You could apply the same generalized hierarchical submunition principle to cruise missiles.
A typical cruise missile (tomahawk) has a unit cost of around $2M and carries about a half ton of payload over 1000 km. A switchblade-300 drone weights roughly a kilogram and costs about $4,000 per unit, so in theory each cruise missile could carry several hundred small drone submunitions in the same weight and cost budget, or a dozen larger switchblade-600 anti-tank drones. The smaller drone is highly cost effective against light vehicles and soldiers, the larger drone is highly cost effective (more than 10x, perhaps 100x) against tanks and armored vehicles.
So in theory a single strike of perhaps a thousand or even as few as a hundred drone delivery cruise missiles could cripple the entire russian army, by taking out all the logistics and support vehicles, most of the tanks, etc.
A single C-17 transport plane can carry about 75 cruise missiles (rapid dragon program) to the border of enemy territory, but that could take half a day. A future military cargo version of starship (rocket cargo program) could—in theory—deliver 100 cruise missiles (and thus roughly 40,000 switchblade-300 drones) anywhere in the world in about an hour.
At that point you can also just deploy some of these in orbit to further reduce response time. For the hardened bunker targets (like nuke silos) you want tungsten rods rather than drones, but drones are good for most of the ground vehicles, undesirable leadership outside of bunkers, etc.
Now replace the cruise missile with similar sized rocket, likewise for the drones, deploy an orbital fleet of a few ten thousand or so (similar to starlink) and you have a strong capability to intercept icbms as they enter low earth orbit. If starship comes even within a few OOM of its promise to reduce launch costs to $10/kg that would be well below missile construction cost ($10/kg vs $1000/kg). So the total cost of an 10,000 unit icbm shield (with each unit housing dozens to hundreds of cheap submunitions) could be as low as a few tens of billions.
You could apply the same generalized hierarchical submunition principle to cruise missiles.
A typical cruise missile (tomahawk) has a unit cost of around $2M and carries about a half ton of payload over 1000 km. A switchblade-300 drone weights roughly a kilogram and costs about $4,000 per unit, so in theory each cruise missile could carry several hundred small drone submunitions in the same weight and cost budget, or a dozen larger switchblade-600 anti-tank drones. The smaller drone is highly cost effective against light vehicles and soldiers, the larger drone is highly cost effective (more than 10x, perhaps 100x) against tanks and armored vehicles.
So in theory a single strike of perhaps a thousand or even as few as a hundred drone delivery cruise missiles could cripple the entire russian army, by taking out all the logistics and support vehicles, most of the tanks, etc.
A single C-17 transport plane can carry about 75 cruise missiles (rapid dragon program) to the border of enemy territory, but that could take half a day. A future military cargo version of starship (rocket cargo program) could—in theory—deliver 100 cruise missiles (and thus roughly 40,000 switchblade-300 drones) anywhere in the world in about an hour.
At that point you can also just deploy some of these in orbit to further reduce response time. For the hardened bunker targets (like nuke silos) you want tungsten rods rather than drones, but drones are good for most of the ground vehicles, undesirable leadership outside of bunkers, etc.
Now replace the cruise missile with similar sized rocket, likewise for the drones, deploy an orbital fleet of a few ten thousand or so (similar to starlink) and you have a strong capability to intercept icbms as they enter low earth orbit. If starship comes even within a few OOM of its promise to reduce launch costs to $10/kg that would be well below missile construction cost ($10/kg vs $1000/kg). So the total cost of an 10,000 unit icbm shield (with each unit housing dozens to hundreds of cheap submunitions) could be as low as a few tens of billions.