Having more and better drones now matters more than having more soldiers
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
Drones are cheaper to replace than people.
Only for western country.
But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.
More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
I think that assumption will quickly need to be reevaluated. Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them and they are so doing their thing for long enough. People can't eat concrete and plants don't grow without the sun.
As well as dumb WW2 era bombs. But even if the city is leveled to the ground you need a lot of ground troops to capture it. We've seen this recently in east Ukraine as well.
And you don't have to capture anything. Just move your drone operators forward once it's safe.
>Robot team captures Russian soldiers in world-first unmanned assault: Ukraine claims https://interestingengineering.com/military/ukraine-robot-te...
>the attack employed a combination of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones and ground robotic complexes (GRCs) to penetrate and neutralize fortified Russian positions that had previously repelled human-led offensives.