In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles.
This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions.
Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy.
"When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” https://t.co/hUVfR4sw66 pic.twitter.com/OW3w9kuGhM
— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) December 3, 2025
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