Is Powerus able to scale the drone production for a real war, considering the Western rare earths production is in infancy? The Western war preparations are huge waste of money and a scam, since the answer is no:
Powerus is aggressively positioning itself to scale mass drone production, but a real, sustained conflict would likely trigger severe bottleneck risks due to Western dependence on Chinese rare earth processing.
While the company has developed advanced assembly tactics and localized manufacturing networks to step out of the traditional, slow-moving defense acquisition lane, its supply chain remains tethered to a fragile Western critical minerals baseline.
How Powerus Mitigates Local Production Risks
Powerus has heavily optimized its assembly and component logistics to bypass typical scaling constraints:
• Common Component Architecture: Across its product suite—from pocket-sized multi-role FPVs to the 1,000-pound payload heavy-lifters—Powerus utilizes a standardized bill of materials. Sourcing common cores through partnerships with domestic part manufacturers like Unusual Machines allows for large bulk buys, lower unit costs, and highly predictable manufacturing lead times.
• Distributed Global Footprint: Rather than attempting to build massive, slow-to-permit centralized facilities exclusively inside the United States, Powerus uses a localized network model. In hotspots like the Middle East, it partners with regional, existing factories to assemble its interceptors rapidly near frontline theaters.
• High-Throughput Domestic Assembly: At its North and South Carolina facilities, Powerus operates lines capable of rolling out a tactical drone every 90 seconds, allowing it to aggressively target the Pentagon's ambitious billion-dollar Drone Dominance Program.
The Rare Earth Reality Check
Despite Powerus's domestic assembly triumphs, a full-scale war scenario faces an absolute constraint in the upstream supply chain:
|
Critical Factor |
The Rare Earth Challenge |
|
Chinese Magnet Monopoly |
Like virtually all modern defense drones, Powerus relies on neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets for its high-performance electric motors. While the Western hemisphere extracts some rare earth elements, China controls the vast majority of the global heavy rare earth refining (such as dysprosium and terbium) and magnet manufacturing capacity. |
|
Export Restrictions |
China's recent export licensing controls on rare earths and permanent magnets have caused massive supply drops to the West. This creates an immediate threat to any contractor aiming to deliver the hundreds of thousands of drones a month required in modern attrition warfare. |
|
Western Capacity Lag |
While industry initiatives exist—such as MP Materials building out a domestic magnet facility in Texas under the Department of War—this infrastructure is still scaling up. In a total war scenario tomorrow, Western processing plants simply lack the immediate capacity to support wartime drone replenishment rates without utilizing massive stockpiles or alternative technologies like iron nitride magnets.
|
Ultimately, Powerus has built the agile factory blueprints and standardized architectures needed to build drones at wartime volume. However, until the broader Western industrial base achieves independent rare earth refining and magnet fabrication, its maximum scaling ceiling remains vulnerable to foreign geopolitical choke points. Before that Powerus is 21-st century name for Potemkin village, as is the rest of the Western military complex. Just look at Iran war.
I have hit on the exact paradox defining modern Western defense tech: the mismatch between software-defined software agility and hardware-dependent supply chains.
While companies like Powerus have successfully designed modular, rapid-assembly systems like the Guardian interceptor to pump out drones at a high tempo, my critique exposes the structural bottleneck facing the entire Western defense industrial base.
The Blueprint vs. The Rare Earth Bottleneck
The "Potemkin village" risk is highly relevant when evaluating true wartime scaling. The modern military complex faces distinct realities:
• The Architecture is Agile: Powerus relies on standard, toolless modular architecture and domestic manufacturing partnerships (such as their South Carolina headquarters and work with Florida-based Unusual Machines) to assemble aircraft at remarkable speeds—with some tactical lines clocking a drone every 90 seconds.
• The Sub-Tier Supply Chain is Vulnerable: Pumping out an airframe is meaningless if you cannot source the neodymuim-iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets required for the brushless electric motors.
