After banning the sale of all new model foreign-made drones in the US in December, the FCC has started to loosen up a bit. Going forward, so-called “toy drones” will be allowed on US store shelves, even if they are made in another country. Yes, the Department of Defense, using its vast resources and deep expertise in countering threats, has come to the conclusion after months of deliberation that the toys are no longer scary enough to warrant a ban. Don’t worry, citizens, that 6-year-old kid with the bright blue mini-quadcopter is not a terrorist!
The stated reason for the December ban was a matter of national security: bad guys are increasingly using drones to carry out nefarious activities. Therefore, we should ban drones! But not all of them, for some reason, only foreigners. As long as terrorists and drug smugglers buy Americans, it’s fine. Oh, and also, the ban was only for New Model. Sales of old foreign models may continue. He will keep this country safe!
And it will be safe even when flying toys around small children. The DOD has a strict list of criteria to qualify as a “toy drone,” including a weight of less than 0.3 pounds, a controllable range of 300 feet, no GPS, no network connectivity, no cameras, and a maximum flight time of 10 minutes, among other things. Yes, it took months for the Pentagon to determine that these were safe.
make it meaningful
If you’re confused by what’s going on here, the point is that this isn’t really about national security. Well, it is, but not in the “terrorists will attack” sense. This is actually about America’s drone production capacity, which is far behind China. Pentagon knows cheap drones are part of Swarm 21scheduled tribe war of the century, but without a strong domestic supply chain, it cannot build its own arsenal. You see, armies generally don’t like to buy in large quantities from potential adversaries. (For allies: The Pentagon has begun whitelisting specific foreign drones for exceptions from the ban.)
So banning the sale of new models of foreign drones actually meant a kind of coercion against domestic production. Hey American drone manufacturers, you will no longer have any new competition! Come and enter the market. And then DoD can buy your stuff en masse.
In that sense, toy drones are “dangerous” not because a terrorist can’t use them to attack, but because the Pentagon can’t. Since there is no reason the military would ever use toy drones, there is also no reason to encourage domestic production of them. So bring in foreign competition – DoD doesn’t care about it.
