The term “affordable mass” entered public defense discourse in 2021 as a munitions concept, which the Air Force adopted in 2023 to describe its effort to field large numbers of lower-cost, semi-autonomous aircraft to complement crewed fighters. The term has since spread in defense reporting, think-tank commentary, service initiatives, and even on War on the Rocks.
The Air Force, Army, and Navy are all pursuing low-cost, high-volume buying efforts to augment the force of the “few and exquisite” with the “affordable and plentiful,” and the Pentagon is requesting $54 billion to dramatically expand autonomous drone warfare efforts. The Air Force calls this affordable mass. Some call it a high-low mix, while others use phrases like precise mass and attritable mass.
For all its popularity, the discussion is imprecise and incomplete. The Defense Department lacks a standard for what qualifies as affordable mass, and there is no common or useful understanding of what it even means.
The problem is not academic. When “affordable mass” is left vague, people default to the easiest interpretation: buy more things that are cheaper. That sounds sensible, but it can result in a military equipped with large numbers of systems it cannot afford to lose, cannot replace fast enough, or cannot produce at scale once war begins. Vague thinking leads to vague procurement. The resulting force could look spectacular on the training range, but break on the battlefield.
As an executive leading a company developing low-cost unmanned systems, I have a commercial interest in this topic. I have also been involved in affordable mass efforts since their early stages, both in uniform and in industry. This article does not advocate for a specific platform or vendor, but reflects my perspective on the force-design and industrial dynamics necessary for affordable mass efforts to succeed.
So, what should the term mean?
Affordable mass is the condition in which a force can replace its combat losses as fast as it is likely to take them. A force meets that standard when three things hold at the same time: Its systems are numerous enough to absorb initial losses, its inventory can cover near-term demand, and its industrial base can replenish losses at a rate that prevents combat power from declining over time. If replacement cannot keep pace with expected losses, the force lacks affordable mass, regardless of how many systems it fields or how low its unit cost appears to be. “Affordable mass” is a rate problem, not a budget problem.
This offers a much higher standard than simply counting units procured or surging legacy production lines. It forces planners to confront two realities that have long sat in the background of U.S. force design: the dynamics of attrition and the production-consumption model.
Attrition
Attrition is central to affordable mass, yet it too remains poorly defined and widely misunderstood. The relevant question is not “How much does it cost?” but “Can you afford to lose it?” More importantly, can you afford to lose it repeatedly and still sustain the fight?
Attrition has three interrelated dynamics: expendability, replenishment, and reconstitution. Expendability is the willingness to commit a capability in risk-to-force scenarios, which depends not just on the system itself but on how much loss the force can absorb without compromising future operations. Replenishment is the ability to replace losses in the near term through available inventory and logistics, allowing units to recover from immediate expenditures without waiting for new production. Reconstitution is the ability to restore combat capacity through production, procurement, and regeneration.
These dynamics operate across different time horizons and together determine whether losses are tactically acceptable, operationally tolerable, or strategically consequential. A system is only truly expendable if it can be replenished. It can only be replenished if it exists in meaningful quantities. And it can only be reconstituted if the industrial base exists to support production demands for replenishment.
A few examples illustrate these dynamics.
Ammunition is designed to be expendable. In Ukraine, both sides have fired thousands of 155mm artillery rounds per day, consuming inventory far beyond assumptions. The war exposed the inadequacies in the attrition model: Western stockpiles were insufficient, replenishment lagged demand, and reconstitution through production proved to be a critical gap that will take years to fix.
The F-22 Raptor shows another example of attrition dynamics. Of the planned 750-aircraft fleet, the Air Force fielded only 187 jets and has no way to buy more. Therefore, its employment is shaped not just by capability, but by the inability to replenish units or reconstitute losses to the force. By contrast, the F-35 operates under a different set of assumptions because losses can be replaced — the program produced more aircraft in a single year than the entire F-22 program ever did.
The MQ-9 Reaper shows that attrition is not a static label. Two decades ago, the limited inventory made losses operationally unacceptable, given the small fleet and high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, high inventory, no intent to reconstitute losses, and retirement on the horizon have changed that calculus. Now the MQ-9 is employed in higher-risk scenarios, incurring acceptable losses in Yemen and Iran.
