However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.
The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.
The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.
If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.
I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.
At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.
Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.
That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.
The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.
A defender who feels an existential threat can outpace an attacker that is fighting a war far away from home without any strong stakes.
In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.