Can America make drones. They're getting smarter, deadlier, and more indispensable, and almost all of them come from China. One Silicon Valley company wants to change that. By Drake Bennett and Ashley Vance read aloud by Mark Leedorf. Late last October, two Ukrainian military officers flew to the US to visit the headquarters of Skaidio, a Silicon Valley manufacturer of quad copter drones. Like the machine gun and the tank before them, drones are remaking battle, and since Russia's twenty twenty two invasion, Ukraine has become the world's laboratory for drone warfare. Quad Copters bought for a few hundred dollars and loaded with explosives have been transformed into lethally efficient guided missiles. Ukrainian pilots, wearing virtual reality headsets, steer them into combat, stalking and killing Russian infantrymen from above and destroying multimillion dollar tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Russians have responded with drone units of their own. At this stage of the conflict, the weapons are responsible for the majority of the casualties on both sides. Ukraine's military goes through unmanned craft at a furious pace. A military industrial complex of small domestic drone companies aided by u S funds, has sprung up in response, but the country still has to import much of its supply. The two men who came to Skydio's offices in San Mateo, California, were senior officers in the Unmanned System's Forces, a branch of the Ukrainian military created last year and the first in the world dedicated entirely to such weapons. Citing security, they asked not to be named in this article. They were in California to see if Skydio could help them. The first day of the visit, Adam Bree, Skydio's co founder and chief executive officer, walked his guests around the company's testing center and research and development labs. Brie is thirty nine, slim and stubbled, with a heavy brow and a deep voice. He favors workout friendly teas, fitted khakis and running shoes, which prove useful when he takes off sprinting around the parking lot. To demonstrate the tracking abilities of one of his quad copters. On the tour, Brie took the Ukrainians past workstations with designs for drone parachutes and prototypes of concept craft, as well as a robot arm that twirled Skydio drones over a sheet of special QR codes to test the navigation cameras and computer vision. Then the visitors, Bri and a dozen other Skydio executives sat down in a conference room and talked. The Ukrainians presented first, describing the myriad rolls drones filled for them. We try to adapt quickly because we basically don't have any other option, the more senior officer said in rapid near fluent English. In addition to single use first person view craft, the Ukrainians deploy more advanced quad copters akin to Scudios, to hover above the battlefield as aerial scouts and artillery spotters, or to drop bombs or transport supplies. Long range fixed wing drones attack Russian cities, and uncrewed speedboats laden with explosives have ravaged Russia's Black Sea Fleet. One newer tactic using drones to lay land mines along supply routes in Russian territory. It works because it's a surprise, the officer said. They just drive thinking they're safe and suddenly they're not. When it was the Skydio executive's turn to present, they ran through a list of the features on the X ten D, a variant of their newest drone tailored for military use. The cameras, both visible light and thermal had been upgraded, and the airframe was now weatherized enough to operate in moderate rain. The company is particularly proud of the craft's ability to pilot itself even without a radio connection and without GPS. The drone uses its navigation cameras at altitudes of up to three hundred meters to produce a real time topographical map of the landscape below, relying on them and that to fly autonomously if other options fail. For Skydio, the meeting was a chance to get invaluable feedback and to make amends, as everyone in the room was aware the company's track record in Ukraine had been disappointing. An earlier Skydio model built to US Army specs, had been shipped over by the thousands, but many had proved defenseless against the anti drone radio jamming now routinely used on Ukrainian battlefields. In electronic warfare testing, there in March twenty twenty four, the xten d had performed better. It successfully operated in the face of radio jamming, GPS jamming, and GPS spoofing when false coordinates are sent to the receiver, but it failed when faced with multiple measures at once. You've been patient with us as we've continued to try and develop our system to be valuable to you, and we appreciate that, said Alden Jones, a Skydio vice president. All tech start ups have growing pains, but the stakes for Skydio are especially high. Bree likes to say drones are evolving from toys to tools to infrastructure. They've proliferated in the US despite strict Federal Aviation Administration limits on where and how they can be flown. Outdoor photographers and filmmakers were some of the first to rely on the technology. Now firefighters and police officers do too, in search and rescue operations, vehicle pursuits, and potentially violent standoffs. Electric utilities send drones along power lines to look for damage. Commercial shipowners use them to inspect their vessels, and structural engineers use them to spot warning signs of failure in the country's aging bridges and dams. Amazon dot Com is even incorporating them into its delivery fleet. Some of those craft are being made in the US aerial industries. A new artificial intelligence focused defence contractor produces a few different drones, and its more traditional competitors have manufactured plane size unmanned military aircraft for years. Sky, for its part, is banking heavily on public safety, which it estimates to be a fifteen billion dollar market between the US and Canada taken together. However, the US drone makers account for only a sliver of global supply. The vast majority of the drones in the air today in the US and everywhere else are Chinese, most of them made by one company, Dji. As drones grow more important, Chinese dominance of the industry has heightened concerns about who controls the flows of data they collect and who ultimately controls the craft themselves. Supply chains, too, can be weapons. Ukraine's military is constantly having to find creative ways to acquire the Chinese drones and components on which its war effort depends, since the Chinese Communist Party a Russian ally restricts their sale to Ukraine. In response to all these perceived threats. US state and federal legislators have begun to outlaw Chinese drones for government use. The law authorizing the twenty twenty five US Defense budget goes further. It includes broad language that could ban Chinese drone manufacturers from the US market starting at the end of the year. The rivalry between the US and China looms over America's largest drone maker. The story of how that came to be is a case study in the different trajectories of the two nations high tech manufacturing. Skydio has a lot going for it, elite Silicon Valley talent, friends in government, and blue chip venture capital. Yet the lifespan of American drone makers thus far has tended to be short. For Skydio, a ban keeping its Chinese competitors out of the US market would be an enormous opportunity. It would also be a test. Brie descends from a long line of devoted, if earth bound, aviation enthusiasts. He grew up enthralled by his maternal grandfather's stories of serving as a mechanic and crew chief in a World War Two B seventeen bomber squadron. Bree's father, Doug a public defender who taught himself to write trading software and became a professional money manager. Flew radio controlled airplanes in his spare time. Father and son would