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 2 days ago | parent [-]

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 2 days ago | parent [-]

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

▲

brokenmachine 2 days ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	rbanffy a day ago \| parent [-]
		The notion that assembly lines can’t accommodate fast-paced change is very early 20th century. Modern assembly lines are very flexible.