A ruling issued by a US court against the Chinese drone manufacturer confirms the strategic need to also use regulations and processes to achieve technological decoupling between the United States and China by Andrea Monti – Originally published in Italian on Formiche.net
The attack on DJI
On 26 September 2025, the US District Court for the District of Columbia confirmed the correctness of the Department of War’s decision to classify Sz Dji Technology Co. (“Dji”) as a “Chinese military company” (CMC) under section 1260H of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021.
DJI had been placed on this blacklist because the Pentagon believed that DJI could be classified as a CMC due to generic “support” from the Chinese government.
The Chinese company contested the Pentagon’s interpretation on several grounds, including the lack of evidence of its significant involvement in the Chinese military sector, the adoption of commercial choices aimed at avoiding the supply of products to countries involved in conflicts, and the absence of investors linked to the Beijing government.
The judge ruled out that DJI was under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, linked to the Ministry of Industry or part of the Military-Civilian Fusion (the doctrine according to which there is continuous osmosis between the civilian and military sectors in terms of research and products, making it difficult to establish where one ends and the other begins). However, he gave greater weight to the US Defence Department’s statements that the company had received support from the Beijing government and that its products fell into the dual-use category. Therefore, considering the drone manufacturer’s arguments insufficiently robust, the judge decided to uphold the decision to include DJI on the Pentagon’s “blacklist”, thus precluding access to supplies for the military sector.
The legal issues surrounding the decision
This decision has important geopolitical significance, but to understand it, it is first necessary to analyse its contents in strictly legal terms.
The weakening of the standards of proof
The first critical aspect of the decision concerns the evidentiary value that the judge attributed to the assessments of the Department of War. For some, the judge considered that there was no need for further cross-examination, while others — although partially omitted — were considered admissible because of their institutional origin. In other words, the decision was made on the basis of incomplete evidence, unilaterally provided by one of the two parties and (at least partially) without verification in court.
The alteration of the principle of equality
As is often the case in legal proceedings involving national security, the standards for assessing the conduct of the parties involved change substantially, particularly with regard to the principle of equality — just think, for example, of the impact of invoking state secrecy. Although this is understandable, we must not, on the other hand, hide from the danger that national security will become a sort of magic spell to cast a veil of secrecy over any decision made by the executive, removing it from the control of the judiciary, or to restrict the right of defence if the dispute ends up before a judge.
The prevalence of the precautionary principle
Similar conclusions can be drawn from another critical element that emerges from the decision: the centrality of the precautionary principle.
Given the preventive nature of the concept of national security, certain actions can, and sometimes must, be taken before a negative event occurs — from an attack to the exfiltration of information. It is therefore not surprising that, even in the absence of decisive evidence, the Pentagon chose not to take any risks.
This approach may work in an operational context, but when discussed in a courtroom, it should be used with extreme caution because it breaks a fundamental component of any trial: the decision must be made on the basis of verifiable facts.
Beyond the courts: technological decoupling in action
With this in mind, it is now possible to assess the extra-legal context in which the outcome of the trial matured and what the consequences are.
The decision on the Dji case is part of a contradictory scenario in which, on the one hand, the United States is pursuing a strategy of weakening China’s presence in the domestic high-tech market, regardless of the direct military involvement of the companies in question; while on the other hand — as highlighted by the executive order on the TikTok case — it is not (yet) able to impose total control over Chinese Big Tech.
An isolated case or a deliberate strategy?
In more general terms, the decision to apply regulatory standards flexibly and not to question the Defence’s claims even when the evidence is incomplete or not provided because it is classified suggests that this is not a unique case or one reserved for Chinese companies.
Once the precedent has been set, in fact, nothing would prevent the same approach from being applied to other situations that do not involve Chinese parties, or that involve entities that have some link in their supply chain that, in one way or another, is connected to Beijing.
If this were the case, not only Chinese companies, but also Western companies or those not under Beijing’s control would have to verify whether the broad interpretation cleared by the DJI case also puts them at risk of being included in the Pentagon’s blacklist.
However theoretical this risk may seem, it cannot be ruled out that this was one of the objectives that the US administration intended to pursue. In fact, faced with the risk of being classified as potential components of the Chinese MCF, more than one company or service organisation could spontaneously decide to sever ties with Beijing, thereby further weakening the Eastern grip.
The definitive consecration of lawfare as a geopolitical tool
From another perspective, while the DJI case constitutes another step towards technological decoupling from China, it also clearly shows how national security, when invoked in court, becomes a factor capable of redrawing the very boundaries of law and demonstrates the increasing prevalence of rule by law over rule of law, even in Western legal systems.
The price to be paid to satisfy the tactical need to fill regulatory gaps or to deal with situations created by hostile actors with the aim of exploiting them places the judiciary in the uncomfortable position of having to play a substitute role while awaiting legislative intervention, thus affecting the separation of powers.
The supply chain as a battlefield
A final aspect that deserves to be highlighted is the growing role of the supply chain as a strategic objective. The technology supply chain is no longer neutral, but its reconstruction along other lines is difficult to achieve in the short term, especially considering the lack of sufficient raw materials and production capacity in the Western bloc and its fragmentation.
The increased geopolitical importance of low-tech
Although analyses often tend to focus on the geopolitical impacts of high technology —ultra-thin chips, supercomputing architectures, new materials— low-tech, or “common” technology, has begun to claim its own space.
The Chinese doctrine based on MCF, in fact, goes beyond the concept of dual-use technologies and adopts an approach based on the bidirectional continuity of the exchange of research and applications, as well as products, between the military and civilian sectors, particularly consumer technologies. A side effect of the MFC is the difficulty of identifying with certainty whether a company belongs to the Chinese military sector, thus allowing it to operate even in areas of national security without being immediately recognised as a potentially critical entity.
Ultimately, therefore, the DJI case is yet another proof that national security is now the real currency of global competition, not only in high technology but also in cross-cutting applications, such as drones for civilian use and beyond, which for this very reason can pose a threat that is difficult to control unless timely action is taken, even at the cost of weakening the legal cornerstones of the system.
In the long term, however, this could create problems no less serious than those that are intended to be managed in the immediate term because, in addition to the substantial effects on the system of rights, it would weaken a key argument in the public narrative in support of Western values: respect for the rule of law.