Oh? Didn't know that. They still make spring steel in Switzerland?

The info out of the Ukrainian MOD is even less reliable than that from the Kremlin, which isn't reliable at all. Both sides lie with abandon.

And Baba Yaga drones are mostly used on resupply missions for trapped troops.

And don't forget to include "board memberships for the family members of generals and admirals" among those incentives.

Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good. Once they've been depleted you'll see single-use drones replaced by reusable aircraft dropping dumb bombs again, which Iran did during the height of the Usrael attacks and Russia occasionally does in lapses of NATO weapons shipments.

Pretty sure he means "made in" like a new VW can say "Made in the USA", but all the components were made in Germany, Mexico and China and it's just assembled here.

Of course, they're dedicated devices. Drones are cheap and easy to customize.

Researchers in England found that they could track the US stealth aircraft outside one of the big bases by its affect on the cellphone network (IIRC it was covered on SlashDot). You can stealth them from the front and to a lesser extent from the sides and rear, but there's not much you can do about the bottom or the top.

There are now anti-net drones.

Once the drone defense gets figured out a way to mostly work around it will be encountered. Every countermeasure so far in the drone exchanges has been combatted, with various levels of success.

Even if they do spend the next several years building up (an extremely expensive) drone production infrastructure they still have to go to China to buy the materials to build those components. While Western corporations were unloading low-profit mining and refining operations in favor of investments which would provide higher short term profits China saw an opportunity to take control of the very base of industrial production and now control most of the truly important material streams.

The Third World is making much larger and accelerated purchases of clean energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, nuclear) from China, to the tune of billions of dollars just since Usrael attacked Iran.

China has over three times our population, and is the industrial powerhouse of the world. Still, they emit a little less than three times the US does.

Actually that last part isn't true. I worked at AWS, and their storage is not like a Windows share where admins have god-like access. All AWS staff see is a "blob" (that's actually what they call it) of encrypted data. They can move it, back it up, or whatever, but only as a blob.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Peru was rated 'most corrupt country in the world' and yet it's pretty much the opposite of totalitarian, the government could be better described as "chaos".

As I used to tell my ESL students, "Oh, there's plenty of corruption in the US, it's just that it happens at a higher level. Rather than passing $20 to a cop they're passing $100,000 to a politician or official so we don't see it."

Probably heard it in church Sunday School.