spend their evenings at the model airplane field in Chatfield State Park in their hometown of Denver. I'd pick him up from school with the car loaded up with airplanes, and we'd go and fly until dark, day after day, Doug recalls. By high school, Adam was traveling to compete in and often win, national and international radio controlled aerobatics competitions, where pilots are judged on how precisely they take their planes through a complex choreography of loops and rolls. It's a little bit like figure skating, he says. He obsessively customized his planes, trimming their foam, filling to lighten them, and weighing each piece of balsa wood. One of his favorites was a Russian maid Yak fifty four with a six foot wingspan. Today it hangs from the ceiling in Scydio's offices, along with several of Bree's other competition planes. For college, Bree turned down Princeton University for the Franklin w Olin College of Engineering, a tiny school just outside Boston that boasts a radically hands on curriculum. The college has since developed a reputation in Silicon Valley, but when bre matriculated in two thousand and four, it had yet to have a graduating class. He found it thrilling that everyone, students and faculty was taking a risk on the place. Afterward, Bree went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied in its department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. There's a short twenty twelve video still available on YouTube that succinctly sums up his master's research there. In the clip, a super light plane using a laser range scanner as its eyes and an Intel netbook processor as its brain, pilots itself in a series of increasingly complex environments roughly the dimensions of a YAK fifty four. The plane circles an indoor track and the atrium of a classroom building, then slow columns gracefully through the columns of an underground parking garage. The success of the self flying plane and the connections pre made at MIT led to a job at Project Wing, a drone delivery effort that was one of Google's whimsical moonshots Wing was part of an emerging industry that used sensors and processors small enough to go into smartphones to build fundamentally different devices than the fixed wing hunter killer drones large defence contractors were making. Other US companies such as three D Robotics, sold quad copter kits to early adopters. The French company Parrot Drone introduced the first drone you could control with your phone, and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a graduate student named Frank Wong started a company called da Jiong Great Frontier in Mandarin Innovations, SZDJI Technology would own the transition from toys to tools. The company started out making control units for douet use hobbyists, and then in twenty thirteen it released a drone called the Phantom you could fly right out of the box. The Phantom was durable, intuitive to control, and smooth enough in flight that you could get professional quality footage by mounting a go pro camera on it. Dji started making its own high performance drone video cameras and gyroscopic gimbals to stabilize them, and it drove improvements in battery life and signal strength that allowed each new model to fly farther and longer. When cops and engineers started experimenting with how they might use drones at work, those were Djis. The company's products are workhorses in both the Ukrainian and Russian fleets. Ted Strasimiri, a Canadian who runs a drone services company and is something of a drone influencer, sums up the appeal of the brand this way, a Dji is like an AK forty seven. Simple and reliable. DJI models also tend to be much cheaper than their non Chinese competition. That reflects sufficiencies of scale and the company's mostly automated assembly line, along with the lower cost of skilled labour in Shunjan, where its offices and factories and the offices and factories of many of its suppliers are located, Dji enjoys other advantages too. In twenty fifteen, the Chinese government issued Made in China twenty twenty five, an ambitious ten year industrial policy plan to move the nation's economy beyond low cost manufacturing and into high tech. Among the ten sectors named in the plan were robotics and aerospace, with a specific mention of unmanned aerial vehicles alongside planes and helicopters. That entitles Chinese drone companies such as Dji and its newest competitor, Hotel Robotics, to research partnerships, grants, low cost loans, and targeted investments from state banks and CCP connected investment firms. Meanwhile, Brie almost immediately grew restless at Wing. In twenty fourteen, he left to start Skidio with Abraham Backrock, a co creator of the MIT self flying plane, and Matt Donahoe, another MIT and Olin College alum. The three founders envisioned a craft that could fly itself, allowing it to be operated by a novice or by a user whose attention was occupied with, for example, biking cinematically down a mountain or surviving a firefight, or operated by no one at all. Its autonomous capabilities could eventually graduate to far bigger aircraft. That argument persuaded the venture capital firms and reason Horowitz and Excel Partners to offer seed funding. Chip maker in Vidia also signed on as an investor, seeing a promising application for robotics friendly computing platforms it makes. In twenty eighteen, Scuydio introduced its first product, of follow Me consumer drone, designed to document video friendly outdoor sports. The r I, as it was called, had a pair of rectangular frames embedded with navigation cameras running around its four rotors, and it didn't come with the controller. Users launched it instead with a smartphone app, after which it zeroed in on and trailed them. Tech reviewers were deeply impressed with the R one's ability to film while avoiding tree branches, light poles, and low archways. They also tended to mention its cost twenty four hundred and ninety nine dollars, twice as much as corresponding DJI models loaded with advanced features. In late twenty nineteen, Skydio came out with the Skydeo two. It was smaller and sturdier than the R one, with even better obstacle avoidance, and it cost only nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. Users could pay extra for a controller, either a traditional two stick one or a wand like a Nintendo Wheeze. Even at that price, Though Skuydio failed to gain traction against Dji and Hotel, the company was kind of in this limbo state. Brie says everyone thought the tech was really cool, the business wasn't working. Other US drone makers were failing. Three D Robotics stopped making drones in twenty sixteen, and Lilly Robotics went bankrupt in twenty seventeen. Airwear ceased operations in twenty eighteen, the same year GoPro discontinued its drone, the Karma, brought to market only two years earlier. We'll be right back with Can America Make Drones? Welcome back to Can America Make Drones? Skydio stayed off that list, thanks in part to geopolitics. The rise of drones has coincided with the worsening of relations between the US and China. For the Pentagon, the danger of relying on a potential adversary for weapons technology, especially technology that's coming to have a mind of its own, is self evident. Guidance jointly published in twenty twenty four by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Securities, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that Chinese drones continue to pose a significant risk to critical infrastructure and US national security. In addition to the potential ban, Congress wrote into this year's Pentagon Appropriations Bill, which declares that unless an appropriate national security agency determined sometime this year that Dji and Hotel drones are not national security risks, the companies will be forbidden from selling any new products in the