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If someone breaks into your home and all you have is a nail-gun and claw hammer, you’ll make due with those. It’s to late to go to the store and buy a gun. You need this tool right here and now and you’re going to make the best with what you have.

(Drone / Tank)
One has a short the other a long ramp up time / one has a short the other a long serviceable life:

—Drones: are a product where you have several manufacturers and you do not need a huge lead time to begin mass producing them. They are a product where you have a large civilian market you can piggy back off of. You develop, test and field state of the art drones, keeping up with the newest there is, but DO NOT mass field these since there is a very high chance that you will spend a lot and by the time you ever want to use them, they will be obsolete (you’ll not even want them). The tech regards sensors, radio, computing, the software controlling them is rapidly evolving, and there is a huge civilian manufacturing base. It doesn’t require massive specialized facilities to be built. You want a large enough stockpile to deal with the threat you think you might face in some near term scenario and ramp up as the likelihood for conflict increases.

—Tanks: require a very long lead time. You cannot crap a new tank overnight. In fact, it took Russia a few YEARS just to ramp up production of pre-existing tank designs. In the US, you have Watervliet that makes the gun tubes, that’s it. It takes time to produce these. It takes time to get the tooling, foundry work, and lines in place to manufacture a tank and there is no civilian manufacturing base you can piggy back off of: https://v.wpimg.pl/NzcyODU2YRsCGzl3eklsDkFDbS08EGJYFlt1ZnoLfUIbTH18elQnFgYLKjQ6HCkIFgkuMyUcPhZMGD8tekR_VQcQPDQ5UzdVBhQtITEdKB5bGyx0ZAFjTVVOKmlhBCtDTkF9fGUfex9TGHhzZwp7TAVObTk

An example from us: In Iraq we used a HMMWV which was in the beginning not even up-armored in most cases. Then we fielded up-armored versions that were OK, but they never were ideal for the threat we were facing. They were something we could produce in mass fairly quickly, like the Russians mass producing tanks they have a lot of (based on T72) and with pre-existing designs and manufacturing lines. There “new” tanks are basically a T72 on steroids.

Additionally, the West is casualty adverse. When we have 5,000 US casualties as in Iraq, that’s a political disaster. 13 US casualties at once is a political disaster. That’s not a bad thing. I like the fact that our kids lives mean something and we’re willing to go to EXTREMES to keep our folks alive. I would much rather see us throwing money and material at a problem, than human flesh and blood. The Russians are willing to accept the casualties they are taking today (they don’t really have a choice unless they want to acquiesce to us), we would not be OK with that.

That said, even we cannot snap our fingers and have a new MBT and IFV over night. It takes time to develop such a system and to field it. It is precisely because these systems have a long lead time but are an essential part of the battlefield that we need to field a new system that gives us the same capabilities which the M1 once gave us.

Most nations cannot throw material (leverage tech, industry, manufacturing base, resources) at a problem like we can, and even we can’t make things happen over night on many of these complex systems which require extensive military specialized industrial input to manufacture, like a tank.

We have R&D, an industrial volume, a manufacturing base, high tech, and access to resources like no one else enjoys. Only China rivals or passes us today in some aspects: a few enabling technologies and definitely the size of their manufacturing base ~2 times ours, which is scary. Even a more primitive tank like a WWII Sherman, and with a concerted national effort (total mobilization), it took 2 years to squeeze out a prototype (1939 - 1941), 3 years before we had a high volume production (1942), and 4 YEARS (1943) to reach maximum production: http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/data/sherman_production.html

Just like you go to war with what you have, not what you wish you had; a nation when it mobilizes for war does the best it can given the industrial, tech and manufacturing capabilities they have, not what they wish they had.

Reality vs. what we wish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INFavIUmhcE