Cheap commercial drones in swarms make conventional air defense cost-per-kill 1000x too expensive

A swarm of 100 modified DJI drones costs under $50,000 total. Engaging each with a $150K Stinger missile costs $15M; with a $3M Patriot interceptor, $300M. Even purpose-built C-UAS systems like Coyote ($100K/shot) cost $10M to defeat the swarm. The attacker's cost advantage is 200-6000x. No military budget can sustain this exchange ratio in a prolonged conflict. This persists because decades of air defense investment optimized for expensive aircraft threats, and pivoting industrial capacity to produce millions of cheap effectors (directed energy, electronic kill, kinetic micro-interceptors) requires retooling defense production lines that currently produce hundreds of expensive missiles per year, not millions of cheap ones.