What makes an artillery shell so expensive compared to a drone?
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.)
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...