Apparently it was developed by a startup in San Luis Obispo, California, Zone 5 Technologies, which was just acquired by a Norwegian defense contractor a few months ago.

Yes, part of this is that a lot of us airpower doctrine has had at the back of the room the implicitly accepted idea that if push comes to shove and a world war does happen that if we do fire off all the expensive missiles, tomahawks, air interceptors etc... that we can turn all of that aerospace engineering expertise to cranking out simpler flying bombs if it comes to that but generally people haven't had to think about that. The Rusty Dagger is exactly that, and it is exactly what many in the military can lucidly see is needed.

The thing that almost nobody perhaps outside of the US military is thinking about right now is that the maximum benefit of swarms of maximally cheap flying bombs interspersed with even cheaper decoys is to an airpower that has extremely high end aircraft, anti-air defenses and EW/signals intelligence capability.

In this sense VTOL or STOL capability is far more relevant than autonomy as a military technology for smaller powers fighting larger ones.

You can see the penalty that the US military has paid in Iran with losing so many Reaper drones, they were never designed to survive a near-peer fullscale military conflict and that wisdom hasn't really changed rather it has become apparent that an attack asset can take a whole lot more weapons in a strike mission with them if the weapons are offloaded to cheap affordable flying aircraft that follow behind and are just good enough to get through the door the high value, highly capable aircraft creates. The high end attack aircraft doesn't have to necessarily control all the drones itself, it just has to kick down the door in tight coordination with the wave of junk.

Here is a good example of how warfare evolves less by radically changing the fundamental patterns than by newer and newer technologies and doctrines fulfilling roles that were previously more narrowly capable... this kind of "knock the door down/breach the frontline air defenses with concentrated power and then disperse lighter equipped "cheaper" forces to raid across the enemies backline causing them to have to divert troops to chase around light cavalry... this is a very old pattern re-emerging in a different context.

All this to say, the Rusty Dagger is the most effective flying bomb in the world almost from day one because of what it is backed up by, that allows the Rusty Dagger to be so effective for being so cheap.... a shahed can never compete with that effectiveness and it has nothing to do with the limitations of the shahed itself because the shahed is ultimately an evolution of a target drone.... for high end military aircraft...... which russia has been using to train Ukrainian f16, mig29 and mirage pilots up to a high degree of competency at low speed air interception.... which feeds back into increased costs per shahed as tactics and equipment have to get more and more sophisticated to evade aircraft and pilots that categorically outclass the flying bomb being operated by a pilot with high latency and poor situational awareness or an exploitable AI routine.