Warum das Pentagon Tausende leicht austauschbarer, KI-gestützter Drohnen bauen will – Die Drohnen-Innovationen der Ukraine haben die Art und Weise verändert, wie die USA einen Krieg mit China planen.

From the article

>Not surprisingly, the Pentagon is looking to learn lessons from these battlefields, particularly as it eyes a potential future conflict with China. But while technological advances from the longbow to the atom bomb have changed the nature of warfare — just as war has driven technological innovation — what distinguishes the new age of drone warfare from previous military innovations is how it will play out. With drones, the military with the advantage isn’t necessarily the one with the most advanced or most powerful weapons, but the one that has these new weapons en masse and can quickly build and replace them.
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>The Iranian-made Shahed drones that Russia has been raining down on Ukrainian cities and that recently killed three US troops in an Iran-backed militia attack in Jordan can cost as little as $20,000 each — or about one four-thousandth the cost of a single F-35 joint strike fighter. Ukrainian forces have even been adapting $400 commercial racing drones to strike Russian forces.
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>These drones aren’t anywhere near as accurate or powerful as manned aircraft or high-end military drones like the US’s Reaper, which costs about $32 million — but they don’t need to be. If one is lost, it’s just not that big a deal. The result is that drones can be a kind of leveler for materially disadvantaged forces, whether they be the Houthi rebels disrupting the global trading system or Ukraine’s beleaguered defenders coping with shortfalls in artillery supplies.
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>All of that is bad news for the US military, which has long relied on sheer technological superiority. In response, the Pentagon is taking an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, launching an ambitious plan called Replicator to build thousands of cheap, replaceable — or “attritable,” in the Pentagon’s lexicon — drones, all in anticipation of a potential superpower conflict with China.

The military industrial complex will still manage to bill $40000 for each $400 drone.