Creep.

This is coolbert:

Originally conceived expendable but then further envisioned as not so expendable!

"Losing one drone for one submarine was a good exchange rate"

From https://www.isegoria.net | November 27th, 2023.

"In the late 1950s, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), the latest sonar could detect a submarine more than twenty miles away, but the best anti-submarine weapons only had a range of a few miles"

"The US Navy wanted to bridge the gap with a Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter or DASH. This was a small helicopter capable of carrying a single weapon and dropping it at the required spot, guided by a controller back on board ship."

"The DASH was based on a one-man helicopter . . . This had two rotor blades rotating in opposite directions for lift, and a propeller for forward motion. The drone version was the size of a small car and weighed just over a ton. By 1963, the US Navy had eighty of them."

[…]

"DASH was designed to be expendable; when it dropped a Mk57 nuclear depth charge it would be within the lethal radius of the resulting explosion. The powerful warhead, from five to twenty kilotons, guaranteed that the sub would be destroyed, and losing one drone for one submarine was a good exchange rate. The idea that DASH should carry a non-nuclear homing torpedo and come back afterwards was a case of mission creep; according to the original design it was only supposed to make one flight."

Mission creep: "Mission creep is the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success"

Mission creep for the DASH drone to include projects such as:

* SNOOPY * NITE PANTHER * BLOW LOW * NITE GAZELLE * GUN SHIP * ATTACK DRONE 

Read further details of all mission creep applications DASH!

coolbert.