The Pentagon is blowing a fortune fighting bargain-bin drones

For the past two years, one image has circulated among defense analysts: a U.S. Navy destroyer firing a Standard Missile-2, which costs about $2.1 million, to intercept a Houthi drone that likely cost $2,000.Nobody in that chain made a bad decision. The ship had to be defended. But the Navy has now fired more than 200 such missiles in the Red Sea since late 2023 at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Project that math onto future conflicts — Taiwan, the Baltics, the Persian Gulf — and the...