Imagine the Pentagon purchases 100,000 drones for $1,000 each, and stores them in a warehouse for future combat. It sounds like an exceptional achievement of mass production — exactly the kind of push needed in the wake of conflicts in Ukraine and the Gulf
But what happens when only 30,000 drones are used before the adversary develops a countermeasure that makes the remaining 70,000 drones operationally ineffective? Suddenly, the cost per useful unit is going to be much higher, with the military either forced to throw out the hardware or invest in upgrades. This breaks the long-standing assumption that lower unit cost reliably translates into lower cost per unit of combat value. And it means as the department pushes towards a future heavily leveraged on small drones, we need to be planning for the very real cost of obsolescence.
The Industrial Revolution taught us that we can scale products and services by using four concepts: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, and Certification. If parts could be standardized, they could easily be replaced. This idea expanded to tooling, processes, and even people. Next, specialized tools needed to be created for specific parts. This concept also applied to processes and people. Then, all parts, tools, and processes needed to be synchronized in time to have the maximum effect. Finally, each part, each tool, each process, and each person needed to be certified so we can trust them with the lowest oversight possible.
