There’s a natural asymmetry here: the defender needs to have drones ready to go everywhere, the archer only at one point. The defender needs to have drones capable of detecting and catching small fast moving enemy drones, but not harm civilians or friendly drones in the process. The attacker just needs to target large slow moving humans and doesn’t care about collateral damage.
That said, with enough effort wealthy countries could probably do something in this sphere.
They would fail for the points Yair brought up. The original draft included a section on them, but Frontiers articles have soft length limits, so I cut it for its similarity to the kinetic interceptor point.
Basically: Kinetic drones can work, but you either need many more of them or more capable ones to reliably intercept the attacker’s units. Predicting and intercepting a target with the same movement capabilities as you is inherently inefficient, which is the same issue you get with missile interceptors. This is compounded by coverage problems, because the attacker can pour all of their resources into one spot to overwhelm the pre-positioned stock of defenses.
You did not list using drones to defend against drones. Is there a reason? Would that not work in some important way?
There’s a natural asymmetry here: the defender needs to have drones ready to go everywhere, the archer only at one point. The defender needs to have drones capable of detecting and catching small fast moving enemy drones, but not harm civilians or friendly drones in the process. The attacker just needs to target large slow moving humans and doesn’t care about collateral damage.
That said, with enough effort wealthy countries could probably do something in this sphere.
They would fail for the points Yair brought up. The original draft included a section on them, but Frontiers articles have soft length limits, so I cut it for its similarity to the kinetic interceptor point.
Basically: Kinetic drones can work, but you either need many more of them or more capable ones to reliably intercept the attacker’s units. Predicting and intercepting a target with the same movement capabilities as you is inherently inefficient, which is the same issue you get with missile interceptors. This is compounded by coverage problems, because the attacker can pour all of their resources into one spot to overwhelm the pre-positioned stock of defenses.