> maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day
I was thinking about that. Wouldn't you be able to make it so the detonator gets armed by the operator remotely only once in the air and away?
That's entirely possible, but doing so reliably and safely is difficult and expensive enough that for a very long time Ukrainians were accepting the risk instead.
The risk appetite countries in existential conflicts have is quite different from what we're used to. For example, there are plenty of videos of Ukrainian soldiers angle grinding cluster munitions open to extract submunitions to put on drones, but that's not a strategy that western armies can rely on.