I'd imagine one of the (forget the name, the big planes with radar that buzz around the battle space), could handle a swarm of drones from a long distance. Not sure that it'd make sense to have a speedy jet out there doing that.
AWACS have vastly superior radar and electronics. It's going to see threats long before they are in range. And it's going to direct interceptors to deal with those threats long before they are in range.
I don't believe an AWACS has ever been shot down.
This lists a few times when AWACS detected and directed the destruction of threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_shootdowns
Or maybe the E-3 Sentry aka AWACS, but the JSTARs matches the "big plane" better and has a giant synthetic aperature radar for imaging large swaths of the battlespace. We deployed with JSTARs when I went to Iraq as a Shadow 200 TUAV Pilot myself.
Sounds like you would know better than me, but aren't both the E-3 and E-8 based on a 707 platform?
And don't you need both? If you're doing an air superiority mission you need an AWACS. If you're doing CAS you need JSTARS, right?
They're complimentary although the AWACS is more relevant today than the JSTARs is. Most of the hardware in the JSTARs hasn't been updated in decades and it is starting to show its age. We had trouble integrating our realtime video feeds from our UAV with the telemetry feed from the JSTARs because it is just clunky and old.