The word attached to CCAs across every Western air force is "attritable", and it is doing an enormous amount of work. It sits between expendable, which means the aircraft is consumed on use, and exquisite, which means each loss is a national event. Where exactly Brontanax lands on that spectrum will shape how commanders actually use it — and no cost figure alone answers the question.
An aircraft at 20 to 25 per cent of a Typhoon's cost is not cheap in absolute terms. Losing one is a real financial event, and the institutional instinct of any air force is to protect assets it cannot quickly replace. If production rates are low and the fleet is small, commanders will husband Brontanax exactly as they husband crewed jets, and the tactical advantage of uncrewed mass evaporates.
That is why production capacity, not unit price, is the variable that determines attritability in practice. An aircraft that can be replaced within months is one a commander will risk on a defence-suppression run into a heavily defended corridor. An aircraft with a three-year replacement lead time is one that gets held back for lower-risk tasks, which is the opposite of the concept.
There are second-order effects too. Accident and loss reporting for uncrewed aircraft, the political handling of a Brontanax lost over hostile territory with sensitive autonomy software aboard, and the rules for self-destruct or data sanitisation are all policy questions with no established British precedent. Each one influences whether commanders feel free to use the aircraft as intended.
The test will come the first time one is lost in training. How the RAF and the MoD publicly frame that event — routine consumption of an attritable asset, or an incident requiring an inquiry — will tell us more about the true doctrine than any capability brochure.