US. The Department of Commerce is considering its own restrictions on Chinese drones, Although many of the details are classified. The broader concern is that Chinese drones could become a crowdsourced spy fleet, transmitting video and location data of potentially sensitive areas back to their manufacturers and thereby to the CCP. Chinese law mandates that companies there assist the country's intelligence services if asked. At the more speculative end of the spectrum, there are worries that even the movements of Chinese drones might not be entirely under the control of their putative owners. Dji vehemently denies that its drones present a specific security risk. We've never had a request under the Chinese national intelligence law, says Adam Welsh, the company's global head of policy. He points to cybersecurity audits by Booze, Alan Hamilton, FDI Consulting, and the US Department of the Interior, among others. That Dji drones have passed. The company now offers a special local data mode where its drones don't connect to the Internet, and Welsh says Dji no longer stores the flight logs of its US users. We've always been open to scrutiny, he says. Any agency that wants to look at our products, they can just do it on their own if they want, or if they want collaboration from us to make it easier for them, We're happy to collaborate. Forskuidio, these fears have been a boon. In twenty twenty, the year Congress ordered the Pentagon to stop buying Chinese drones, the company came out with its X two, a folding drone whose camera, battery, and transmitter were all marked improvements over its previous models. Skydio marketed the X two to police and fire departments, the US military, utilities, and other businesses customers that prioritize cybersecurity in a way most bmx ers and snowboarders don't, and for which the X two's ten thousand, nine ninety nine dollars price tag wasn't prohibitive. In twenty twenty three, Skydio announced it was dropping out of the consumer drone business entirely to focus on enterprise and government. Skydio now boasts of having six hundred and fifty public safety agencies as clients, helping drive its nine figure annual revenue with rapid growth. At its most recent user conference, held in late September twenty twenty four at a resort just outside Santa Cruz, California, bre unveiled improvements to the X ten, whose price starts at twelve thousand dollars and can easily be twice that. The big announcement, though, was the dock, a drone hangar combe launchpad resembling a space age patio grill. Today, most drones are launched by hand. The promise of the dock with a battery charger and a retractable weather proof cover is that they won't have to be. In pilot programs. In New York City, Oklahoma City, and Las Vegas, docks installed on the roofs of police precinct houses and fire stations have allowed Skydio drones to launch within seconds of a nine to one one call to assess a potentially dangerous situation before human first responders arrive on the scene. Skydio is hardly alone in seeing this future. Other drone makers, including Dji, sell similar products as they go into production. Skydio's docks will be made across the San Francisco Bay from the company's San Mateo headquarters. There, set among body shops and countertop stone showrooms in the city of Hayward, is a sixty thousand square foot space spread over two buildings. That's where two hundred and ten Scidio production workers build X twos and X tens, assembling gimbals and cameras or attaching the different drone subassemblies, arms, chest canopy core using special power screwdrivers that precisely measure torque and count turns and cost thousands of dollars apiece. The factory, as its output grows, is being tweaked to ring out production bottlenecks and errors, but also weight, which for battery powered aircraft means more flight time per charge. One of the newer machines on the factory floor is an ultrasonic welder that makes X ten arms by fusing together two pieces of plastic, saving the few grams that clips or screws or glue would add after they've been assembled. The drones are strapped into cages along the sound proofed walls of the burn in room, where they run at full throttle for half an hour while their temperature and electrical current draw are monitored for evidence of defects. All in all, the drones undergo about five hundred and fifty different tests. In the final one, they take themselves through a flight test in a room with a foam padded floor. In one corner stands a mustachioed mannequin in a freightwig that the drones must be able to lock in on to verify that their subject detection system works. As in most disciplines, the key to manufacturing is practice. In the nineteen twenties and thirties, an aeronautical engineer named Theodore Wright noticed that as factories made more planes, their production costs steadily declined by a calculable percentage. In the years since, researchers have found the relation to be widespread and persistent. Though the shape of the curve varies among industries, the dynamic is now referred to as Wright's law. A challenge for Skydio is that its biggest competitor is a lot further along Wright's curve. Skydio has produced a total of forty five thousand drones. DJI doesn't release numbers, but in all likelihood and makes that many every few weeks. The American company is doing whatever it can to close the gap. Engineers in its San Mateo offices use a cat scanner to X ray DGI drones to see how they're made. A ban on Chinese drones could help Skidio get even more practice building devices for US customers. Brie has been vocal about what he sees as the risks of Chinese drones. As he told a Congressional select committee last year, it would be completely insane to accept a future where we depend on our geopolitical adversaries to supply these drones. Bands have proven deeply controversial in the American drone community, and some of the anger they inspire has been directed at SKIDEO. I work at a small department and cannot afford Skideo's prices, writes one commenter on the website drone Excel. We can afford DGI and use these products regularly to assist in lost or injured hikers, area surveillance, for events, and other uses. I can tell you this, I will build my own drone from parts before I spend a dime with any drone company that uses lobbying to keep their competition away at the expense of getting affordable tools into the hands of underfunded police agencies. Bree walks a fine line on the subject. We're trying to be the most reasonable voice in the room, he says. He argues that any transition should be gradual, and that government agencies forced to jettison DJI drones should get extra funding to replace them, public money that would be spent, at least in part on Skuydios. So far, at least that funding hasn't been forthcoming. In contrast with the CCP, with its grants and loans and R and D subsidies, the US government has for the most part opted simply to clear the field for non Chinese drone makers and to trust the market to take care of the rest. The drone trade wars show no sign of waning. Last fall, the Chinese government placed Skydio on its so called Unreliable entity list, cutting the company off from one of the few components it still sourced from China batteries. The ostensible reason for the sanctions was that Skidio sells drones to Taiwan's National Fire Agency, but it was widely seen as retribution for US export controls on advanced semiconductors and other technologies to China. The company was already working to source its batteries from non Chinese suppliers, Bri says, but in the meantime it has had to ration them, sending out just one per new drone. A few months later, DJI announced its latest firmware update in the US would remove geo fencing around military bases, airports, and other FAA determined no drone