For me it all hinges on how good consumer-grade drones become. If I can cheaply make an octocopter that accomplishes an insurgent goal, nothing save bullets or a less effective net gun will be cheaper. The anti-drone tech can be near-perfect but then it's a similar issue as ICBM interception. Only one needs to get through to achieve a disproportionately expensive goal. If the net gun has six barrels I send seven $300 AliExpress/3D printed drones and destroy the $4.5m T-90 tank. If the infantry squad can expect to manually shoot X drones down, I send Y and maybe one of them detonates a hand grenade overhead. Those infantry go somewhere drones can watch to sleep, and when they do whatever expensive defense can be overwhelmed cheaply enough to get one or two through and bomb a barracks. If they can shoot accurately to 1000m vertically, I just need to 3D print fins into whatever I drop and do so from higher.
It's an arms race but it's one built around a mechanic rockets can't cheaply match- precision. Those Azov mortar videos out of Mariupol are terrifying, with them guiding strikes with pinpoint accuracy in congested streets onto vehicles and infantry. If a drone can cheaply strike itself or guide a strike from another cheap weapon like an unguided rocket/mortar, fancy guided rockets won't be able to match the cost-effectiveness and the logistical footprint to supply them will be larger/more vulnerable. Anything that launches a rocket short of a nuclear vessel or a silo is so fuel inefficient that you need those big Russian convoys in the drone/ATGM videos just to keep them moving.
edit: Minus electronic warfare solutions like jamming, but a software problem seems easier and cheaper to overcome than a hardware one. If they can find a way around that then it's only manual interception stopping them.
It's somewhat plausible that anti-drone "rockets" end up physically being some sort of rotary craft, like a suicide drone that's incapable of turning around. But a thing that only goes in one direction, one time, is still going to be cheaper and simpler than something that has to be able to slow itself down and reverse course. That's why I'm fairly confident that anti-drone weaponry ends up cheaper than drones in the long run, even if it's fairly high-tech stuff. It's also why I think this is different from ICBM interception (which I've posted a few times about being mostly impossible), since in this case you're intercepting something slower with something faster (and all the speeds are less than ICBMs).
Minus electronic warfare solutions like jamming, but a software problem seems easier and cheaper to overcome than a hardware one
There's only so much you can do with software. If the parts of the EM spectrum you have antennae for are full of enough noise, there's nothing for software to do. But I don't actually know how much noise it's plausible to put out in a war setting.
I think infantry-carried anti-drone weaponry will catch up and outperform drones. Rockets are just fundamentally cheaper than drones can be.
For me it all hinges on how good consumer-grade drones become. If I can cheaply make an octocopter that accomplishes an insurgent goal, nothing save bullets or a less effective net gun will be cheaper. The anti-drone tech can be near-perfect but then it's a similar issue as ICBM interception. Only one needs to get through to achieve a disproportionately expensive goal. If the net gun has six barrels I send seven $300 AliExpress/3D printed drones and destroy the $4.5m T-90 tank. If the infantry squad can expect to manually shoot X drones down, I send Y and maybe one of them detonates a hand grenade overhead. Those infantry go somewhere drones can watch to sleep, and when they do whatever expensive defense can be overwhelmed cheaply enough to get one or two through and bomb a barracks. If they can shoot accurately to 1000m vertically, I just need to 3D print fins into whatever I drop and do so from higher.
It's an arms race but it's one built around a mechanic rockets can't cheaply match- precision. Those Azov mortar videos out of Mariupol are terrifying, with them guiding strikes with pinpoint accuracy in congested streets onto vehicles and infantry. If a drone can cheaply strike itself or guide a strike from another cheap weapon like an unguided rocket/mortar, fancy guided rockets won't be able to match the cost-effectiveness and the logistical footprint to supply them will be larger/more vulnerable. Anything that launches a rocket short of a nuclear vessel or a silo is so fuel inefficient that you need those big Russian convoys in the drone/ATGM videos just to keep them moving.
edit: Minus electronic warfare solutions like jamming, but a software problem seems easier and cheaper to overcome than a hardware one. If they can find a way around that then it's only manual interception stopping them.
It's somewhat plausible that anti-drone "rockets" end up physically being some sort of rotary craft, like a suicide drone that's incapable of turning around. But a thing that only goes in one direction, one time, is still going to be cheaper and simpler than something that has to be able to slow itself down and reverse course. That's why I'm fairly confident that anti-drone weaponry ends up cheaper than drones in the long run, even if it's fairly high-tech stuff. It's also why I think this is different from ICBM interception (which I've posted a few times about being mostly impossible), since in this case you're intercepting something slower with something faster (and all the speeds are less than ICBMs).
There's only so much you can do with software. If the parts of the EM spectrum you have antennae for are full of enough noise, there's nothing for software to do. But I don't actually know how much noise it's plausible to put out in a war setting.