Would those costs still be obscene if you were in a conflict where you’d want to use a significant number of them? Right now they’re expensive because they’re essentially just sitting around.
In other terms, Protoss-type technology works well when you have a large advantage and need to deal a decisive blow; an example would be B-2s bombing the Iran nuclear facilities. But when you're in a protracted conflict against a capable adversary, Zerg-type technology, cheap, flimsy, and truly massively produced, seems to be indispensable.
Ukraine plans to buy 4.5 drones in 2025. They’re definitely going with volume over software features. Further they’re allowing frontline drone regiments to earn “points” based on kills and using the points to buy their own drones instead of allocating them top down. The regiments appear to be favouring the cheap drones over expensive ones like the Helsing HF-1.
What’s interesting is that European governments are probably going to end up buying tens of thousands of the expensive drones because the laundry list of features, rather than investing in true mass production like the Ukrainians have. Going the Protoss way, rather than Zerg.
Is that 0.5 drone for spare parts?
The war in 2022 was primarily an artillery war. Drones were in use, but the dominance you describe came later.
1. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/304947...
Why do you think that’s the reason for these high prices rather than, say, lack of competition?
If the U.S. still had it's own (gov't-owned, gov't-operated) production facilities - as, historically, every A List nation has had - to provide honest competition? Hell, no.
History: The not-even-yet-the-U.S.A. set up the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Armory in 1777, to manufacture military ammumition. And the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Yard in 1799.
The small-arms ammo was just their MVP for 1777. By the late 1950's, the government was building stuff like this in it's own (gov't-owned, gov't-operated) shipyard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Hawk-class_aircraft_carr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Navy_Yard
I'm thinking that a Tomahawk has rather fewer parts, from fewer subcontractors, than a >60,000-ton aircraft carrier. And doesn't take multiple years of continuous work to build, either.
Axiom: While, in the past, gov't organizations were quite capable of performing the largest, most complex, and most critical technological tasks that society faced, things are somehow Different Now - and only non-gov't organizations (very preferably for-profit corporations) are now capable of such things.
But what is actually Different Now is this: Our ruling classes de facto decided to reduce the gov't's core competency in a part of national security - because outsourcing those capabilities to for-profit org's was far more lucrative for them, and the nation seemed secure enough that they didn't much care about the downsides.
Humans are very responsive to their social environments, and its structure and unwritten rules. Setting the "Non-corporate" bit on the org that a human works for does not magically reduce what they are capable of. Linus Torvalds actually is the creator and BDFL of Linux. Even though he is an individual human - not a corporation, nor a secret front for one. The mathematicians who completed the classification of finite simple groups ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl... ) over decades and centuries completed that massive task while generally working individually or in small groups, for wide array of colleges and universities.