The Pentagon has quietly rewritten its procurement logic. For decades, defense budgets rewarded complexity: billion-dollar aircraft that took years to build and decades to maintain. The new doctrine inverts that calculus. Attritable drones — small, cheap, and intentionally expendable — are being embedded into Army and Air Force unit tables of equipment not as supplements to manned platforms but as replacements for certain missions entirely. The critical word is attritable: you don't repair these systems, you reorder them. That transforms a capital purchase into a recurring consumable, and it permanently restructures who captures the defense dollar.
Defense
The Drone Proliferation Trade: Washington's Shift to Attritable Unmanned Systems Creates a Recurring Revenue Stream
As Army and Air Force doctrine ditches expensive manned platforms for cheap drones designed to be expended rather than maintained, AVAV and KTOS are sitting on what amounts to a government-mandated subscription business.
