“Whatever you are shooting the ability of an adversary it should be less expensive than what you are shooting down. That is what U.S.-based LANDEURO defence conference held in Germany said General Chris Donahue. The line is movable, since it can be measured. It also brings an ugly reality to the procurement systems that were developed based on the exquisite platforms: the cheapest flying objects now define the most costly decisions.
Ukraine has made a cruel guinea of this new arithmetic. The capability has been sped up by a hobbyist supply chain, accelerated software cycles and parts of civilian standards, even compared to usual acquisition cycles. It is not only the air-based drones that have a story of engineering, but also networks, navigation, electronic warfare, and the factory logic that drives thousands of attritable systems.To the readers of Modern Engineering Marvels the machinery of the adaptation is the focal point: the clash of low-cost autonomy that seeks to counterbalance the high-cost interceptors, the raising of the limit of what the airpower of the present century can maintain, not by any one particular breakthrough.
1. Attritable drones designed using FPV were not a budget choice, but rather a design choice
A drone with an FPV, with the price of about €500, has become a performance feature. The production rate of Ukraine has been reported to be over 4 million drones annually including over 2 million FPV drones with the production increasing to about 200,000 units in a month compared to approximately 20,000 last year. Quantity is not necessarily the operational point but the capability to view losses as the order of the day and make improvements on the fleet.
It is also disruptive on the manufacturing model. Decentralised workspaces build, repair and modify airframes near the end-user before distributing fixes via internet speeds. Ensuring the deployment of thermal cameras, make-it-yourself payload mounts, and antenna swaps spread via informal channels, and iteration cycles can be reduced to weeks. Engineeringly, the drone is a modular consumable, more of a circuit board than an aircraft whereas the tactical advantage is the speed of the update, not the airframe range.
2. Commercial satellite internet was turned into a subsystem of battle, privately choked
The extent of drone warfare expands as the communication expands with it. The work of Starlink can be explained by the fact that it is connectivity, but the hidden message is architectural: a commercial constellation of proliferation can supply the bandwidth effectively in regions where military satellites with custom designs fail to deliver the density of the coverage. The primary article quotes a count of 6,000 satellites as a network and a terminal charge of approximately 100 Euros per month, positioning space services as an operating cost and not a capital programme.
There are engineering and governance implications to that bargain. Starlink terminals have been repeatedly jamming, and a U. S. defence official called the frequency of counter-jamming software releases an eyewatering pace. However, the very dependency reveals a new form of vulnerability: not only physics can restrict service, but policy and business choices can do so, too. Contemporary airpower, that is, is more and more reliant on contracting, firmware, and access control than on airframes.
3. The subject of electronic warfare compelled a scramble toward autonomy, tethers and degraded-mode navigation
With the introduction of jammers, navigation ceased to be a service and turned into a survival feature. The response most often noted has been to eliminate dependency on controversial connections – the transition towards constant remote piloting to the last moments of flight to autonomy. It is mentioned in reference literature that autonomous terminal guidance and other counter-interference techniques are deployed with drones, which reflects a change in the direction that onboard compute is no longer voluntary but a necessity.
An even more literal answer has been found: fibre-optic tethers which transmit control and video without radio emissions. The strategy appears backward-wire in lieu of wireless but it fits the atmosphere. In saturated spectrum and commonplace spoofing, a physical connection is the only way to bring predictability at the expense of weight, complexity, and distance. The pattern of engineering is similar across the board: once the air is dirty, then the system that is gracefully degrading will win, even though it may not be as fine on paper.
4. In Europe, becoming an alternative to the acquisition of more manned fighters is becoming the drone of the wingman
On the high end, autonomy is being bundled to purchase mass without purchasing pilots. Germany Helsing has proposed a full-size model of its CA-1 Europa and estimated it as first flying in 2027 and available within four years. The pitch of the company is within a larger Western trend of collaborative combat aircrafts uncrewed platforms that are supposed to fly with crewed jets, jam, scan, or serve as decoys.
The most important economic argument in the main article is that such a drone will likely cost a fraction of a modern fighter, and this puts an upper limit on the extent to which survivability must be expensive. Even when the platform is advanced, it is still meant to be less durable than a jet whose downfall has both strategic and political implications. The industrial implication is that the aerospace production industry will be divided into two rates: long-cycle staffed planes and fast-cycle uncrewed adjuncts, where the latter are more reminiscent of munitions production than conventional aviation.
5. Accuracy bombs and drones are uniting around the same limit: arsenals
The supply logic of glamour is so easily concealed. A precision-guided munition is supposed to eliminate a point target and keep the collateral damage as low as possible, and it achieves the same goal by incorporating guidance elements, such as GPS receivers, inertial units, seekers, into the weapon. In the U.S. portfolio, systems include Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits and longer range missiles, which are traded off in terms of unit cost per shot against reduced shots per target.
The issue with drones in the drone-saturated environment of Ukraine is not the effectiveness of precision, but the ability to produce and maintain it on a timely basis. Drones are cheaply made, batteries, motors, cameras, and radios, smart munitions are made cheaply, guidance electronics and energetics. They both take time in production lines. Once the inventories are reduced in a short time, procurement systems find that a design choice of peacetime efficiency with a war time bill attached.
6. The cost-exchange ratio is now a systems-engineering problem, not just a weapons choice
Air defence looks different when the target costs tens of thousands and the interceptor costs millions. Reuters Breakingviews captured the imbalance starkly: a Shahed-type drone can cost about $35,000 to build, while an AIM-9X missile used to down intruding drones has been cited at just over $1 million per round. Even without discussing outcomes, that spread forces redesign: cheaper interceptors, better sensors, more automation, and clearer rules for what gets shot and what gets spoofed.
Engineering solutions rapidly become architecture decisions. Acoustic detection units, low-cost radars, electro-optical sensors, jammers, and short-range interceptors must be integrated into a layered mesh, then maintained as a living system. The “wall” metaphor obscures the reality: the cheapest workable defence is usually a network, not a line.
7. Industrial capacity is the hidden determinant of “modern” military power
Ukraine’s drone sector has been described as generating 100 billion hryvnia in revenue in 2024 and employing 10,000 people, with 13.8 billion hryvnia in net profits. That is not merely wartime improvisation; it is an industrial policy outcome shaped by urgency. It also clarifies why factories themselves become strategic assetsand why dispersed, workshop-style production is attractive when concentrated plants are vulnerable. The same industrial lesson appears in conventional ammunition. U.S. efforts to reach 100,000 155mm rounds per month slipped to mid-2026, with output described at 40,000 per month during 2024–2025, constrained by equipment lead times and supply-chain single points of failure.
In Europe, the EU’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) has targeted a capacity of 2 million shells per year by end-2025, underscoring that the decisive variable is not a single platform but the ability to refill magazines reliably. The drone era does not abolish expensive platforms; it changes what they must be worth. When a €500 aircraft can destroy a vehicle that costs orders of magnitude more, “capability” becomes inseparable from throughput, update cadence, and the resilience of the networks that connect sensors to shooters. The durable shift is economic and industrial. Airpower now depends on producing enough cheap thing sand upgrading them fast enough that the opponent is pushed into wasting expensive things in response.
