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.
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