AUVSI Partnership for Drone Competitiveness

September 15, 2023

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Michael Robbins, Chief Advocacy Officer, at AUVSI Defense on September 14, 2023:

I want to very briefly discuss a new initiative that AUVSI is rolling out today publicly for the first time that beings to address the challenge of the industrial capacity shortfalls, starting with drones.

The AUVSI Partnership for Drone Competitiveness is a new initiative to address the acute challenge the drone industry faces with respect to subsidized competition from China and the loss of the component supply chain.

As I noted earlier, the scale of the problem is very concerning.

China – through its Made in China 2025 policies – has unfairly supported their drone industry and flooded the U.S. with subsidized drones and drone components to the detriment of U.S. drone manufacturers.

These strategic investments have developed a robust internal industry for drone manufacturing in China, and have also allowed the PRC to project their influence abroad and use their monopolistic position to put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage by flooding the global market with subsidized drones.

Obviously, this market strategy by the PRC is not unique to drones – and the U.S. government has taken actions to address similar market distortions in the semiconductor, solar panel, and battery markets, to name a few.

Drones are of particularly concern, however, as they are critical tools for U.S. national defense, public safety, building our 21st century economy, and for the U.S. to retain global aviation leadership.

As the world has watched in Ukraine, the utility of drones – even small, commercial off the shelf drones – has been put to great use for warfighting. The U.S. warfighter cannot be reliant on Chinese drones, obviously.

Congress and the DoD have recognized this, and have taken initial steps to begin to address, including banning the use of Chinese drones and critical Chinese components, but a lot more needs to be done to build up the domestic drone manufacturing base — which has been suffering from unfair competition from Chinese dumping — to meet the demands of not only DoD, especially with the stated goals of Replicator, but also the commercial industries.

Further, and our next speaker may speak to his more, numerous government agencies – including DoD, DHS, and DOJ, as well as Congress – have expressed grave security concerns about the use of Chinese drones in the U.S.

Our Partnership for Drone Competitiveness not only lays out the scale of the problem in a detailed white paper, but also offers tangible solutions – steps that can be taken now, and programs that can be authorized in the near future at the state and federal levels – to level the playing field for U.S. drone manufacturers and to build a real industrial base for drones and their necessary component supply chains in the United States.

This Partnership is another new advocacy initiative from AUVSI, and we welcome engagement from all of you here today on this new program. We just sent out a press release on this, and a lot more information can be found on our website.

And you can expect more of this type of work from AUVSI going forward. We are starting this effort with drones, but as I noted in my opening, this challenge requires attention across domains and throughout supply chains. We have a lot of work to do. And we are assembling the team and the capacity to get it done.