I read recently that Ukraine was producing a lot of drones and ramping up production too, as well as using fibre-optic controlled drones to overcome electronic warfare/jamming.
Hundreds of small companies (around 10 employees each) in Ukraine are making and assembling drone's right now (according to journalists who filmed them in Ukraine last month). I counted at least two dozen companies in the Netherlands, probably a few hundred all over Europe. Besides the frame that holds the 4 or six rotors together all other parts are off the shelf, mostly ordered from Shenzen. You can CNC mill a carbon fiber or aluminum frame from a single plate on an x-y flatbed cnc.
I researched all this last night because I need $20K-$200k investment right now to start my own startup making unjammable autonomous kamikaze drones with 20K payload on top of 20km optical fiber spools unreeling. I think it is possible to make them lighter without fibers if you put a few thousand microprocessors in with a wafer scale integration for $500.
Of course you could just make cheap drones that kill every warm body in sight[4] indiscriminately. To disable a tank you need these fiber tethered drones with bigger payloads[3][5][6]. You cab see two fiber strands still in the air in a few frames of the video.
What you need is a Paul MacCready style development cycle for drones in the field. You need to be able to make 10 crashes per hour, fix the drone by replacing with off-the shelf components and try again. The programming should be live-coding like Squeak Smalltalk, no recompiling, just fix and run while you are using the software to edit itself [1] as Dan did in 1976[2] on this 5.88 mhz computer. We still code like this today but most programmers and managers ignore this in favor of terminals and simulated punch cards. Remember that it took humans 200.000 years to invent written language or agriculture, we just are not that smart.
[1] https://youtu.be/NqKyHEJe9_w?t=433
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3uAFBzzbTc
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM
If you unwind the spool hanging under the drone by a rotating shaft through the spool, you do not have any tension on the fiber (but for a few grams of its weight if you unspool to slowly) and the weight of the fiber in the air even helps unspool the fiber (although you want to prevent that by speeding up the unwinding)