U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday his tariff policy was aimed at promoting the domestic manufacturing of tanks and technology products, not sneakers and T-shirts.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One in New Jersey, Trump said he agreed with comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on April 29 that the U.S. does not necessarily need a “booming textile industry” - comments that drew criticism from the National Council of Textile Organizations.
“We’re not looking to make sneakers and T-shirts. We want to make military equipment. We want to make big things. We want to make, do the AI thing,” Trump said.
“I’m not looking to make T-shirts, to be honest. I’m not looking to make socks. We can do that very well in other locations. We are looking to do chips and computers and lots of other things, and tanks and ships,” Trump said.
This isn’t true. Tanks role in doctrine has changed. How the US would fight with drones on the field is completely different than how Ukraine or Russia are fighting.
“How the US would” would be subject to rapid change in real conditions before it adapts its doctrine to modern warfare. Since it’s the US with plenty of money in the defense and powerful companies that desperately want to test new and more efficient ways at solving problems, yeah it would.
However right now what’s known of US drones and approaches seems to be kinda expensive garbage. Good thing is that such relatively close engagements are secondary for its doctrine.
Current US doctrine relies on controlling the skies. Still right now there’s no credible threat to US air dominance. If the US has air dominance, drones in their current form are a bug attacking a tractor. Look up videos on how the US air campaign worked during Gulf War 1 and see the sheer number of assets that were on station for months waiting for the order to attack. Any enemy would be utterly exhausted by the time any attack started and the force and speed of violence would keep drones down to local threats.
That’s also not counting any drone countermeasures the US currently has and could mass deploy.
I think the US use of expensive drones is just different to what we’re seeing in Ukraine. They’re fitting into a different space than FPV drones, which isn’t bad, it’s just different.
Gulf War 1 is either just as relevant as yesterday or not relevant at all. It was a bit of a demonstrative beating.
I know, but the recent India-Pakistan contact seems to have shown that modern ways to reach those expensive assets are available to many more countries than when this doctrine was adopted. Which means that very expensive planes might sometimes be shot down, and the system disrupted.
Ukraine reaches Moscow suburbs with drones. It has almost become realistic for a hypothetical Muslim country with oil to reach something like Austin, Texas with drones. With some stages involved, maybe with recharging\refueling drones, maybe using fixed-wing drones that can glide will make more sense for such, maybe even launched from naval drones as small carriers. The point is, this has become possible. Not bug attacking a tractor, more like a host of termites attacking a tractor and it’s not good for its driver if they reach him.
The long-term outcome of Gulf War 2 demonstrated the limitations of Gulf War 1. If you don’t have any idea of what the desired end state should be, military superiority does you very little good.
In other words, the Powell doctrine still applies, and the cost of ignoring it (as in GW2) can be hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.
I think that’s a bit far fetched. You don’t need to have something fly from Tripoli to hit the US, just send operatives here, and have them launch the attacks from the US. You could be a mile away and never get caught, hypothetically speaking.
I still think US doctrine from GW1 applies, simply because drone use is already being implemented into the current chain of command. I have a few friends that are on the RnD side of things and the non classified drone stuff they’ve talked about to me is exceptionally impressive, and augments current doctrine rather than upending it.
OK, admittedly I don’t really know a thing other than what I read, and it would make sense.
BTW, yes, launches from Russian territory much closer to targets Ukrainians do too.
You wouldn’t even need something that big, man.
I was in college during GWOT and part of the political science club. We had a ‘games theory’ session with the DHS rep in our state, where part of the class was reps for the government and part were a terrorist cell.
I was part of the latter, and our goal was ‘disrupt the state’ and half the people wanted a big 9-11 attack to happen. My suggestion was small teams and car bombs over the course of 3 days along the major highways in the state and intra city traffic would grind to a halt. That was what kept him up at night.
The same thing could be done at an even more effective scale with FPVs hypothetically.
Yes, but also now there are networked cameras everywhere.
Sure, pointing at streets. Your normal not super cheap FPV has a range of like a mile. Even adjacent to an urban center you could find places to launch a drone and send it to do evil shit and not be spotted.