Jennifer Santos, deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy, said the Department of Defense (DoD) has witnessed a rise in “adversarial capital” in U.S. technology companies, including small drone providers, during the coronavirus pandemic, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.
“In general terms, there has been of an uptick, but it’s always been pretty high,” Santos said Wednesday during the C4ISRNET Conference.
She noted about the dominance of foreign companies in the small unmanned aerial systems sector and said that Chinese companies control 97 percent of the market.
Santos said DoD has seen an increase in the number of shady foreign investments it is monitoring since expanding reviews of such investments in February through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
“We simply cannot afford during this period of economic uncertainty the loss of American know-how in critical tech,” she added.
