After banning the sale of all new-model foreign-made drones in the U.S. in December, the FCC has started to loosen up a little. Going forward, so-called “toy drones” will be permitted on American store shelves even if they are made in another country. Yes, the Department of Defense, utilizing its vast resources and deep expertise in countering threats, has after months of deliberation reached the conclusion that toys aren’t scary enough to ban anymore. Worry not, citizen, for that 6-year-old with a bright blue mini-quadcopter is not a terrorist!
The purported reason for the December ban was a matter of national security: bad guys are increasingly using drones to conduct nefarious activities. Therefore, we must ban drones! But not all of them, for some reason, just foreign ones. So long as terrorists and drug smugglers buy American, that’s fine. Oh, and also, the ban was only for new models. Older foreign models could continue to be on sale. That will keep this nation secure!
And it will remain secure even with little kids flying toys around, too. The DoD has a strict list of criteria for what qualifies as a “toy drone,” including a take-off weight under 0.3 pounds, 300 feet of controllable range, no GPS, no network connectivity, no cameras, and a maximum 10 minutes of flight time, among other things. Yes, it took the Pentagon months to determine that these were safe.
Make it make sense
If you’re confounded by what’s going on here, the trick is that this really isn’t about national security. Well, it is, but not in the “terrorists will attack” sense. This is really about America’s drone production capacity, which lags far behind China. The Pentagon is aware that cheap drone swarms are part of 21st century warfare, but without a robust domestic supply chain, it can’t build out its own arsenal. Militaries generally don’t like to buy in bulk from potential adversaries, you see. (As for allies: the Pentagon has started whitelisting specific foreign drones for exceptions from the ban.)
So banning the sale of new models of foreign drones was really meant as a kind of brute force lift for domestic production. Hey American dronemakers, you won’t have any new competition anymore! Come on and enter the market. And then DoD can buy your stuff at scale.
In that sense, toy drones are “unthreatening” not because a terrorist can’t use it for an attack, but because the Pentagon can’t. Since there’s no reason the military would ever use a toy drone, there’s no reason to incentivize domestic production of them. So bring on the foreign competition — DoD doesn’t care about that.
