A single F-22 Raptor costs about $150 million. If the production costs of cheap, mass-produced drones could be kept under $50,000 each, you could buy THREE THOUSAND drones for the price of one F-22. Keeping it simple, each drone could carry a common, 250 pound bomb. It would also need some shielding to protect its electronics, and some other things, but there would be no practical way to stop such an armada short of a nuclear detonation.
Will the future see a mission of thousands of $50k smart drones, each with its own detailed target list, overseen by a handful of people in a bunker watching computer screens?
What's needed is a vehicle with the smarts of an X-47B but with a less ambitious, and therefore much cheaper, airframe. The cost of smarts continues to fall with every new smartphone and driverless car. However, airplanes remain expensive.
You don't fly the X-47B. You give it a flight plan. It can carry up to 4500 lbs of ordnance and has a range of 2100 nm. An X-47C model is planned to have a 10,000 lb payload.
But it's not cheap. The X-47 program cost stands at $813m. I'm not able to find a unit cost estimate. As an example, the Predator unit cost is around $4m (program cost $2.38b), so I would expect the X-47's to be considerably higher.
The US military-industrial complex is not known for controlling cost and keeping things simple. Who knows how much a Lexus would cost if it were built by Northrop Grumman under contract to the Pentagon? What nation is most likely to innovate disruptively in this field?
As far as which nation, I figure any belligerent power with the technology to mass produce cars can do it. The only trick needed is once you have a design, to keep production secret. Using such an armada in a sneak attack would be devastating, likely defeating their hated enemy in a week.
“The US military-industrial complex is not known for controlling cost and keeping things simple.”
Actually. . .”The US congress is not known for controlling cost and keeping things simple.”
Fixed it.
Defense contractors are under a microscope when it comes to pricing. They even have DCMA reps in the plants and can audit the books anytime they want to.
“Who knows how much a Lexus would cost if it were built by Northrop Grumman under contract to the Pentagon?”
A heck of a lot cheaper than you might think. . provided congress gets out of the way. Congress meddles with acquisition rates and numbers and all heck breaks loose.
It is cost-per-unit that drives this issue, and when you program a cost you include all the R&D and tooling necessary to build the product. Imagine the cost of a Lexus if congress meddled with production quantities and constantly messed with funding for contracted quantities and for long-lead items. (Unstable funding equals risk and risk equals increased cost).
So, the better question to ask is; “Who knows how much a Lexus would cost if it was messed with by congress during its R&D and production phase?”
Acquisition has problems but the problem lies more with congress and budgeting than anywhere else.