[kragen]

Clearly you need more than one drone to hold a city. But do you need more like one drone per thousand people, one drone per ten people, ten drones per person, or a thousand drones per person? Clearly at some point you cross the threshold.

Drones are cheaper to replace than people.

[ponector]

>> Drones are cheaper to replace than people.

Only for western country.

[kragen]

It's true just about anywhere. Maybe if a militant group was really cut off from global markets it would be an exception.

But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.

More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.