> but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers [...] is also going to be very difficult

Just ban general purpose computers that allow running arbitrary unsigned code. I'm sure lots of governments and corporations would be happy to get on board that one, and many end-users wouldn't notice.

A cure worse than the disease. Also wouldn't stop the military from building up a drone army and then someone within it choosing to go rogue and take it with them. It only ensures that no one else can stop them.

I think the parent post agreed with you and was just being facetious -- 'just ban general purpose computing' isn't very likely to be a popular sentiment on hn!

I hope so as well ;)

In a war situation, likely supply chains will be disrupted, so the regime will have to use whatever it has in the country. There are chips in circulation, but each different chip needs different drivers, has different performance characteristics, etc. E.g. I read that Tesla changed a bunch of chips due to the current shortage and they had to write new drivers for them. That's one chip they had to replace.

Of course you could make your population turn over their old smartphones, remove IR filtering from the camera lenses and solder them to a robot body. But this will slow down manufacturing as it isn't well suited to mass manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it's a limited resource so you might have to deal with attempts by your enemy to exhaust it. Last, you'd be limited in fanciness, as in your robots can only process limited amounts. The best place to source the computation needed for really "smart" robot soldiers would probably be self driving cars as they have the AI processing power needed.