I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.

60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.

So you pay china $1 million for some amount of steel (via vietnam) and then pay the us gov $4.56 million for a total cost of $5.56 million.

It’s amazing that so many steel companies are still underperforming in the USA seemingly in spite the intense protectionism.

0: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-us-vietnam-steel-trad....

Simple stuff like pots and pans, cutlery, potato mashers. Then industrial parts. Farm equipment. Eventually, cell phone frames and more sophisticated stuff. I think this is what the parent comment is alluding to.

- small production runs

- obsolete components

- obsolete production technology

- certification requirements

- continued support and design changes to account for the above

- the mandatory defence surcharge

From top of my head.

They don't want memos, but solid 10-15 year contracts. And since they are not getting that, not much is happening.

There's no need to be hyperbolic.

They're certainly facing a serious situation. But by all accounts they still have some runway. And if you'll check your current news feeds very carefully: no, the front hasn't collapsed, and no, the Russians aren't on the verge of overrunning Kharkiv and Odesa.

So no, Ukraine is not "out of ammunition NOW".

So if there would be a startup saying, we can build a automated factory, spitting out cheap javelin alike warheads using off the shelf components, would surely get money, if they have some expertise.

For context btw: I oversaw the production of hundreds (if not into the thousands) of the Javelins we sent to Ukraine. Two of my coworkers were Ukrainian too. Do not mistake my brutal realism for a lack of caring about the situation.

That worked for russia but somehow doesn't work in the west?

I mostly lack experience in defense tech beyond being a user but ime it often doesn't work as well as the certificate (which probably cost a lot of effort to obtain) states it does. I'm of the opinion that we need to radically rethink our approach here if we hope to deter or withstand potential conflict with china in the next 10 years.

Regarding China, I thought the same thing. Until Ukraine. Because as it turned out, that being at constant, if low intensity, war for basically all the time since Vietnam and Korea (at least since Gulf War 2 over Kuweit), really has benefits for the warfighting capability of countries. NATO, and especially the US, have that. Russia and China don't. And it shows, Russia didn't walz over Ukraine the way the West did over Iraq. And China has to deal with an amphibious invasion against a country that had decades to prepare for just that. Which leaves the question of supply lines across the pacific for a prolonged conflict. And there my money really is on western navies.

Just as a reminder, Russia is at a war economy by now, and still has to source from North Korea. All the while, NATO countries are just emptying stockpiles and slowly, maybe too slow, replenishing them. And despite that, all Russia got is a stalemate.

Not really the same thing. Iraq was very low on quality military supplies with years of sanctions before that.

And Russia did walz over Georgia in 2008 and Russia would have walzed over Ukraine in 2014 (some russian military was enough to capture lots of ground back then). But much happened between 2014 and 2022.

The Western powers are not treating the situation as if they themselves were at war, hence no drastic changes in economic output to favor war machines. We have increased production though. Can't say how much, but it would raise eyebrows. I feel we should have been far more generous with the munitions, especially the older aircraft (think F-16, F-18) early on.

The certificates are basically just a paper trail. The aluminium is aircraft grade, the optics in spec, EMI shielding is sufficient, etc. We do extensive testing, but things slip through. Some issues are storage-related, and others are issues that don't show up til years later - such as microscopic ESD damage. Much of what we've been giving Ukraine was in storage for a while.

Definitely possible, this one is mostly US-built: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/

Note that it's $1,999+ for mostly made/assembled in USA version, vs. $999 for Purism's made in China version.

And China is more capable at scaling, if the product were ever competing on price rather than principle. So still a ways to go to be competitive at manufacturing.

Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?

Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)

Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)

Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)

What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)

I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.

Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.

CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.

What? Are you suggesting that aluminium phone cases nowadays are created by an army of trained CNC machinists? And not programmed once by a (few) dozen engineers per model of the handful of existing phone models and then executed by highly automated factories and an army of "low-skilled" workers.

CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.

To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.

And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.

Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.

I hate crypto, but I love this idea. We should apply this to a lot of systems.

Make stakeholders of anything accountable. 100% skin in the game.

(unlikely to work for several reasons, may be stupid idea but looks like something that could work in not-so-different world)

But I do think we're leaning way too far towards the no-accountability side currently, and need to shift a bit further the other way.

(But I don't expect THAT to come out of a VC industry where so many prominent people and parters have track records that generally include a lot of "founded unprofitable company but kept it alive long enough to have a good exit" stories... This world lives on the perception of success, not on long-term responsibility.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu

> caused the deaths of over 800 people in Panama from cough syrup that contained diethylene glycol in place of glycerin.

We have seen consumer grade DJI drone use in Ukraine-Russia war by both sides.

AI to control a swarm of cheap drones to survey and kill?

Longer range systems cost a bit more, but not a whole lot much more.

Improvements that are desirable are generally in terms of range, endurance, sensors and resistance to electronic warfare.

Copying the silent prop design from Zipline would also be neat to reduce the sound signature and give the enemy less time to react…

Well, given the fact that people are working on it, and many of them probably don't like you so much, it's a good idea for "the people you call friendly" to work on it.

I personally have some ideas based on my own experience in war, but I cannot make them while in a trench.

Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.

Another idea: drone AWACS. I mean, a drone with radar to detect other drones (and other aircraft).

In fact, as far as I know, they are a one-weather system: clear.

"...that is connected to the firing unit by a cable, allowing it be used at distances up to 50 metres (160 ft) away"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skif_(anti-tank_guided_missile...

I would hate to cross you. That is scary.

I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.

> "Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?

US is offering money, so why not take it?

Problem is that unless the asset is virtual, it's going to actually be held by a legal person in the real world, not the smart contract, and it's not ideal to have a stable coin collateralised only by another virtual asset (although makerdao seems to make it work so far).

I think the main innovations here wouldn't be technical but legal, since good solutions to this problem involve the interface between the real world and the blockchain. I remember reading about a legal structure where real assets were held by a trust for the benefit of the owner of an NFT or something, but I'm sure there are other things you could do with the right legal structure, or possibly a central bank or a jurisdiction like Estonia could come up with something that would engender a lot of confidence.