From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

China is running away with critical drone technology while the U.S. struggles to even get into the race, with experts warning that the technological gap spells a “nightmare” scenario for America’s military on the battlefield.

Chinese company Da Jiang Industries (DJI) currently controls 70% of the worldwide commercial drone market alone, and American drone companies specializing in defense applications still rely heavily on Chinese parts to make their products, according to Forbes. The U.S.’ inability to match China’s drone production poses a major threat to national security, according to defense experts, with one source of the problem being the military’s insistence on developing “exquisite” weapons systems that have big price tags.

“China has captured 90% of the global market for small civilian drones by directly subsidizing drone manufacturers,” Bret Boyd, CEO of defense-oriented logistics firm Sustainment, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This has allowed them to be extremely competitive on price, undercutting most of their competitors and receiving huge benefits from economies of scale. This has been happening for decades.”

The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) included a review of the effect of using Chinese-made parts for domestic drone manufacturing, with DJI saying in a press release that the law was based on “xenophobic fear.” New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik attempted to add formal restrictions on Chinese parts into the NDAA, but the law only passed the house before stalling in the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

DJI sued the Pentagon in October over its inclusion on the department’s Chinese military company list. The case is ongoing.

The U.S. currently utilizes mostly high-cost, plane-like drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper, which specializes in air-to-ground attacks with missiles. An MQ-9 costs around $56.5 million to build per unit, according to the Air Force.

Since October 2023, Houthi rebels in Yemen have brought down at least six Reaper drones, according to ABC News in April. Meanwhile, Houthis have found great success with small, cheaply-made drones, with some having the range to fly nearly 16 hours to targets in Israel, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ALCED).

Moreover, the Houthis have killed an estimated 470 people with suicide drones since 2016, according to ALCED. By contrast, the drones can cost as little as $2,000, experts told Politico in 2023.

The enormous gap in the cost to wage war presents a unique national security risk that the Pentagon must urgently tackle, Boyd told the DCNF.

“Our military has become far too reliant on exquisite, expensive weapon systems that can only be built by a very small percentage of the American industrial base,” Boyd told the DCNF. “While this was appropriate for the Cold War, we need to adapt to the realities of combat in 2025. Ukraine is showing us that the modern battlefield is going to be dominated by ‘good enough’ technology deployed at scale.”

Cheap drones have fundamentally changed the battlefield, most exemplified by their extensive use in the Russia-Ukraine war beginning in 2022. The drones allowed Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike to deal with tanks and other armored vehicles without exposing themselves with traditional anti-tank weapons systems like rocket launchers, according to The New York Times.

“These drones allow these service members to destroy a tank from 20 kilometers away,” William Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute and Army Ranger veteran, told the DCNF. “When you’re used to being threatened at only two and a half kilometers away, it changes the whole dynamic of how you move around and how you find cover and concealment.”

The air duel.
A Ukrainian FPV drone destroyed a russian Lancet drone that tried to escape its fate. 

📹: 93rd Mechanized Brigade pic.twitter.com/R8BfrGIMNE

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 30, 2024

In the Bakhmut region alone in Ukraine, drones killed nearly 210 Russian Wagner Group mercenaries and wounded 360 more over the course of months in mid-2023, the NYT reported.

“The question is, are we ready for drone on drone warfare, or are we still putting humans in the loop?,” a former defense engineer granted anonymity to freely discuss U.S. military policy, told the DCNF. “Because as far as I know, we’re still putting humans out there, and human against drone is a nightmare.”

The U.S. armed forces have already made some headway into adopting small drones for combat, with the Army creating “hunter-killer” platoons equipped with drones used for mainly reconnaissance. Most recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Army to investigate the use of “low-cost” drones in strike applications as part of a $36 billion overhaul of the service branch.

“Ukraine set up this infrastructure from basically nothing, and it happened in garages, and they set it up in less than two years,” Thibeau told the DCNF. “We don’t want to figure this out after the shooting starts.”