zones. It would be up to users themselves to decide whether they'd follow US law. According to Welsh, dji's head of policy, the change had been in the works for a while and was driven in part by public safety users who needed to fly their drones in exactly those areas. On November fifth, election day, the brightest hopes of America's drone industry were gathered in the Mojave Desert at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Centre. Like the adjacent city, the base is known informally as twenty nine Palms, and it lies a two and a half hour drive due east from Los Angeles. The last few miles along a road lined with barber shops specializing in high and tight haircuts. It's one of the biggest military training facilities in the world. Outside the main camp with its neat homes, movie theater, and Popeyes, the vast majority of the eleven hundred square mile expanse is empty. Desert. Artillery blasts echo off the hillsides, and at night, phosphorus flares bloom above the horizon. The air is busy with manned aircraft, tilt rotor transports making slow turns, a ten thunderbolts climbing sharply out of strafing runs, and supersonic fighters performing aerobatics in the upper sky. For the US military, getting a new technology into the field takes several years at best. While that might feel appropriate for an aircraft carrier, small drones evolve over a timescale of months, so the military's cumbersome program of record process ensures that new systems are years out of date by the time they're deployed. For instance, the RQ twenty eight, a specialized Skuyo X two that won the army's short range reconnaissance contract in twenty twenty two, was made as per the terms of the contract with only a single band radio. That's what rendered the ones sent to Ukraine particularly vulnerable to Russian jamming. More recent X two and X ten variants developed for military use have multiband radios and automatically switch to a different frequency band when they're jammed. Scale is the other problem. Military strategists who focus on drones talk about a trittable mass. In the future. They argue war will be waged not by nine figures next generation aircraft, but by ones that are cheap enough to be disposable. These drones won't be flown one on one as they have been in Ukraine, but in swarms that overwhelm an enemy's defenses in self sacrificing attacks. Eventually, they may coordinate themselves using AI like murmurations of Killer Starlings. It's an ethically fraught prospect and a terrifying one. It also would require lots of drones. According to Trent Emmenecker, a program manager for the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, at the attrition rate currently observed in Ukraine, the US military would exhaust its entire drone supply in five days. Program of record, drones are not delivered in great quantities. He says nor he says, are they characterized by great qualities? The problem isn't limited to drones, Imminecker points out the military's cumbersome procurement process has also hampered efforts to ramp up production of a far older we artillery shells to replace those sent to Ukraine. In recognition of these shortcomings, the Pentagon in twenty twenty three launched Replicator, a program to accelerate the pace of its drone development. At the same time, it started doing something simpler, allowing military units to go out and buy off the shelf drones from a white list of approved devices. Emmenecker, a former Marine aviator, is in charge of putting together the latest version of the list, called Blue UAS. Uncrude Aerial Systems is military nomenclature for drones. The flight tests at twenty nine Palms were part of the approval process. SKUYDIO and more than thirty of its competitors, including Parrot Drone, Shield AI and Anderil, were there. Much of the testing took place at a sprawling urban terrain combat range set against a broad rocky hillside. Its fifteen hundred empty buildings were mostly bare concrete with window shaped openings, giving it the feel of something half built and then abandoned to the desert. There was a mosque, a market filled with dusty plastic produce and burned out cars in the streets. Military drone operators had been brought in as evaluators. Uniformed soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and special forces operators in civilian tactical clothes rotated between the rooftops and dirt intersections where different drones were being launched, asking questions about payload, jamming, and autonomy, customer success. Representatives from the companies demonstrated the products, showing off their range and the video footage they took. One of the evaluators was Corry Solerzano, an Army staff sergeant and air reconnaissance specialist in the hundred first Airborne Division. Solerzano flies and trains other soldiers on his brigades drones, which include, along with the Scydio RQ twenty eight A, some smaller and larger quad copters, and the aero Vironment Switchblade, a one way drone with a warhead launched from a mortar tube. Solarzano said the new Skydio's camera capabilities were leaps and bounds better than what he was accustomed to. He especially liked the ease of control. Even someone who doesn't have the aptitude to fly these drones, they could just grab the controller and do it, he said. After sundown, there was a night test and Solarzano and others took turns flying the X ten D invisible with its lights off, down one of the range's dark streets, seeing themselves show up on the thermal camera when it turned back around to face them a little more than three months later, in mid February, the Pentagon announced the new Blue UAS list, and Skydio's drones were on it, as expected, but the company's pre eminence hasn't gone unchallenged, even among US drone makers. Just before Thanksgiving, the Army awarded its short range Reconnaissance UAS program contract, the same one Skydio one in twenty twenty two, to a smaller US drone maker called red Cat Holdings. Asked about that a few weeks afterward, Brie was philosophical and diplomatic congratulating his competitor. The accelerating churn of world events has hit close to home for Breeze Company. After the Unmanned System's forces officers visited San Mateo. The company heard back that the X ten d aced its latest electronic warfare test in Ukraine. And yet, with the Trump administration determined to bring the war to some kind of clothes, Ukraine may be less able to buy US made drones, its own industry might need to start exploring markets elsewhere. And on March fourth, Skydio found itself caught up in President Donald Trump's trade war two. In retaliation for his administration levying a twenty percent tariff on Chinese imports, the Chinese government placed fifteen US companies on an export control list. One of them, somewhat redundantly since it was already on a different Chinese sanctions list, was Skydeo. Bree believes the most exciting near term possibilities for his company are closer to home, as more and more cities buy extends for their police and fire departments. Six weeks before the twenty nine Palms test, he was sitting on the patio outside his hotel room at the company's user conference, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. I think drones are really in their infancy, he said. They are becoming intelligent, actors fulfilling their responsibilities on their own, regularly buzzing up from their rooftop docks to patrol a perimeter or look for smoke along a transmission line, or otherwise monitor us from above. You're using software to define where you want those things, he said. You can just say I want a camera right here at this moment in time, three times a week, and it just happens. Scidio was already being deployed for all these critical industries, and it's almost all behind the scenes. Brie said. It's sort of like infrastructure.

