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US Army Hopes To Outfit Soldiers With Tiny Drones By 2018 (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The U.S. Army has requested industry information on the feasibility of making tiny drones that would help infantry gather intelligence on a small scale, such as peeping over a hill or around a building. its dream recon machine would weigh no more than a third of a pound, launch within one minute and fly for at least 15 minutes. Ideally, the drones would be in service as soon as 2018. "[A nano-drone] will send real-time video back to the operator to give them real-time situational awareness of what's in the immediate vicinity," says Phil Cheatham, the deputy branch chief for electronics at the Army's Maneuvers Center for Excellence (MCOE). Cheatham says he and his team want something cheap enough to deploy with every squad, noting the Army already uses satellite imagery and larger drones to provide broader battlefield intelligence.
And what happens in practice is that the 80% solution is 1/10th the cost and so you have twice as many, so there are more working than the ideal at 1/5 the cost.
Twice as many that don't work isn't much of an improvement.
Yes, in some situations, you can get 5 times as many for the same cost, until they don't work.
Read up a bit of history of WWII, the problems of taking vehicles into the desert, then the arctic, then Western Russia and the mud. Then the jungles of SE Asia.
Stuff that is reliable as dirt in one place is worthless in another.
Part of what makes military stuff cost so much is the ability to work everywhere. Our M1 tanks have to be geared up to work in 120 degree deserts and -40 degree arctic snow.
That is harder than you might think.