Volume has historically determined the outcome of conventional wars more reliably than technological sophistication, a principle the U.S. demonstrated during World War II, when American industry ultimately produced more heavy bombers than the Axis powers combined, with the Willow Run plant in Michigan standing as a famous symbol of that productive capacity.
This is the essence of a war economy: the redirection of a state’s productive capacity toward military output at a scale that overwhelms an adversary through mass rather than qualitative superiority.
The Cold War shifted emphasis toward technological edge, and the post-Cold War decades of counter-insurgency warfare entrenched that shift further. The American military-industrial complex consolidated around a small number of prime contractors, paid largely through cost-plus contracts that reimburse expenses rather than reward speed or savings, producing exquisite, expensive systems poorly suited to a return of mass industrial warfare.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reintroduced the demands of volume, a shift compounded by fears of a Taiwan contingency with China and reflected in sharp defence budget increases in Germany and Japan. The 2026 Iran war made the affordability problem even more concrete.
Iran’s sanctioned economy cannot sustain a genuine war economy, yet Tehran built a largely self-reliant missile and drone capacity on modest inputs, and the resulting arithmetic favoured it: within roughly a month of the war’s outbreak, the U.S. had reportedly expended around half its Patriot interceptor stock, each interceptor costing several million dollars against Iranian drones costing tens of thousands.
The affordability shift
None of this is a story of novel technology. The drones imposing these costs derive from decades-old airframes. What has changed is the cost of the electronics inside them, driven down by global consumer supply chains rather than military innovation.
