drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. the biggest reason is the need to deal with adversarial input. dealing with GPS spoofing, properly encrypted and jamming resistant spoofing, not leaking the location of the operator, etc all are really complicated requirements that need expensive mitigation (and worse, prevent you from using commercial components)

> drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more.

After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep.

Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep.

And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".

Note that FPV drones in Ukraine are not squad-level, there are separate drone units (at the very least 2 operators, at least 1 explosives guy because arming drones with makeshift explosives is not trivial and super risky, plus cover). Plus they are supplied literally on the back of a minivan in cardboard boxes because they only need to survive one way trip over a couple hundred km, the US needs to supply their units half a globe away.

US army drones are squad-level, have proper safing/arming, transportable, and shelf-stable. It's not scope creep, it's a very different doctrine and circumstances.

I don't think I wrote FPV, one way attack or kamikaze drone although I can understand why you interpreted it that way that I wrote home built (this was a mistake on my side, I was thinking about the commercial drones they use) and expendable (this doesn't mean attack drones, only that it is cheap enough that one doesn't hesitate too long to use it and don't try to recover it).

These surveillance drones can absolutely be used at the squad level.

A million dollar rocket is expensive, but it hits exactly where you want it and so you need far less of them. Artillery is a lot cheaper but also much harder to get exactly where you want it and so you end up using far more of it.

Note that Russia and the US have both guided misstles and artillery. Both have value in different situations. They both have their reasons for their preference, but that is more about how they expect a war they are involved in to look than about thinking one is better.

Except the effectiveness of precision fires is now closer to 50% in a GPS denied environment. Now it's both expensive and inprecise.

Every hear the term "arms race". This is a constant in history. There precision weapons that don't use GPS. There are various ways to evade GPS denial (I don't know how effective they are). We will constantly be in a race of out doing each other.

There are alternatives to GPS but they are expensive. While the arms race is normal the issue is the penny hasn't dropped yet and no one wants to admit their weapons are now obsolete.

Ah, I was actually thinking about how iron dome vs Hamas rockets. Iron dome was super effective, yet a million a pop to shoot down a rocket that costs a few thousand dollars at most may quickly bankrupt a country. That said, maybe it's just one aspect of the war while in grand scheme of things highly effective guided missiles will win the war.

Not shooting them down would be more costly though.

while i agree about the importance of precision, a 3-d printed drone from a ukrainian basement workshop also hits exactly where you want it, to the point that the problem is finding out what you want