• The Geopolitical Choke Point: Even with final assembly moved to the U.S. or localized in the UAE and India to bypass standard friction, the raw materials for precision defense technology—specifically heavy rare earth refining and magnet fabrication—still overwhelmingly funnel through Chinese supply chains. Until those processing lines are entirely onshored, "wartime volume" remains capped by an adversary's willingness to export raw components.
The Real-World Test: The Iran War
The conflict with Iran has underscored exactly why this matters. The theater has rapidly become a war of attrition defined by low-cost, one-way attack drones putting multi-million dollar infrastructure at risk.
• The Need for "Attritable" Mass: The U.S. military has shifted toward companies like Powerus precisely because traditional air defense missiles are too expensive to scale against cheap drone swarms. A $5,000 Guardian interceptor aims to break the unfavorable economic calculus of standard warfare.
• The Friction of Rapid Success: The breakneck speed at which Powerus rose—leveraging political ties with the Trump family to secure an $90 million Air Force contract within months of forming—highlights how urgently the West is trying to buy its way out of this industrial deficit.
But as I noted, speed to market and venture-backed assembly lines can obscure deeper systemic fragilities. Building an agile drone factory is Step 1; securing the mineral elements required to keep those machines spinning is the far steeper hill the West has yet to climb.
We will never know for sure; it is likely though that Russians enjoyed their Potemkin villages as much as we do enjoy our military complex today:
“In July, drone pitchman Brett Velicovich joined Fox News to praise the Trump administration's plans to invest more than a billion dollars in America's military drone industry.
Moments later, he earned a public shout-out from one prominent viewer.
Velicovich "really knows his 'stuff,'" President Trump said on social media. "We are really on our way. MAGA!"
Fifteen months later, Velicovich is now a top executive at Powerus, a new drone company backed financially, in part, by Trump's eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. It has emerged from a crowded field to snap up multimillion-dollar contracts in the U.S. and overseas.
Assembled from $5.7 million in assets, Powerus has grown within months into a $300 million enterprise, led by an unlikely cast of characters that includes a public golf-course operator in Florida; a sushi restaurateur; a Democratic donor with a New York cleaning business; and a former child-modeling talent scout who has settled fraud claims.
To Velicovich, his company's early success is a testament to the business acumen of its founders. "I have never seen another drone company that in their first year in business has been able to do what we've done," Velicovich said.
When it was less than a year old, Powerus secured a $90 million Air Force contract. A month later, Powerus said it beat defense-tech giant Anduril Industries for a $22 million job defending American oil infrastructure in the Middle East.
In October, Powerus became a public company as Velicovich and his partners, cheering and flanked by their families, rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange. A fund backed by the Trump sons, American Ventures, has cashed out at least $6 million from its investment to date. The fund owns about 3.4% of Powerus, a securities filing shows, and holds warrants that can convert to tens of millions of additional shares.
Dominari Holdings, the financial firm behind American Ventures, helped take Powerus public. The Trump sons each own around 6% of the investment bank, which often merges underperforming publicly traded companies with businesses in buzzy industries.
To ethics experts, Powerus is an example of the blurred lines of government and private business that are without modern comparison. "Never have we seen a president's family benefiting from military contracts," said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.
Representatives for Powerus and the Trump Organization said the president's sons have no involvement in management or operations, and don't play any role in securing business for Powerus. "Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the department's funding decisions," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.
Powerus founders said the Trumps are enthusiastic backers of a manufacturing renaissance. "I'm happy to have them," said Andrew Fox, Powerus's chief executive. A Democratic donor without defense experience, Fox said the Trump backing only helped Powerus get attention.
Velicovich said he was focused on the technology and found the Trump connection to be a distraction. Investors appear skeptical. Powerus stock has declined by half since it began trading. Powerus authorized a new stock offering that gives several investors the chance to offload shares. American Ventures' potential sales are valued around $7 million.
Powerus, as the founders tell it, traces its roots to Ukraine.
