Drone weapon market

Trent Telenko's latest thread about drones and snipers suggested a million drones minimum would be required for training our own forces. The numbers don't seem crazy. We train snipers with optics and rifles now while the next battlefields will be using drones for both spotting and shooting.

The first thing that came to my mind was "How many will fall off the back of a truck?" A few years ago AP did some research on how many weapons the US military, and came up with 1900 over 10 years (2010's). 190/year doesn't sound too terrible. FWIW, the AP article is pretty crappy: it only gave numbers for a single burglary (6 M4's and 10 pistols). I'd bet that quite a few of those counted were explosives, e.g. grenades, which are a bit hard to track after use.

I suspect that the presence of a gigantic market for civilian arms depresses the market for stolen military ones in this country. Of course, if our military were as corrupt as Mexico's, economies of scale might enter. But aside from homemade automatic weapons like the Glocks modified with the switch, I hear more about truly automatic weapons (instead of "newspaper automatics") from instances in Europe. Maybe that's some kind of sampling bias in favor of the dramatic, or maybe stricter rules for civilian weapons make military ones a larger share of the market. (And there've been some serious civil wars on that landmass with plenty of room for tools to go missing and no big oceans to cross to get them to market.)

At any rate, I suspect the Mexican cartels will get a lot of their military-use drones from their military, and our local gangsters buy from them or from China, and not bother with US military stuff.