In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.
Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth.
They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
As is 10 percent of annual GDP.
The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers, or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many have to have their positions go empty or be filled by someone new without adequate experience?
Use, or expend?
Interesting, do you have more information on state of the art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once, ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight controllers are configured for out of the box.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukrai...
They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems.
Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.
Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing.
On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
I could see a sci-fi future where we visit some planet somewhere and when we land there are no living beings anywhere. Just killer robot factories pumping out more killer robots fighting an endless war with each other fully autonomously.
That's another AGI super intelligence end state. You get two AGI super intelligences fighting a war against each other and they fight until the entire planet is turned into killer drones and explosives. A plausible form of paper clip maximizer.
It's $80,000 for a switch blade drone, which can loiter for 40 minutes.
Buying a consumer fixed wing drone with similar flight time costs <$1000.
They are big chunks of metal that needs to be identically machined to tight tolerances and filled with explosives and a fuse.
$3k is pretty cheap for custom work.
Then you need to transport and store them.
You can buy drones off the shelf made with cheap components.
[x] this item is a gift
[ ] gift wrap this itemAnd the answer is yes, China makes their artillery shells cheaper. American labor is very expensive and American military manufacturers tend towards low volume nowadays, because they don't trust the government to commit to 1 million shells a year for two decades, because every time there's a changing of the guard in the whitehouse, plans get gutted seemingly as a "Fuck you" to anyone who worked with the previous admin.
That being said, I'd like to see a citation for the $3k figure being thrown around. The number I've seen is more like $800
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artill...
The tooling for an artillery shell is used only for artillery shells. Not many consumers looking to buy 152mm shell casings and high explosives.
In the industrial age, volume production is the usual solution to keeping costs low. Artillery shells would be a lot cheaper if we built as many of them as we did in WW2.
(As a side note, this is one reason why housing was so cheap in the post-WW2 1950-1970 era. There was a whole lot of surplus construction equipment leftover from WW2, so you could acquire the tooling needed to build a subdivision really cheaply. Once the surplus aged out and there was no economic reason to build a huge number of new diggers and bulldozers, construction got a lot more expensive.)