An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.

An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.

You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.

> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA

Not excessive taxes, a political choice to spend a lot of the revenue on defense.

And anyone who wants to reduce military spending will get asked:

"Don't you support our troops?"

And that'll be the end of that

> but being fueled by massively excessive taxes in the USA

I think it's even worse, it's funded a lot more by debt than excessive taxes, taxation in the USA is not even that excessive (to its own detriment since the budget is never balanced).

If you think you can produce them for cheaper, you could make yourself a lot of money and save taxpayers a lot of money by starting your own company.

Correct, now let's also talk about US government-funded [research, healthcare, education, construction, foreign aid, intelligence, infrastructure, entitlements]

Except almost everyone has their pet topic where they'll defend any amount of spending.