Drones are the new aircraft carriers. That is, pre-WWII, the dominant naval ship was the battleship. Heavily armored, with enormous guns, military planners expected that the battle for the Atlantic and Pacific would be carried out by these monsters slugging it out. Though there were hints that planes could be quite effective against ships, few admirals realized that the longer range of an aircraft carrier would make the battleships effectively obsolete in ship-ship battles. And after all, they'd spent a ton of money producing those battleships, and developing doctrine. Would you really want to throw that all away on some newfangled novelty?

After Pearl Harbor, it became clear that the answer should have been Yes.

Drones offer overwhelming advantages -- they're cheap and disposable. A drone generally costs less than the US missile used to shoot it down. You can lose 100 of them, and there will be no lives lost on your side.

During WWII, by 1943 the European theater was essentially decided, except for a lot of killing. The US was producing tanks and planes so quickly that it was simply mathematically impossible for the Germans to counter them. Will the same thing happen when China decides to throw its manufacturing capacity into war drones?