[jjk166]

> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.

There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.

All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.