>This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.

Single use drones could exist without subsidizing by the consumer industry. Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands. Anything else would simply lead to overdesign and basically the same problem we have now where the enemy is simply lobbing cheap artillery in volume while we simply do not have smart missiles to spare for Ukraine, nor for ourselves if we got into such a war. Lmao.

The American MIC is largely...maliciously incompetent. I work in this sector. Overdesigning, so you can slap a 500% profit margin on something with more features than ever needed. Then you lobby the generals in charge of project funding with dinners, gifts and more.