Strategic reserve of drone pilots and industry
A practical method to ensure drone industry and pilot capacity for national defense.
This post is about what small countries can do to have a sufficiently trained drone pilot force and sufficient drone manufacturers and maintenance to convert from peacetime to wartime use.
Drone pilots are actually hard to train and 50% of the people fail the course.
Drones are quite fiddly and you need very rapid reaction times and also the controls are not that easy.
The Ukrainian army starts people off training in a simulator and then progresses to real-world flight indoors and then outdoors.
In my mind the easiest way to create trained drone pilots is by mass-adoption of drones in an important industry.
This will create a domestic drone maintenance industry servicing this industry and it would maintain a trained pilot force that operates drones for a living.
There are two industries that make sense to me to convert and two civil services
rural postal delivery
beach horeca
life guards
police
It’s possible those industries are profitable on their own but certainly initially they will need some state support.
Postal delivery in rural areas
Currently the postman has to drive up to every house and drops the mail in the mailbox and those mailboxes are free standing typically.
It would not be a stretch to modify mail delivery to be done by drones, including packages such as UPS and others. In fact, as drones are more flexible they could also pickup packages more easily.
There are an estimated 10,000 mail delivery drivers in Belgium but ofcourse not all could be replaced.
Beach horeca.
Beach bars are great but they are actually annoying if you are on the beach. It would be much nicer to have your drink delivered somewhere on the beach itself.
The advantage of converting this is that beach horeca employs a lot of students for seasonal work so you will train younger people on more transient skills.
There’s no clear numbers on how many flexijobs work at the Belgian beach in the summer but I would put it at least at 2000.
One should also consider training the life guards on drones for search and rescue.
Rapid response policing.
Police forces could be trained on drone surveillance and rapidly arriving at the scene and potentially following criminals.
There are about 40000 police officers in Belgium but ofcourse not all would be patrolling the streets in a normal context.
Baseline talent can be trained in university
Not everybody is a drone pilot, you also need technical experts on how to modify and maintain drones. This can be easily added as a 3-point credit to all universities in Belgium, which I believe will be quite popular with students.