And because a decapitation strike worked in Venezuela, so they naively believed they could use a similar tactic against a much more resilient adversary.

Sadly, the war colleges in the US have all been aware that this kind of shift was coming, too. There are many examples from history of an incumbent superpower being dethroned because it failed to modernize and was overtaken by others with better technology (eg the Ottoman Empire).

Our current US administration is woefully incompetent.

This is not entirely true. There are plenty of people of that opinion but there were plenty of people that thought that the US would be able to achieve air supremacy, and then destroy the missile cities, which would eventually mean Iran would lose its ability to close the strait and attack US bases and the Gulf states in a matter of weeks and months. Those people were wrong, and the US failed to achieve these tactical goals against a conventional military power, which is not something many US strategists were used to.

Of course plenty of people expected it would happen the way it did, but it was not unanimous at all. I have no doubt many in the general staff were rudely surprised.

What was the opinion of the janitor in February 2022?

This is not clear at all. The MMA program, which is the MQ9 replacement, is mostly the same mission set, but has a slightly lower per unit price tag and lower capability - there is a good chance that the MQ9B ends up being the MQ9 replacement.

Also, the US military is still procuring broadly similar drones, and will be for a while.

The lack of survivability is not the fault of the drone design. The design set it has is to have high unrefueled endurance, a medium payload capacity, and a reasonably low cost. The nature of technology means that to do so it is going to be relatively slow and have a large wingspan.

Additionally, they were lost in missions which require loitering in predictable patterns near known targets, in which they were shot down mostly by optically guided missiles. There is no indication that there is an alternative design that would be more survivable. The only hope is that there would be one that is significantly cheaper, but that is not obviously true.

So all in all, these are valuable losses. When they are replaced, they are very likely to be replaced by a substantially similar design at a significant fraction of the cost of acquisition.

I'm really no fan of the US MIC, but the MALE/HALE drones are actually a decent design. While they are more expensive than they should be, they are and have to be pretty big aircraft with sophisticated sensors, and so a decent chunk of the cost really is justified. Chinese/Russian/Iranian equivalents are broadly similar in design and cost 25-50% as much, which is about what you'd expect.

All in all, the attrition is not necessarily unexpected but it is a real problem, will have real and expensive consequences, and ultimately reflects a tactical failure in how this war was prosecuted which is a material factor in the current bad outcome. Many people really did think they would be able to survive enough to loiter around the missile cities as a backup in case they failed to be drstroyed, and that turned out to be wrong.

At least it will work as a wake up call (for both US and US enemies).

> It's amazing how incompetent the U.S. has become.

Amazing and yet not at all surprising... entirely predictable given what lead up to it.

If someone wrote a story 10+ years ago about how a draft-dodging nepo baby reality TV actor who had never successfully ran any organization himself that wasn't a complete grift improbably became a world leader and he hired another TV personality with no leadership experience to run the US military based entirely off of loyalty and the fact that he physically looks the part of someone who might play the role of SecDef in a Tom Clancy movie adaptation, you wouldn't accept the plot if the outcome wasn't a complete trainwreck.