The B-24 Liberator shows historically what happens when all three dynamics are dialed up to the extreme. In 1944, the Army Air Forces were losing roughly 100 to 250 heavy bombers per month. Yet, the force could absorb those losses because U.S. industry was producing bombers at extraordinary rates, including roughly 650 B-24s per month at a single facility. An otherwise non-attritable platform functioned as affordable mass because all three dynamics of attrition were actively managed.
Given these dynamics of attrition, the next key is understanding how to manage them using a production-consumption model.
Production
Production determines whether replacement can keep pace with expected losses. Low cost and high volume are only meaningful if they translate into the ability to regenerate combat power at the rate war consumes it. These are important first steps toward generating real mass, but they do not determine whether that mass can be sustained.
The first step is aligning capability with mission demand so that high-end systems are not consumed faster than they can be replaced. Many modern, exquisite systems are over-committed to missions they were never designed for — firing $1.5 million stealth cruise missiles because no alternative exists, or expending $3 million Patriot interceptors against Shahed drones. This is a breakdown in economy of force — a principle of war that emphasizes reserving capability to apply it where it matters most.
Restoring an economy of force requires acquiring systems tailored to meet the lower-end demands that needlessly consume high-end capacity. Balancing magazine depth with breadth means not only incorporating an objective-based cost-per-effect methodology, but doing so without sacrificing operational suitability and operational effectiveness standards — areas that new defense companies tend to overlook. A start-up marketing a $200,000 weapon with half the reliability will soon learn its product is effectively a $400,000 solution with greater logistical and employment burdens.
Unfortunately, that’s where most of the affordable mass discussions end. There is much more to it. A key driver of affordability is volume — high-volume production that unlocks economies of scale. Affordable mass means prioritizing producibility, something traditionally treated as an afterthought in new-tech and prototyping efforts. This first-principles approach to producing at scale requires that the Pentagon (and defense industry) adopt a fundamentally different design and engineering approach.
It means fully embracing the principles of design for cost, design for manufacturing, and design for assembly, as well as the associated industrial engineering required to manage the resultant throughput. This encompasses dozens of deliberate trades in materials, processes, tolerances, part counts, tooling, and touch labor to optimize for repeatability and scale rather than peak technical elegance.
It also requires designing around production realities: supplier depth, lead times, takt, and the mechanics of surge capacity. In practice, that means standardizing where possible, simplifying where practical, and only customizing where mission value clearly justifies the added cost and complexity. The goal is not merely to produce a system that works, but to produce one that can be built quickly, consistently, and in meaningful volume without collapsing under its own manufacturing burden.
In this context, technology readiness is not the right benchmark for affordable mass programs. Anything beyond research and development should emphasize manufacturing readiness levels, which inherently include technology readiness in their calculus. Programs that emphasize this will reward the vendors who optimize for it.
However, production alone does not sustain affordable mass.
Consumption
Consumption in peacetime gives suppliers a reason to keep defense capacity in their business mix. When demand is sporadic or episodic, tier two and tier three suppliers rationally shift labor, floor space, and capital toward steadier revenue. Capacity does not sit idle waiting for the next crisis. It is reallocated, the workforce moves on, and production knowledge decays. When wartime demand returns, the system cannot respond on timelines that matter. This is the familiar cul-de-sac of low-rate sustainment production: enough to keep a program alive, but not enough to preserve real production muscle.
Affordable mass force design means engineering peacetime consumption that is strong enough to preserve industrial capacity, yet flexible enough to respond to wartime surge. The goal is not to force inefficient demand, but to keep factories running, supply chains active, and products continuously improving. There are three ways to engineer consumption into affordable mass.
The first is continuous depletion. These are efforts that routinely expend, attrit, or wear down a product through training and readiness. This is not waste, but planned turnover (think of lot acceptance testing, ammo depletion in training, missiles expended in evaluation). Beyond the obvious readiness benefit, continuous depletion also keeps inventory in rotation, suppliers qualified, and maintains quality control under realistic conditions. Unsurprisingly, this is often baked into legacy programs, though affordable mass efforts should incorporate much higher rates of continuous depletion into their force design model. Continuous depletion creates a small but important surge buffer, because resources already allocated to training and evaluation can be redirected to meet replenishment demand in wartime.
