In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.
In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.