The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.
The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.