[brindlejim]

To the folks who want to cut Anduril slack, let me just say that these cost 5-6x a Shahed. In war, like in chess, if you manage to trade crappy little pieces for rare big pieces, you win. And if you decide that your strategy is to trade expensive big pieces for crappy little ones, you usually lose. The US has avoided losing by fighting small countries against which it has an overwhelming advantage, which keeps its hot wars short. If it were to fight a long hot war against a near peer (hello, Taiwan Straits), its dumb decisions about bloatware would quickly catch up to it.

Setting aside the budgetary considerations, quality is its own quality, as Stalin never really said. That is, if you can manufacture tens of thousands of payload-bearing model airplanes for less than the price of a Tesla, then you can DDOS any air defense system in the world. Its million-dollar missiles will soon be exhausted, and your radio-controlled offensive will have won.