Hopefully. But where military tech trickles down to consumers, and consumers can't have any fun with drone thanks to the FAA, we don't have the drone ecosystem that it would take to win that contest. The US military draws from the US, so it can't go to the civilians and ask for drone operators and mechanics and engineers if there's not a vibrant drone ecosystem. How many high schoolers in the US are playing with drones to become future drone company owners? Manufacturing them, designing new ones, fixing existing ones. I want to believe but the FAA rules are just so stifling that it's just not there.

Chilling effect, sure.

But between youtube, cheap IR cameras, 10k-Neuron-Net running on a raspberry pi, github open source swarming algos, extremely cheap 3'D printing, hap-hazard innocuous chemicals, and a global ubiquitous surveillance state...

A "sufficiently motivated citizen" could literally walk down the street, encounter an altercation, and snap their fingers, and have their opponent 'neutralized' within seconds, all with off the shelf hardware and open source software, right now.

These people exist, but do we really want to stir them?

It's a very chilling effect. Instead of American football driving things, it should be drone piloting. We should reorganize our culture around drone flying, in order to be more competitive during world war 3 that we find ourselves in. We should have a national league of drone pilots, and every high school in the country should be fielding teams to find the best pilots across the country to the level of the Superbowl.

all moot. em jamming. best you get is line of sight, if that isnt countered too with constant retro-reflective detecting IR jamming directional beams(ie. any remote with a convex lense)

it will certainly be interesting. this is why we are Ukraine, to figure it out now.

But you don't need line of sight for the whole squad of operators if you can put up a repeater that the operator's signals can go through.

The FCC killed the hobby and in the process, made us fight with one hand behind our backs. Still, the future of autonomous drones means maybe we won't have human operators for the swarm so maybe it's moot.