Cold, wet and sandy… as God intended. 🇺🇸 "The map is not the territory." A(n) - Forward Compute
Pennsylvania, USA
Joined January 2017
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No, The New Kalashnikov Is Not a Weapon – A rebuttal to Gerald Mako's @smallwars opinion.
Cheap commercial drones fitted with readily available guidance software have collapsed the cost of precision strikes. Ukraine has demonstrated the method at scale: mass-produced frames, improvised warheads, and increasingly autonomous terminal guidance have given states and non-state actors capabilities once reserved for conventional military forces. The warfare equation has changed. That much is not disputed.
What does not logically follow is the policy package offered to reverse it.
Gerald Mako's argument for tighter controls on hardware that enables onboard autonomy, enforceable obligations on manufacturers whose platforms are routinely militarized, and a minilateral coalition of component producers treats the commercial dual-use ecosystem as if it were a controllable arsenal. It absolutely is not. The systems in question began as hobby, racing, photography, and agricultural products and became weapons only after conversion. The proposed remedies – manufacturer due diligence, conversion-resistant firmware, and supply denial of enabling components – do not survive contact with how these systems are actually built and fielded.
The AK-47 analogy fails as an analogy. The Kalashnikov was purpose-designed as a military weapon and then deliberately proliferated as a geopolitical instrument: cheap, rugged, and simple to operate by design. Small UAVs and FPV platforms followed the opposite path. They began as commercial products before being adapted, often in small shops and wartime factories, into delivery vehicles. The distinction is acknowledged in passing and then ignored. A weapon that begins as a weapon can be regulated as one. A commercial airframe that becomes a weapon only after a user straps on a warhead or swaps the flight controller presents a fundamentally different regulatory problem.
Imposing strict due-diligence duties, secure-boot mandates, and market-access conditions on commercial manufacturers because downstream actors convert their products is the gun-control argument applied to dual-use electronics. A manufacturer cannot reasonably be held responsible for every illicit modification any more than a tire company can be held liable for a drunk-driving manslaughter. The article concedes that no firm can be responsible for every conversion, then recommends treating refusal to adopt “reasonable” anti-militarization features as grounds for exclusion from Western markets. That substitutes upstream obligations for downstream enforcement. Such measures may deter some casual misuse and impose compliance costs. They will not stop a knowledgeable bad guy.
The practical failures are straightforward. Software is already open and mirrored. Jailbreaks, forks, and companion computers have been routine in the hobby community for years and are now industrialized. Physical conversion does not require defeating firmware. A warhead and basic fuze can be zip-tied or strapped to a commercial platform. Motors, props, batteries, and boards can be stripped from a “conversion-resistant” airframe and reused on an open stack. Middle markets and gray-market channels for commodity components persist as a structural feature of global trade, not a temporary loophole. These realities make conversion resistance a weak foundation for policy.
Local fabrication has already collapsed the premise that the original commercial stack is an indispensable chokepoint. Ukraine’s wartime industry is the existence proof. Firms there now machine motor housings, wind stators, fabricate or assemble flight controllers, ESCs, and initiation boards, and produce frames and props at meaningful volume. Localization of 70–90 percent or more is documented across multiple producers, with isolated examples of near-full domestic component sets for FPV systems. Residual dependencies remain – high-grade magnets, battery cells at volume, certain specialized sensors, higher-end edge chips – but they are narrower than a comprehensive supply-denial regime assumes. Once process knowledge and modest equipment exist, a determined actor does not need the original manufacturer for an effective short-to-medium-range system. Targeting commercial makers or the commodity layer cannot be the primary line of effort.
The coherent response is therefore actor-centric. If the concern is bad actors using drones, policy should target those actors and the systems they field. That means intelligence and interdiction against the specific groups, workshops, conversion networks, and deployment chains that assemble, arm, and employ them. It means layered detection and defeat once the systems are in the air. It means narrow restrictions only where they can be tied to identified diversion networks and the few high-end items that still materially improve particular programs. It does not mean spreading friction across legitimate commercial markets, component producers, and software repositories in the hope of raising costs for actors who have already demonstrated their ability to substitute and fabricate around those frictions.
Two clocks are running, but not the clocks described. One is the conversion cycle on commercial frames. The other is the localization and substitution cycle that has already outpaced upstream controls. Geneva processes and minilateral component coalitions will not stop what small shops and motivated actors can already build. The practical task is to target the people who turn available technology into weapons, not the manufacturers and markets that produce the technology.
Warhound, the brain child of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.
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AUTOWAR25 Afternoon Edition, Thursday, Oct. 22. The top 25 autonomous-warfare stories, ranked. 🧵
The Pentagon's Drone Dominance program is lining up orders for 60,000 small attack drones from nine companies, and DIU wants armed drone boats that shoot down drones fielded within 120 days. The Army sends nine autonomous resupply finalists to Hawaii, and Ukraine finds a new anti-jamming sensor in a Russian Geran.
