Phillips Payson O’Brien: If We Don’t Understand This Cost Benefit Calculation of Using Drones We Will Be in Trouble

O’BRIEN: “Well, it’s actually been going on for a few years now, it’s just that large militaries like the U.S. Military and European militaries haven’t wanted to fully adjust to the new world we’ve been seeing. But the drone, or we might say that the cheaper, smaller defensive weapon has been far more effective in this war than the larger legacy, large system like a tank. And that’s become increasingly so. I mean, the Russians have lost 4,000 tanks, that’s more tanks than all of the rest of Europe has together. And most of them have been lost to these small systems like drones. So that’s just the reality of where we are. And as you said in your piece, it’s an enormous cost differential. All the drones, the Russians — the Ukrainians used against the Russians in Operation Spiderweb together would have cost less than a million dollars. They destroyed billions of dollars, billions of dollars of Russian equipment. If we don’t understand this cost benefit calculation, we in the United States and in Europe are going to be in big trouble.”