Can America make drones. They're getting smarter, deadlier, and more indispensable, and almost all of them come from China. One Silicon Valley company wants to change that. By Drake Bennett and Ashley Vance read aloud by Mark Leedorf. Late last October, two Ukrainian military officers flew to the US to visit the headquarters of Skaidio, a Silicon Valley manufacturer of quad copter drones. Like the machine gun and the tank before them, drones are remaking battle, and since Russia's twenty twenty two invasion, Ukraine has become the world's laboratory for drone warfare. Quad Copters bought for a few hundred dollars and loaded with explosives have been transformed into lethally efficient guided missiles. Ukrainian pilots, wearing virtual reality headsets, steer them into combat, stalking and killing Russian infantrymen from above and destroying multimillion dollar tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Russians have responded with drone units of their own. At this stage of the conflict, the weapons are responsible for the majority of the casualties on both sides. Ukraine's military goes through unmanned craft at a furious pace. A military industrial complex of small domestic drone companies aided by u S funds, has sprung up in response, but the country still has to import much of its supply. The two men who came to Skydio's offices in San Mateo, California, were senior officers in the Unmanned System's Forces, a branch of the Ukrainian military created last year and the first in the world dedicated entirely to such weapons. Citing security, they asked not to be named in this article. They were in California to see if Skydio could help them. The first day of the visit, Adam Bree, Skydio's co founder and chief executive officer, walked his guests around the company's testing center and research and development labs. Brie is thirty nine, slim and stubbled, with a heavy brow and a deep voice. He favors workout friendly teas, fitted khakis and running shoes, which prove useful when he takes off sprinting around the parking lot. To demonstrate the tracking abilities of one of his quad copters. On the tour, Brie took the Ukrainians past workstations with designs for drone parachutes and prototypes of concept craft, as well as a robot arm that twirled Skydio drones over a sheet of special QR codes to test the navigation cameras and computer vision. Then the visitors, Bri and a dozen other Skydio executives sat down in a conference room and talked. The Ukrainians presented first, describing the myriad rolls drones filled for them. We try to adapt quickly because we basically don't have any other option, the more senior officer said in rapid near fluent English. In addition to single use first person view craft, the Ukrainians deploy more advanced quad copters akin to Scudios, to hover above the battlefield as aerial scouts and artillery spotters, or to drop bombs or transport supplies. Long range fixed wing drones attack Russian cities, and uncrewed speedboats laden with explosives have ravaged Russia's Black Sea Fleet. One newer tactic using drones to lay land mines along supply routes in Russian territory. It works because it's a surprise, the officer said. They just drive thinking they're safe and suddenly they're not. When it was the Skydio executive's turn to present, they ran through a list of the features on the X ten D, a variant of their newest drone tailored for military use. The cameras, both visible light and thermal had been upgraded, and the airframe was now weatherized enough to operate in moderate rain. The company is particularly proud of the craft's ability to pilot itself even without a radio connection and without GPS. The drone uses its navigation cameras at altitudes of up to three hundred meters to produce a real time topographical map of the landscape below, relying on them and that to fly autonomously if other options fail. For Skydio, the meeting was a chance to get invaluable feedback and to make amends, as everyone in the room was aware the company's track record in Ukraine had been disappointing. An earlier Skydio model built to US Army specs, had been shipped over by the thousands, but many had proved defenseless against the anti drone radio jamming now routinely used on Ukrainian battlefields. In electronic warfare testing, there in March twenty twenty four, the xten d had performed better. It successfully operated in the face of radio jamming, GPS jamming, and GPS spoofing when false coordinates are sent to the receiver, but it failed when faced with multiple measures at once. You've been patient with us as we've continued to try and develop our system to be valuable to you, and we appreciate that, said Alden Jones, a Skydio vice president. All tech start ups have growing pains, but the stakes for Skydio are especially high. Bree likes to say drones are evolving from toys to tools to infrastructure. They've proliferated in the US despite strict Federal Aviation Administration limits on where and how they can be flown. Outdoor photographers and filmmakers were some of the first to rely on the technology. Now firefighters and police officers do too, in search and rescue operations, vehicle pursuits, and potentially violent standoffs. Electric utilities send drones along power lines to look for damage. Commercial shipowners use them to inspect their vessels, and structural engineers use them to spot warning signs of failure in the country's aging bridges and dams. Amazon dot Com is even incorporating them into its delivery fleet. Some of those craft are being made in the US aerial industries. A new artificial intelligence focused defence contractor produces a few different drones, and its more traditional competitors have manufactured plane size unmanned military aircraft for years. Sky, for its part, is banking heavily on public safety, which it estimates to be a fifteen billion dollar market between the US and Canada taken together. However, the US drone makers account for only a sliver of global supply. The vast majority of the drones in the air today in the US and everywhere else are Chinese, most of them made by one company, Dji. As drones grow more important, Chinese dominance of the industry has heightened concerns about who controls the flows of data they collect and who ultimately controls the craft themselves. Supply chains, too, can be weapons. Ukraine's military is constantly having to find creative ways to acquire the Chinese drones and components on which its war effort depends, since the Chinese Communist Party a Russian ally restricts their sale to Ukraine. In response to all these perceived threats. US state and federal legislators have begun to outlaw Chinese drones for government use. The law authorizing the twenty twenty five US Defense budget goes further. It includes broad language that could ban Chinese drone manufacturers from the US market starting at the end of the year. The rivalry between the US and China looms over America's largest drone maker. The story of how that came to be is a case study in the different trajectories of the two nations high tech manufacturing. Skydio has a lot going for it, elite Silicon Valley talent, friends in government, and blue chip venture capital. Yet the lifespan of American drone makers thus far has tended to be short. For Skydio, a ban keeping its Chinese competitors out of the US market would be an enormous opportunity. It would also be a test. Brie descends from a long line of devoted, if earth bound, aviation enthusiasts. He grew up enthralled by his maternal grandfather's stories of serving as a mechanic and crew chief in a World War Two B seventeen bomber squadron. Bree's father, Doug a public defender who taught himself to write trading software and became a professional money manager. Flew radio controlled airplanes in his spare time. Father and son would