He hasn’t made us any weaker than the numerous politicians who have voted to spend billions of dollars towards missiles that have to be spent on 40k$ drones.

I think this dynamic is best explained by comparing the Tomahawk Cruise Missile with the Shahed Flying Bomb.

Both function as relatively slow moving, low flying precision guided munitions that take circuitious routes to avoid air defenses rather than coming in high and fast like a ballistic missile or like a freight train glide bomb barreling in on a runaway slope.

Shaheds began as a German idea for a mass wave of radar emission seeking loitering munitions that could flood enemy air defenses and eliminate their air defenses in an initial attack. In many ways though they are really just a target drone with a bomb strapped to them, useful as the smallest, least expensive single airframe you can send a precision guided munition long ranges on. Shaheds are optimized for the lowest per unit cost possible and the highest production rate possible (which unintuitively makes them an extremely cost inefficient strategy especially because they are always one time use).

Tomahawks were never designed as a weapon to be affordable or mass producable necessarily. They were designed to be a limited resource that could be built up over time by extremely skilled technicians to be used as an overwhelming peacetime reserve expressed in a burst of war using incredibly precise intelligence gained over years of old fashioned intelligence work.

The point was never to overwhelm the enemy by producing and firing so many Tomahawks day in day out in a war of attrition until defenses and military crumbled, even if Tomahawks have been deployed that way at times by fools as it being used now in the Iran War (as in instrument of violent retribution rather than strategic elimination of high value military targets). A Tomahawk is named as such because it is meant to be decisive, meant for the opposite kind of war a Sling is.

The point of a Tomahawk is that it is the most assured, targeted, direct way for a head of political power to make someone or something dead, fast and with little warning or chance of escape or hiding no matter where they are. Under that doctrine affordability isn’t really the point since I mean… if the head of political power is ordering mass amounts of people to be killed we have a bigger problem on our hands right? (and yes… we do have that problem on our hands in the US).

In otherwards the point of a Tomahawk is to be so rich that you personally built an unmanned kamikaze jet for every one of your enemies and already have the targetting solutions loaded in just in case they decide to fuck with you. Mutually Assured Personnel Destruction if you will.

The point of a shahed is that a kid can make it, deploy it and fly it if you force them too.

Both are fundamentally very cost inefficient strategies, but for different reasons and to different effects.