Comment by jandrewrogers

Exactly, drones enable quantity and precision. Geran type drones can easily fly 1000nm, and that kind of range needs wide area sensing and patrols to intercept, really expensive at present.

I don't know that a loss right now would be likely, probably a stalemate which would be ruinously expensive for everyone.

Drones favor defenders by making movement costly, there is a considerable advantage to being dug in. Air dominance no longer guarantees being free from low altitude aerial threat. Long range drones require basing further away, which means A2A refuelling, or a massive innovation in drone defence (cheap missiles, autonomous drone interceptors, sensor nets).

Cheap drones are extremely limited in the kinds of targets they can reach and damage while evading air defenses. I understand this domain well.

Upgrading drones so that they have sufficient range and carry a sufficiently capable warhead and have a decent probability of surviving a modern air defense environment has been done many times by many countries. The price always comes in ~$1M/drone. It doesn't matter who builds it. Those economics get expensive fast for a weapon system you can't reuse. Much cheaper drones either have no useful range or are susceptible to even cheaper defenses; in either case they don't do any meaningful damage. That point on the price-performance curve wasn't picked at random by competent weapon designers.

Even the Ukrainian FP-5 is ~$0.5M, and it is significantly less capable than some western weapons with a similar profile.

The US has assumed drone swarm attacks would be a thing for decades and has both tested and fielded many systems purpose-built for those scenarios.