spend their evenings at the model airplane field in Chatfield State Park in their hometown of Denver. I'd pick him up from school with the car loaded up with airplanes, and we'd go and fly until dark, day after day, Doug recalls. By high school, Adam was traveling to compete in and often win, national and international radio controlled aerobatics competitions, where pilots are judged on how precisely they take their planes through a complex choreography of loops and rolls. It's a little bit like figure skating, he says. He obsessively customized his planes, trimming their foam, filling to lighten them, and weighing each piece of balsa wood. One of his favorites was a Russian maid Yak fifty four with a six foot wingspan. Today it hangs from the ceiling in Scydio's offices, along with several of Bree's other competition planes. For college, Bree turned down Princeton University for the Franklin w Olin College of Engineering, a tiny school just outside Boston that boasts a radically hands on curriculum. The college has since developed a reputation in Silicon Valley, but when bre matriculated in two thousand and four, it had yet to have a graduating class. He found it thrilling that everyone, students and faculty was taking a risk on the place. Afterward, Bree went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied in its department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. There's a short twenty twelve video still available on YouTube that succinctly sums up his master's research there. In the clip, a super light plane using a laser range scanner as its eyes and an Intel netbook processor as its brain, pilots itself in a series of increasingly complex environments roughly the dimensions of a YAK fifty four. The plane circles an indoor track and the atrium of a classroom building, then slow columns gracefully through the columns of an underground parking garage. The success of the self flying plane and the connections pre made at MIT led to a job at Project Wing, a drone delivery effort that was one of Google's whimsical moonshots Wing was part of an emerging industry that used sensors and processors small enough to go into smartphones to build fundamentally different devices than the fixed wing hunter killer drones large defence contractors were making. Other US companies such as three D Robotics, sold quad copter kits to early adopters. The French company Parrot Drone introduced the first drone you could control with your phone, and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a graduate student named Frank Wong started a company called da Jiong Great Frontier in Mandarin Innovations, SZDJI Technology would own the transition from toys to tools. The company started out making control units for douet use hobbyists, and then in twenty thirteen it released a drone called the Phantom you could fly right out of the box. The Phantom was durable, intuitive to control, and smooth enough in flight that you could get professional quality footage by mounting a go pro camera on it. Dji started making its own high performance drone video cameras and gyroscopic gimbals to stabilize them, and it drove improvements in battery life and signal strength that allowed each new model to fly farther and longer. When cops and engineers started experimenting with how they might use drones at work, those were Djis. The company's products are workhorses in both the Ukrainian and Russian fleets. Ted Strasimiri, a Canadian who runs a drone services company and is something of a drone influencer, sums up the appeal of the brand this way, a Dji is like an AK forty seven. Simple and reliable. DJI models also tend to be much cheaper than their non Chinese competition. That reflects sufficiencies of scale and the company's mostly automated assembly line, along with the lower cost of skilled labour in Shunjan, where its offices and factories and the offices and factories of many of its suppliers are located, Dji enjoys other advantages too. In twenty fifteen, the Chinese government issued Made in China twenty twenty five, an ambitious ten year industrial policy plan to move the nation's economy beyond low cost manufacturing and into high tech. Among the ten sectors named in the plan were robotics and aerospace, with a specific mention of unmanned aerial vehicles alongside planes and helicopters. That entitles Chinese drone companies such as Dji and its newest competitor, Hotel Robotics, to research partnerships, grants, low cost loans, and targeted investments from state banks and CCP connected investment firms. Meanwhile, Brie almost immediately grew restless at Wing. In twenty fourteen, he left to start Skidio with Abraham Backrock, a co creator of the MIT self flying plane, and Matt Donahoe, another MIT and Olin College alum. The three founders envisioned a craft that could fly itself, allowing it to be operated by a novice or by a user whose attention was occupied with, for example, biking cinematically down a mountain or surviving a firefight, or operated by no one at all. Its autonomous capabilities could eventually graduate to far bigger aircraft. That argument persuaded the venture capital firms and reason Horowitz and Excel Partners to offer seed funding. Chip maker in Vidia also signed on as an investor, seeing a promising application for robotics friendly computing platforms it makes. In twenty eighteen, Scuydio introduced its first product, of follow Me consumer drone, designed to document video friendly outdoor sports. The r I, as it was called, had a pair of rectangular frames embedded with navigation cameras running around its four rotors, and it didn't come with the controller. Users launched it instead with a smartphone app, after which it zeroed in on and trailed them. Tech reviewers were deeply impressed with the R one's ability to film while avoiding tree branches, light poles, and low archways. They also tended to mention its cost twenty four hundred and ninety nine dollars, twice as much as corresponding DJI models loaded with advanced features. In late twenty nineteen, Skydio came out with the Skydeo two. It was smaller and sturdier than the R one, with even better obstacle avoidance, and it cost only nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. Users could pay extra for a controller, either a traditional two stick one or a wand like a Nintendo Wheeze. Even at that price, Though Skuydio failed to gain traction against Dji and Hotel, the company was kind of in this limbo state. Brie says everyone thought the tech was really cool, the business wasn't working. Other US drone makers were failing. Three D Robotics stopped making drones in twenty sixteen, and Lilly Robotics went bankrupt in twenty seventeen. Airwear ceased operations in twenty eighteen, the same year GoPro discontinued its drone, the Karma, brought to market only two years earlier. We'll be right back with Can America Make Drones? Welcome back to Can America Make Drones? Skydio stayed off that list, thanks in part to geopolitics. The rise of drones has coincided with the worsening of relations between the US and China. For the Pentagon, the danger of relying on a potential adversary for weapons technology, especially technology that's coming to have a mind of its own, is self evident. Guidance jointly published in twenty twenty four by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Securities, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that Chinese drones continue to pose a significant risk to critical infrastructure and US national security. In addition to the potential ban, Congress wrote into this year's Pentagon Appropriations Bill, which declares that unless an appropriate national security agency determined sometime this year that Dji and Hotel drones are not national security risks, the companies will be forbidden from selling any new products in the