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Chris Talgo

Like most of Western Europe, Spain and Portugal have been at the forefront of the green movement in recent decades. Both nations have embraced renewable energy sources, especially wind and solar, as they have transformed their energy grid infrastructure to rely heavily upon these sources.

With that being said, it should come as no surprise that the extensive power outage that crippled these countries and parts of others earlier this week was primarily caused by a huge drop in solar power output in a short period of time.

To be exact, as the Associated Press reports, “In a span of just five minutes, between 12:30 and 12:35 p.m. local time (1030-1035 GMT) on Monday, solar PV generation plunged by more than 50% to 8 gigawatts (GW) from more than 18 GW.”

Based on an early report, the sudden drop in solar power occurred at two solar facilities in southwest Spain, which triggered a “complete collapse of the system,” according to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Because power grids are complex structures that are often intertwined among nations, when one country experiences a major outage, it typically spreads to its neighbors as well. Such is why areas in Portugal, France, and Belgium experienced large power outages after the Spanish grid collapsed.

Predictably, the mainstream media are totally ignoring the cause of this manmade disaster.

For now, the official narrative is that the abrupt power outage was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon.”

The truth is that Spain, which generated 56 percent of its electricity mix in 2024 from renewables, has become a canary in the coal mine for other nations that are considering going all-in on renewable energy.

Red Electrica, a fitting name for Spain’s monopolistic utility power provider, blamed the power failure on “severe oscillations in high-voltage lines in southern France or inland Spain.” The company said the possible causes “include a physical fault (line disconnection), a sudden loss of generation within Spain or an atmospheric phenomenon.”

What recently occurred in Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium is not an isolated incident; it is only the latest instance of an electric grid being unable to deliver on-demand power due to an overreliance on renewable energy.

The same thing’s been occurring more and more in the United States in recent years, especially after President Biden’s four-year war on natural gas and coal, which can provide abundant, affordable, and reliable energy 24 hours per days, seven days per week.

As the federal government, in cahoots with state and local governments, has pushed electricity grid operators to build more solar and wind power facilities instead of dependable natural gas plants while prematurely shuttering perfectly operable coal power plants, the U.S. grid has suffered.

As the American Energy Alliance notes, “ power outages have increased by 93 percent across the United States over the last 5 years—a time when solar and wind power have increased by 60 percent. Texas, who leads the nation in wind generation, and California, who leads the nation in solar generation, have had the largest number of power outages in the nation over those 5 years.”

It also must be emphasized that wind and solar are not environmentally friendly.

While it is true that solar panels and wind turbines produce little to no direct carbon monoxide emissions; it is also true that the manufacturing process requires vast amounts of rare earth elements.

It is also the case, as even the Los Angeles Times acknowledged in 2022, that enormous solar fields and gigantic wind turbines destroy pristine lands, disrupt habitats, are nearly impossible to recycle, and result in the mass killing of birds, whales, and other animals.

Finally, it is essential to reinforce the fact that not only are wind and solar unreliable and bad for the environment, but they also cost more, not less, than natural gas and coal.

As James Taylor, President of The Heartland Institute, notes in a new Policy Study, “a peer-reviewed analysis of full-system levelized costs of competing power sources shows wind power is seven times more expensive than natural gas power and solar power is 10 times more expensive.”

The good news for Americans is that President Trump understands the fundamental folly of the so-called green movement. Unlike his predecessor, Trump is not interested in pushing what he calls the “green new scam.”

Over his first 100 days, Trump has taken a vast array of actions to roll back Biden-era regulations that stifled domestic energy production. Moreover, Trump wants to export natural gas to Western Europe, which would weaken Russia’s war machine while bringing our traditional European allies back in the fold.

Hopefully, this dark episode will help other European nations, Germany in particular, recognize that you simply cannot run a modern nation primarily on wind and solar power.

Chris Talgo is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.