The second way to engineer consumption is with planned obsolescence. Systems can become obsolete not because they fail, but because the environment around them changes. Technologies advance, adversaries adapt, software becomes outdated, and supply chains change. This dynamic is constant, but its pace varies. The automotive industry uses five to seven-year refresh cycles to ensure it continually incorporates rising safety requirements and efficiency gains, resulting in vehicles that keep lasting longer. By contrast, in Ukraine, drone adaptation cycles are measured in weeks.
Affordable mass, therefore, requires inventory turnover to stimulate continual modernization. Planned replacement cycles, modular subsystems, open architectures, and well-defined interfaces allow parts of a system to be consumed and renewed before the entire platform is outpaced. This is one of the most important differences between affordable mass and the sustainment logic of exquisite systems: The goal is not to maximize lifespan, but to maximize relevance.
The third mechanism of consumption is dual-use demand. That is part of what has enabled the scale of Ukrainian and Russian drone production: The consumer drone market created cost, scale, and manufacturing maturity that wartime demand could then exploit. The same principle can be designed into defense programs by using modified off-the-shelf components, adjacent product line components, and shared subassemblies. This means making subsystem determinations on when to standardize and when to customize. It also means the government should map and share supply chain data across portfolios to identify and exploit common components — an area where current practices fall short.
A broader aspect of dual-use demand occurs at the system level with secondary markets. Collaborative combat aircraft offer a blue-force capability, but are also ideally suitable adversary air for training. Similarly, a fleet of one-way attack drones can also serve as realistic targets for counter-drone systems. Traditional approaches treat these as adjacent markets to compete in. Affordable mass views them as integrated demand signals within its production-consumption model. Like continuous depletion, this also engineers surge capacity into the system. Together, continuous depletion, planned refresh, and external demand create the consumption base that affordable mass needs.
Conclusion
If affordable mass is the ability to replace losses as fast as they are likely to occur, then it ought to be treated as a force design planning standard.
First, analysts and acquisitions need to be tightly coupled. Expected loss rates for key systems need to be characterized in the scenarios that matter, not as a single number, but as a range tied to operational concepts, threat environments, and phases of conflict. Without a clear view of how quickly a force will be consumed, there is no way to determine the attrition dynamics for how much mass is required or whether it is affordable.
Second, those loss rates should be matched against inventory and production capacity. This means assessing not only how many systems exist today, but how quickly they can be replaced. Programs should be evaluated against a simple question: Can this system be produced, fielded, and integrated at a rate that keeps pace with its consumption rates that are rigorously tested in iterative wargaming and simulations?
Third, resource sponsors across the services should shift their analytic emphasis from unit cost to replacement capacity. A low-cost system that cannot be produced at scale, or whose supply chain cannot support sustained output, will fail under wartime conditions. Conversely, a system with a higher unit cost may still contribute to affordable mass if it can be replenished reliably and in volume. The relevant metric is not price alone, but cost relative to sustainable production rates.
Fourth, production should be treated as a core element of force design. This requires prioritizing manufacturing readiness alongside technical performance, designing systems for scale from the outset, and aligning acquisition strategies with the realities of industrial throughput. Programs that cannot demonstrate credible paths to high-rate production should be treated as capacity-constrained, regardless of their technical merit.
Fifth, the Department of Defense should deliberately engineer peacetime demand to sustain that production capacity. Continuous depletion, planned replacement cycles, and integration with commercial demand are crucial mechanisms that keep the industrial base viable. Without them, production capacity will atrophy, and wartime replacement rates will fall short.
Finally, these elements ought to be integrated into a single production–consumption model that is updated continuously. This model should inform budgeting, program selection, and operational planning. It should make explicit the tradeoffs between capability, capacity, and endurance, and provide a clear answer to the central question: Can the force sustain itself under the conditions it expects to face?
The United States needs affordable mass, but it will not be achieved by buying more systems at lower cost. It will be achieved by building a force that can absorb losses, replace them at speed, and continue fighting without a decline in effectiveness. It is a higher standard. It is also the only one that matters in war.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Cpl. Joaquin Carlos Dela Torre via DVIDS.