US. The Department of Commerce is considering its own restrictions on Chinese drones, Although many of the details are classified. The broader concern is that Chinese drones could become a crowdsourced spy fleet, transmitting video and location data of potentially sensitive areas back to their manufacturers and thereby to the CCP. Chinese law mandates that companies there assist the country's intelligence services if asked. At the more speculative end of the spectrum, there are worries that even the movements of Chinese drones might not be entirely under the control of their putative owners. Dji vehemently denies that its drones present a specific security risk. We've never had a request under the Chinese national intelligence law, says Adam Welsh, the company's global head of policy. He points to cybersecurity audits by Booze, Alan Hamilton, FDI Consulting, and the US Department of the Interior, among others. That Dji drones have passed. The company now offers a special local data mode where its drones don't connect to the Internet, and Welsh says Dji no longer stores the flight logs of its US users. We've always been open to scrutiny, he says. Any agency that wants to look at our products, they can just do it on their own if they want, or if they want collaboration from us to make it easier for them, We're happy to collaborate. Forskuidio, these fears have been a boon. In twenty twenty, the year Congress ordered the Pentagon to stop buying Chinese drones, the company came out with its X two, a folding drone whose camera, battery, and transmitter were all marked improvements over its previous models. Skydio marketed the X two to police and fire departments, the US military, utilities, and other businesses customers that prioritize cybersecurity in a way most bmx ers and snowboarders don't, and for which the X two's ten thousand, nine ninety nine dollars price tag wasn't prohibitive. In twenty twenty three, Skydio announced it was dropping out of the consumer drone business entirely to focus on enterprise and government. Skydio now boasts of having six hundred and fifty public safety agencies as clients, helping drive its nine figure annual revenue with rapid growth. At its most recent user conference, held in late September twenty twenty four at a resort just outside Santa Cruz, California, bre unveiled improvements to the X ten, whose price starts at twelve thousand dollars and can easily be twice that. The big announcement, though, was the dock, a drone hangar combe launchpad resembling a space age patio grill. Today, most drones are launched by hand. The promise of the dock with a battery charger and a retractable weather proof cover is that they won't have to be. In pilot programs. In New York City, Oklahoma City, and Las Vegas, docks installed on the roofs of police precinct houses and fire stations have allowed Skydio drones to launch within seconds of a nine to one one call to assess a potentially dangerous situation before human first responders arrive on the scene. Skydio is hardly alone in seeing this future. Other drone makers, including Dji, sell similar products as they go into production. Skydio's docks will be made across the San Francisco Bay from the company's San Mateo headquarters. There, set among body shops and countertop stone showrooms in the city of Hayward, is a sixty thousand square foot space spread over two buildings. That's where two hundred and ten Scidio production workers build X twos and X tens, assembling gimbals and cameras or attaching the different drone subassemblies, arms, chest canopy core using special power screwdrivers that precisely measure torque and count turns and cost thousands of dollars apiece. The factory, as its output grows, is being tweaked to ring out production bottlenecks and errors, but also weight, which for battery powered aircraft means more flight time per charge. One of the newer machines on the factory floor is an ultrasonic welder that makes X ten arms by fusing together two pieces of plastic, saving the few grams that clips or screws or glue would add after they've been assembled. The drones are strapped into cages along the sound proofed walls of the burn in room, where they run at full throttle for half an hour while their temperature and electrical current draw are monitored for evidence of defects. All in all, the drones undergo about five hundred and fifty different tests. In the final one, they take themselves through a flight test in a room with a foam padded floor. In one corner stands a mustachioed mannequin in a freightwig that the drones must be able to lock in on to verify that their subject detection system works. As in most disciplines, the key to manufacturing is practice. In the nineteen twenties and thirties, an aeronautical engineer named Theodore Wright noticed that as factories made more planes, their production costs steadily declined by a calculable percentage. In the years since, researchers have found the relation to be widespread and persistent. Though the shape of the curve varies among industries, the dynamic is now referred to as Wright's law. A challenge for Skydio is that its biggest competitor is a lot further along Wright's curve. Skydio has produced a total of forty five thousand drones. DJI doesn't release numbers, but in all likelihood and makes that many every few weeks. The American company is doing whatever it can to close the gap. Engineers in its San Mateo offices use a cat scanner to X ray DGI drones to see how they're made. A ban on Chinese drones could help Skidio get even more practice building devices for US customers. Brie has been vocal about what he sees as the risks of Chinese drones. As he told a Congressional select committee last year, it would be completely insane to accept a future where we depend on our geopolitical adversaries to supply these drones. Bands have proven deeply controversial in the American drone community, and some of the anger they inspire has been directed at SKIDEO. I work at a small department and cannot afford Skideo's prices, writes one commenter on the website drone Excel. We can afford DGI and use these products regularly to assist in lost or injured hikers, area surveillance, for events, and other uses. I can tell you this, I will build my own drone from parts before I spend a dime with any drone company that uses lobbying to keep their competition away at the expense of getting affordable tools into the hands of underfunded police agencies. Bree walks a fine line on the subject. We're trying to be the most reasonable voice in the room, he says. He argues that any transition should be gradual, and that government agencies forced to jettison DJI drones should get extra funding to replace them, public money that would be spent, at least in part on Skuydios. So far, at least that funding hasn't been forthcoming. In contrast with the CCP, with its grants and loans and R and D subsidies, the US government has for the most part opted simply to clear the field for non Chinese drone makers and to trust the market to take care of the rest. The drone trade wars show no sign of waning. Last fall, the Chinese government placed Skydio on its so called Unreliable entity list, cutting the company off from one of the few components it still sourced from China batteries. The ostensible reason for the sanctions was that Skidio sells drones to Taiwan's National Fire Agency, but it was widely seen as retribution for US export controls on advanced semiconductors and other technologies to China. The company was already working to source its batteries from non Chinese suppliers, Bri says, but in the meantime it has had to ration them, sending out just one per new drone. A few months later, DJI announced its latest firmware update in the US would remove geo fencing around military bases, airports, and other FAA determined no drone