Easy construction; you simply need to remove the various parts from the cardboard plate with a knife and then build the drone using glue, tape and some rubber bands.
It's like reading a MacGyver script.
It's like reading a MacGyver script.
Meanwhile in the US:
On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”
Sometimes, worse is better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#:~:t....
Also things like reliability, durability under various extreme conditions, safety for humans involved and so on can escalate times and prices dramatically, but are not massive concerns in existential situation Ukraine currently is in due to russia's war.
US is basically never aiming so low with new tech they want for its military, it wants brilliant solutions above everybody else, and has money to burn on it. And from time to time, when looking back those investments were well worth even with flops included. US global hegemony is not something that US wants to lose due to few hundreds billions not allocated as effectively as possible.
Mentioned here on SE:
<https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/237557/science-fic...>
And of course Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)>.
ISFDB: <https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40897>
It's published in Expedition to Earth (1953): <https://archive.org/details/expeditiontoeart0000arth/page/90...>
Considering the period it's not exactly science fiction.
I've seen variants of Clarke's observation such as extrapolations of combat aircraft costs which lead to a single plane being shared amongst the US Air Force, Navy, and Army, with the Marines having dibs every few weeks, something similar.
The criticism isn't entirely fair, as there is an element to which a superior weapon or capability can utterly overwhelm numerically-superior forces, given an equivalent initiative to fight, and military leadership capability. The defence-offence advantage (that is, a defender virtually always has the advantage) means that yes, a technologically inferior force can wear down a superior invader over time, though shear weight of numbers (though often at immense cost), as with China over Japan in WWII (Japan occupied portions of the country but simply lacked the personnel to control all but a small fraction of it), the Vietnam against the French and Americans in Indochina, and Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans from the 19th through the 21st centuries. But at the same time in an initial assault phase technological supremacy can offer overwhelming advantage, as with the US in both Iraq wars and initially in the Afghan conflict, Nazi Germany against France in WWII (most notably radio-equipped tanks overwhelming the noncommunicative French forces), and presently in Ukraine where more advanced Nato munitions seem to be giving a critical edge over Russian massed forces and dumb munitions, though that's been a relatively closer contest, given that Russian leadership seems to have little concern for its own forces' losses.
But...
>A total of six of the systems were installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1,000,000 per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used. The Navy will remove the AGS from the ships in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System
A complete dead end, a decade spent doing nothing. Meanwhile, China is launching a dozen guided missile destroyers a year.
2) US needs to build weapons for the future not the present. And as such the amount of cutting-edge R&D as a percentage of the total program spend will always be significantly higher than for most other countries.