When does the drone strategy become no longer cheap? I don’t know but we are headed towards that line.
We are long past drones being cheap, actually they weren’t ever all that cheap. It was always a question of saving the lives of the soldiers and being cheaper than what they are destroying, and destroying logistical lines of the enemy (this one is new). By that metric they essentially cost nothing. One launch of short range fpv is up to a 1000 usd. One launch of middlestrike drone costs like 5-7 thousand usd. Long range ones are multiple times more expensive. That’s not counting supporting infrastructure and training and materials.
It also isn’t counting the fact that all of the people involved with the production and deployment of the flying rocket bombs are learning skills that are only useful for killing or intercepting killers.
This means that every dollar sunk into this process is a hard loss once peacetime comes, the same can not be said for training pilots to intercept drones with helicopters or aircraft as the maintenance crews, factory workers, technicians and pilots all can transfer their skills directly to peacetime in a way that if anything increases how valuable they are vs. wartime.
If you only compare a flying rocket bomb/interceptor to a traditional aircraft or helicopter (which you can make optionally unmanned if you want see the Lakota unmanned helicopter) than it looks WAY cheaper but is it really cheaper once you take into account the context?
The helicopter crew flying around gunning down flying bombs and launching air to air missiles to defeat rocket flying bombs can turn around and do search and rescue, air ambulance or disaster response operations, the flying bombs on the otherhand will always just be flying bombs and nothing more.
Not really? It’s low-high tech if that makes sense, technologywise it’s low-ish tech, but realistically homegrown elecronics and electeomechanical engineering experience and production is very valuable. ESCs for example aren’t all that hard, but there isn’t a lot of places that make them, same with engines, same with FCs, same with batteries (chemistry is very hard but there are at least a few homegrown producers that attempt to make their own lithium batteries). It’s mostly design and assembly, but even limited production gives a lot of benefit. Unless world is ending tomorrow, these skills are valuable and will be thought after and wars aren’t going to end anytime soon. Everyone wants a worldwar after all.