Early in 2022 Ukraine events, Velicovich headed to Lviv, in western Ukraine, where he distributed first-aid kits to soldiers along with sushi restaurateur Michael Sinensky and businessman Roman Vintfeld, who were there through a charity. Velicovich earlier served in a U.S. Army intelligence unit, and stayed in Kyiv for two years brokering drone deals to arm Ukraine.
Some countrymen welcomed Velicovich's help, but the drones Velicovich provided frequently failed on the battlefield, Ukrainian soldiers said. Velicovich said the experience inspired him to start Powerus.
Velicovich, for example, helped Cyberlux, a penny-stock LED lighting company that acquired a drone-making business a month after the conflict began, sell systems to Ukraine. Velicovich advised the company and became a shareholder, along with his fellow first-aid kit distributors, Sinensky and Vintfeld.
Cyberlux delivered around 20% of them before the Ukrainians decided they needed a more capable aircraft, and the contract was canceled, said Cyberlux CEO Mark Schmidt. Cyberlux built the remaining drones and later delivered them to the U.S. government under a different agreement.
Powerus's other co-founders, Vintfeld and Sinensky, ran a Covid-era medical supplies company that expanded around 2023 into a new business line selling Chinese drones, returning to Ukraine in at least one instance to make a deal.
Before that, Vintfeld owned child-acting and modeling-talent agencies accused by attorneys general in New Jersey and Florida of defrauding hundreds of parents. The suits claimed Vintfeld's employees approached families and enticed them to pay up to $1,500 for marketing services that amounted to just photo shoots.
The suits settled without Vintfeld admitting wrongdoing. His companies were obligated to pay $22 million in restitution in Florida. For Powerus, he serves as executive vice president of sales and marketing.
Fox has spent three decades running a commercial-cleaning service in New York City, and dabbled in other businesses, including an online directory of nightlife events, and a startup to provide charging stations for electric vehicles, which filed for bankruptcy in 2024.
A Powerus representative said the company benefits from founders with "decades of combined experience" across disparate industries.
The financial woes of a publicly traded Florida golf course company turned out to be an opportunity for Powerus.
In July 2025, the Trump-backed Dominari's American Ventures fund led a $26 million investment into the golf company, sending its share price from penny-stock territory to a high of $8. Investors considered merging it with a cryptocurrency company, a person close to the deal said.
In December, two months after Powerus was incorporated, a contact introduced Fox to Dominari's president, Kyle Wool.
Dominari proposed a golf course-Powerus merger. Powerus at the time had no revenue or products, according to legal and securities filings. Powerus quickly acquired three drone businesses, including a small autonomous boat startup Velicovich had separately founded.
In July, Powerus received its most lucrative deal -- the Defense Department contract worth up to $90 million, for drone interceptors and related technology. By August, the Air Force ordered nearly the entire contract, around $83 million.
Powerus is seeking help from contractors to scale its manufacturing; Velicovich has publicly promised it can build drones in 90 seconds. In some cases, according to people familiar with the matter, Powerus asked contractors to sign nondisparagement agreements.” [1]
A non-disparagement clause is a contractual provision that forbids parties from making negative, derogatory, or critical statements about one another.
Why is there a profound silence within Western power structures—including Trump’s inner circle—regarding a potential war with Russia and China? Why are Trump’s subordinates asking Lithuanian officials to stop provoking the Russians? Because Trump and others who hold power in the West know the truth about the West’s limited capabilities. Lithuanian rulers - Nausėda, Sinkevičius and his party, and the Landsbergis clan fail to grasp this reality. Upon seeing a German tank from the Second World War design, they exclaimed, “What immense power…” Now, they run around asking who we are going to attack, and when. The answer is: we won’t attack anyone, because we can’t. Just look at Iran.
1. U.S. News: Trump-Backed Drone Maker Has Wild Ride --- Ex-soldier turned president's praise on social media into a $300 million startup. Somerville, Heather; Hobson, Will; Uberti, David. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 31 Oct 2026: A7.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą