While asymmetric innovators like Ukraine pioneer drone tactics to achieve high casualty ratios, adversaries exploit the second-mover advantage to copy and scale those technologies via industrial manufacturing. Slingshot innovations temporarily disrupt stronger foes, but industrial scale rapidly neutralizes that initial asymmetric edge.
American military doctrine combines extreme aversion to troop casualties with contractor capture, yielding exorbitantly expensive platforms that commanders cannot afford to risk in combat. Deploying multimillion-dollar assets with human crews becomes prohibitive when facing adversaries who readily sacrifice cheap, disposable drones and personnel.
Replacing eighty-million-dollar fighter jets with thirty-thousand-dollar drones and abandoning cost-plus defense contracting can dramatically lower the Pentagon's budget while preserving national defense capabilities. By embracing asymmetric procurement and a commercial product mindset, governments can simultaneously modernize armed forces and repair national balance sheets.
Historical empires typically collapse from financial insolvency rather than battlefield defeats. Under Ferguson's Law, when a superpower spends more servicing its national debt than funding defense, the compounding interest burden absorbs scarce resources and leaves the nation increasingly vulnerable to military challenges.