Eight Newly Produced MQ-9 Reaper Drones Destroyed in Iranian Strike

For example, the F5 rocket is the most powerful rocket engine ever developed and that was 60+ years ago at this point. Up until Starship, the Saturn had remained the most powerful rocket ever built. This naturally leads to the question of "why didn't we just recreate it?" There are lots of reasons why. Material science has come a long way. We can't necessarily even recreate the materials used. Also, F5 engines were kind of bespoke and that expertise is long gone. We'd have to spend a lot of time and effort recreating it. It quickly reaches the point where the effort is comparable to developing an entirely new design, assembly line and the expertise to build, maintain, repair and use such a system.

So Reapers have their own production line, expertise, supply lines, etc. It's not something you can just make the assembly line go a little faster on, Henry Ford like.

But let's say you could make another subsonic loitering drone. That's basically developing an entirely new air system. It has to be integrated into the military. Drone operators, repairs, munitions, proving everything works, etc etc etc.

Now these 8 Reapers were destroyed on the ground, which is embarrassing and expensive. But ~30 have been destroyed in the air. The Reaper is realtively slow (~300mph top speed) and a so-called medium-height (meaning up to 50,000 feet) air frame and yet the IRGC keeps shooting them out of the sky. This is something the US has never had to deal with before. So if you developed another system with similar characteristics, woudln't it just be shot out of the sky too?

As for being prop-driven, too slow and too low.

As for ordinance, Reapers use a mix of Hellfire missiles for "precision strikes" (which really means "targeted assassinations") and gliding JDAMs, which are ~2000lb bombs but you to fly pretty much over the target and those Reapers keep getting shot down.

A big problem the US has faced is that they've been unable to achieve air supremacy and fly freely over Iran like they once did with Iraq. So they've had to continue using so-called 'stand off" muntiions. Hellfire missiles are an example of this. The problem is that these are more expensive and have smaller payloads because they've had to sacrifice explosives for a propulsion system.

Fast forward to today, and we've elected reality TV personalities to lead our country and military and they're making decisions that are akin to what a newbie playing chess would blunder in their first opening moves of a game.

Because the conflict is not actually sanctioned by Congress, we are not at wartime replacement levels for munitions and aircraft, so these losses are not something that we can recover from quickly. The reapers that were destroyed are not even produced anymore. It's like amateur hour.