zones. It would be up to users themselves to decide whether they'd follow US law. According to Welsh, dji's head of policy, the change had been in the works for a while and was driven in part by public safety users who needed to fly their drones in exactly those areas. On November fifth, election day, the brightest hopes of America's drone industry were gathered in the Mojave Desert at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Centre. Like the adjacent city, the base is known informally as twenty nine Palms, and it lies a two and a half hour drive due east from Los Angeles. The last few miles along a road lined with barber shops specializing in high and tight haircuts. It's one of the biggest military training facilities in the world. Outside the main camp with its neat homes, movie theater, and Popeyes, the vast majority of the eleven hundred square mile expanse is empty. Desert. Artillery blasts echo off the hillsides, and at night, phosphorus flares bloom above the horizon. The air is busy with manned aircraft, tilt rotor transports making slow turns, a ten thunderbolts climbing sharply out of strafing runs, and supersonic fighters performing aerobatics in the upper sky. For the US military, getting a new technology into the field takes several years at best. While that might feel appropriate for an aircraft carrier, small drones evolve over a timescale of months, so the military's cumbersome program of record process ensures that new systems are years out of date by the time they're deployed. For instance, the RQ twenty eight, a specialized Skuyo X two that won the army's short range reconnaissance contract in twenty twenty two, was made as per the terms of the contract with only a single band radio. That's what rendered the ones sent to Ukraine particularly vulnerable to Russian jamming. More recent X two and X ten variants developed for military use have multiband radios and automatically switch to a different frequency band when they're jammed. Scale is the other problem. Military strategists who focus on drones talk about a trittable mass. In the future. They argue war will be waged not by nine figures next generation aircraft, but by ones that are cheap enough to be disposable. These drones won't be flown one on one as they have been in Ukraine, but in swarms that overwhelm an enemy's defenses in self sacrificing attacks. Eventually, they may coordinate themselves using AI like murmurations of Killer Starlings. It's an ethically fraught prospect and a terrifying one. It also would require lots of drones. According to Trent Emmenecker, a program manager for the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, at the attrition rate currently observed in Ukraine, the US military would exhaust its entire drone supply in five days. Program of record, drones are not delivered in great quantities. He says nor he says, are they characterized by great qualities? The problem isn't limited to drones, Imminecker points out the military's cumbersome procurement process has also hampered efforts to ramp up production of a far older we artillery shells to replace those sent to Ukraine. In recognition of these shortcomings, the Pentagon in twenty twenty three launched Replicator, a program to accelerate the pace of its drone development. At the same time, it started doing something simpler, allowing military units to go out and buy off the shelf drones from a white list of approved devices. Emmenecker, a former Marine aviator, is in charge of putting together the latest version of the list, called Blue UAS. Uncrude Aerial Systems is military nomenclature for drones. The flight tests at twenty nine Palms were part of the approval process. SKUYDIO and more than thirty of its competitors, including Parrot Drone, Shield AI and Anderil, were there. Much of the testing took place at a sprawling urban terrain combat range set against a broad rocky hillside. Its fifteen hundred empty buildings were mostly bare concrete with window shaped openings, giving it the feel of something half built and then abandoned to the desert. There was a mosque, a market filled with dusty plastic produce and burned out cars in the streets. Military drone operators had been brought in as evaluators. Uniformed soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and special forces operators in civilian tactical clothes rotated between the rooftops and dirt intersections where different drones were being launched, asking questions about payload, jamming, and autonomy, customer success. Representatives from the companies demonstrated the products, showing off their range and the video footage they took. One of the evaluators was Corry Solerzano, an Army staff sergeant and air reconnaissance specialist in the hundred first Airborne Division. Solerzano flies and trains other soldiers on his brigades drones, which include, along with the Scydio RQ twenty eight A, some smaller and larger quad copters, and the aero Vironment Switchblade, a one way drone with a warhead launched from a mortar tube. Solarzano said the new Skydio's camera capabilities were leaps and bounds better than what he was accustomed to. He especially liked the ease of control. Even someone who doesn't have the aptitude to fly these drones, they could just grab the controller and do it, he said. After sundown, there was a night test and Solarzano and others took turns flying the X ten D invisible with its lights off, down one of the range's dark streets, seeing themselves show up on the thermal camera when it turned back around to face them a little more than three months later, in mid February, the Pentagon announced the new Blue UAS list, and Skydio's drones were on it, as expected, but the company's pre eminence hasn't gone unchallenged, even among US drone makers. Just before Thanksgiving, the Army awarded its short range Reconnaissance UAS program contract, the same one Skydio one in twenty twenty two, to a smaller US drone maker called red Cat Holdings. Asked about that a few weeks afterward, Brie was philosophical and diplomatic congratulating his competitor. The accelerating churn of world events has hit close to home for Breeze Company. After the Unmanned System's forces officers visited San Mateo. The company heard back that the X ten d aced its latest electronic warfare test in Ukraine. And yet, with the Trump administration determined to bring the war to some kind of clothes, Ukraine may be less able to buy US made drones, its own industry might need to start exploring markets elsewhere. And on March fourth, Skydio found itself caught up in President Donald Trump's trade war two. In retaliation for his administration levying a twenty percent tariff on Chinese imports, the Chinese government placed fifteen US companies on an export control list. One of them, somewhat redundantly since it was already on a different Chinese sanctions list, was Skydeo. Bree believes the most exciting near term possibilities for his company are closer to home, as more and more cities buy extends for their police and fire departments. Six weeks before the twenty nine Palms test, he was sitting on the patio outside his hotel room at the company's user conference, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. I think drones are really in their infancy, he said. They are becoming intelligent, actors fulfilling their responsibilities on their own, regularly buzzing up from their rooftop docks to patrol a perimeter or look for smoke along a transmission line, or otherwise monitor us from above. You're using software to define where you want those things, he said. You can just say I want a camera right here at this moment in time, three times a week, and it just happens. Scidio was already being deployed for all these critical industries, and it's almost all behind the scenes. Brie said. It's sort of like infrastructure.