They're not dropping them, they're flying them directly into armored vehicles now. That removes a lot of the environmental difficulties, and if the drones are cheap enough, makes a lot more sense. Still a consumer drone with an RPG warhead, just without the dropping.
The consumer stuff in a lot of areas is just plain better than the military equivalent. Communications, especially. Not in this case, obviously, but there is no distributed EW environment as bad as you'll find naturally in a stadium with 100,000 people, all of whom expect cell coverage.
Okay, different example, Iran's Shahad 136 is made entirely with consumer electronics. Cheap consumer electronics. If you look at the teardowns of the Lancet loitering munitions on the Russian side, I personally know the people who designed some of the electronics that they employ (chinese knockoffs of, anyway.) None of those systems cost $100,000.
Fortunately for Ukraine, Russia is a failed state kleptocracy and Iran is not much better, and they're both heavily sanctioned. They can't make a million units of a thousand dollar system. They couldn't make a million units of a free system.
But China absolutely, positively can. If you launch 100 Shahad-class "really cheap cruise missiles", that's easy for air defense to take down. A thousand, probably not. Ten thousand, definitely not. A million would be an unmitigated slaughter.
The electronics in such a thing is MUCH simpler than in a cell phone. 1.46 billion cell phones were shipped in 2022. Billion with a B. We know where the vast majority of them were made.
All you have to do is look at the satellite imagery anywhere near the Ukranian front to see what the probability of hitting anything with artillery is, at least as fired by Ivan. It looks like the surface of the moon, with a notable lack of burned out vehicles over most of it. Artillery is area denial. It can't counter loitering munitions that outrange it.
If you have the technology to have 100,000 cell phones working in a stadium, you have the technology to have a 100,000-unit drone swarm go anywhere you like, and mesh network back to 100,000 individual operators. The military, at least our military, hasn't really been too concerned about doing things at that kind of scale in quite some time. In electronics we call a 100,000 unit order "Thursday."
I'm not saying don't make more artillery shells. It's cheap, it doesn't hurt anything to do it. It probably helps us fight proxy wars. But whether or not we make lots of artillery shells or few artillery shells will make exactly no difference in any of the wars we might HAVE (rather than choose) to fight in our lifetimes.
... but ok, "those aren't gravity dropped" so what system are you talking about?
