Lars Erik Schönander is a nonresident fellow with FAI’s tech and statecraft team and an MBA student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. From 2022-23, he wrote a series of articles and reports evaluating the extent of American dependence on Chinese drones and making the case that this dependence posed serious national security risks.
In 2022, Lars penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on U.S. federal agencies’ overreliance on Chinese drones. The following year, he undertook an extensive FOIA endeavor to understand state-level dependence on Chinese drones, compiling these findings in an FAI report, and wrote for American Affairs on the need for a domestic drone industrial base, among other work.
Three years later, the drone policy picture has changed tremendously. Congress has broadly restricted federal procurement of Chinese drones and the FCC has placed foreign-made drones and drone components on its Covered List of banned equipment. On the demand side, the Pentagon has announced major purchasing commitments and the administration has directed agencies to prioritize buying domestically manufactured drones. Drones have now been deemed too risky to national security to be built elsewhere.
I spoke with Lars in early October about how this shift came about and the lessons we should take from it. We discussed what the drones case can teach policymakers about eliminating dependencies and growing a domestic market in other industries, his experience as an early adopter pushing for action on Chinese supply chain risks before our government was well-versed in dealing with them, and the Chinese drone juggernaut that is DJI.
