The most surprising thing here is that the US was previously only spending $225 Million on drones when it’s been fully apparent for the past decade(s) that drones were the future of warfare.
Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head.
In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an interception.
Meanwhile they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore or they’ll be sunk with hypersonic missiles.
The economics are crazy but even if you’re willing to pay, the capacity to build enough isn’t there either.
Drones + cheap antidrones + aircraft carriers + stealth aircraft looks like a solid high/low optimum. Anyone pitching an only-high or only-low strategy is leaving chips on the table.
The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
If your opponent has drone dominance, you neutralize that advantage with anti-drone kit and then build your own advantage. Part of that will be drones. But part will be heavier, more sophisticated platforms. (Which will eventually pilot themselves, but aren’t drones since they aren’t cheap.) You can’t win a war only playing defense.
> someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd
Their high technology destroys your industry while you wait. This is strategy as old as the Bronze Age.
If someone has high dominance, they can probably afford to take 20% of that capability and divert the funding to low dominance as well. The reverse will not necessarily be true: if you have low dominance does not mean you have the capability to go high.
> The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.
The US generally does not lose militarily: it has 'lost' because they didn't have a strategic goal, or decided that their goal was no longer important.
The US could have stuck with South Vietnam just like it stuck with South Korea (to this day, in 2026), but decided to stop. There's no reason why they couldn't kept with it, and we have a North/South Vietnam like we have a North/South Korea.
That is the present situation with Iran: the US has/is trounced Iran military, but the problem is that the Administration cannot answer the question "What is the purpose of this war?". Hegseth is dunking on "elite" colleges and wanting a "warrior army", but one thing colleges do is things like teach von Clausewitz. You know, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."
The US managed to stick with Iraq a little longer, through the insurgency and then against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and now Iraq has elections:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...
There was enough of a civil culture in Iraq that wanted a system of government to keep it going. There seems to not have been enough a civic culture in Afghanistan to sustain a similar government and to fight against the Taliban. Militarily the US was doing just fine against the Taliban.
Just as in any group, there are certain positions that are more prestigious/desired than other positions. Typically the prestige increased the more people that they supervised or valuable pieces of equipment (expensive tanks / fighter jets) in their group.
Then there are other positions with lower prestige / desirability - think support/logistics (unless your org's main revenue stream is support/logistics).
This has little correlation to the effectiveness/impact of the group.
Those who worked well with the current strategies / standard operating procedures, can't see/don't want to see how new technology can be used to operate more effectively.
Imagine how army officers treated those who wanted to use airplanes in the period from World War I to World War II.
drones are commodity manufacturing
Ehhh, tanks are the cavalry of the tank era. Cavalry did not go away, it changed from its namesake horses to armoured battle vehicles but its task remains more or less the same. Drones and 'cheap-ish' ballistic missiles can make life harder for the mentioned expensive high-tech weaponry until cost-effective counter-measures are widely available. For drones that'll probably end up being directed energy weapons - lasers and the likes - while ballistic weaponry can (for now) be countered by moving out of their (ballistic) path. Eventually aircraft carriers will probably be replaced by multiple drone carriers, that may happen sooner or later depending on how the current fleets end up performing in coming conflicts.
I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA.
We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
For Afghanistan it seems like high-flying, capable, armed drones were a better option for that type of conflict.
Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]
The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.
Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.
Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.
>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
The picture below is from 1995. [1]
By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.
[0] https://www.twz.com/6866/60-minutes-does-an-infomercial-on-d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator#...
just not DJI suicide drones, and not on the squad level
in 2006 those would have been great but the tech wasn't there the way it is in 2026.
but in 2016 the US had eyes on everything. the difference is that the US had an occupation -- hearts & minds -- and couldn't just JDAM everything that moves, which is the SOP in Ukraine
... and it only cost $225M.
(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...)