"Meanwhile, on the military side, the Pentagon is still buying Boeing Scan Eagles at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop when they can buy a similar capability for only a few thousand dollars at a local hobby shop."

1.Your local hobby shop drone will not be able to fly for 20 hours like a fixed wing Scan Eagle. Bad comparison. 2. Modifying drones to be used for combat is cheap if you don't count the labor cost, and in relative peace time counting the labor costs and overall cost of fielding a system is fair. If you take a $5,000 consumer drone and want it to *reliably* explode on someone, at small volumes that will likely take enough labor time to verify, let alone certify, that it pushes the price up to closer to the price of the new dedicated loitering munitions...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-a-team-of-marines-...

Moreover, as this War on the Rocks podcast shows, all levels of drones are being integrated.

Not to mention logistics. It’s easy to support one of something. Supporting spares, upgrades, obsolescences, etc (plus documentation and training) for hundreds of drones across the globe is another story.

> will likely take enough labor time to verify, let alone certify

All that to say that US desperately needs to copy Ukrainian model. Lots of small manufacturers and an excellent skunk works team for very quick iteration.