What would air defence against a swarm of a few 1000 UAV look like? Because China...
In order to have a useful X,000miles range and useful payload you need to build fairly large drones which means a large target. If their cheap that directly translates into low speeds making them a very easy target for anti air guns, or low cost anti aircraft missiles.
If you want a large fast drone, that’s getting expensive. To the point where having or not having a pilot makes minimal cost differences.
Note, this assumes it’s part of a modern war with extreme radio jamming etc.
Small cheap disposable drones are a game changer. Drop them on a military base and have them seek and distort any human shaped targets, any sources of RF radiation, anything that looks like a vehicle or plane...
If you can get close enough to drop a bunch of slow drones, you can get close enough to just drop a bomb on the whole thing instead. Much more bang for your buck.
Let's also not forget that small drones might become 'banned' much like chemical weapons did, if they ever became viable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s clear what they where referring to, as the argument was a type of drone being banned not all drones. Saying they “banned lasers” is correct even if they only banned a subset of lasers.
I am genuinely curious if you have a deeper argument. As small anti personnel drones seem suspiciously close to cluster munitions, but might be acceptable.
Considering that the US, Russia, India, and China haven't even signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions there's clearly no political appetite for such bans among countries with large militaries. And such a ban would be unenforceable anyway because small drones are dual use technologies which don't require specialized manufacturing.
The expected direction of drones is as loyal wingmen (i.e., to carry sensors, weapons and/or fuel) and to be low-cost (i.e., disposable). If your drone costs more than an F-35 you'll want to get it home again, whether there's a human inside or not.
Ofc you can low-tech your way into it by just delivering drones in shipping containers and hiding them close to potential targets... Also, cheap ass drones + bio-warfare would make a killer combo, if you knew you won't get nuked if you implement it...