to drone production, he told Kellie Meyer from The Hill’s sister network. “A lot of the regulations around what you could build and how you could build it, and even how you could test it were limited in the last administration.”
Drones are the new frontline of modern conflicts, featuring prominently in Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts in the Middle East.
Nowhere were drones displayed so mightily that in June with Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, where Kyiv spent months smuggling hundreds of small drones deep inside Russia for coordinated strike that destroyed upwards of 40 Russian warplanes on five airbases.
Thankfully that didn’t turn into WWIII. The U.S. needs to be prepared for an attack like that, and the U.S. needs to be able to project that type of force, as well as use a drone swarm for defense
But the United States is currently outpaced by Russia and China in military drone use, a gap caused by a dearth in companies approved to make drones for the U.S. military as well as limited equipment and expertise needed to mass-produce drones, according to a new report released Tuesday by The Heritage Foundation.
Only 14 companies currently can make drones for the Defense Department while just one Chinese company, DJI, accounts for 70 percent of all worldwide drone sales and makes millions of drones each year, putting Washington at a disadvantage. U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones.
So, the Pentagon is going to fast-track building drones for military use, particularly for attack. Small ones. Not the big ones. We do great with the big ones, which are usually under direct control by a pilot in a room far away. I guess we’ll see how this turns out.
Our esteemed host began:
It’s simple: bureaucrats are protecting their jobs! The less bureaucracy there is, the less need there is for bureaucrats.
A great many of those rules that people call “red tape” are the result of disasters and previous waste, fraud and abuse.
Examples: Special forces in Afghanistan used their credit card to buy a small light weight laser designator (untested) and it designated their own position instead of the enemy. They cut out the red tape.
US artillery has to test fire thousands of rounds to certify that they are safe to be used by troops. The alternative is they blow up and kill our own troops.
US attack aircraft spend millions testing airworthiness for the aircraft and everything attached to it because sometimes they crash when that testing gets shortchanged.
In each of these cases, politicians cry about how shortchanging safety cost live. New developers and vendors call those tests “red tape” because they don’t want to do them. Russians and Ukrainians don’t do it and accept a certain percentage of failures in use.
The generals at the Pentagon have been playing this tug of war for decades to make procurements faster and easier, but that usually means waste and fraud happen faster and easier too.
I was disappointed that Mr Teach hadn’t posted his fear mongering atomic bomb ‘sploding pic. Especially after Trump threatened Russia by moving nuke subs so close to Putin because o Russia ignoring his threats if Putin doesn’t stop his warring in Ukraine
Because I live in NYC I will be safe here in NYC because of all the Trump properties
AMERICA NEEDS YOU!!!!
ICE has removed the age cap for hitting
We have found that those Gen Zs and millennials etc just aren’t up to protecting our great country from the invasion of foreign military aged menthe
MAGA must step up
Who here will answer Liberty’s call?
Excellent benefits! Masks to hide shame ! Student loan forgiveness??! Maybe when I finish school in 2030 I might go for that.