Yeah, why wouldn't an f22 for example just turn and run from these drones at nearly mach 2.
No one's using tactical nukes against a drone swarm.
The Genie anti-air nuclear rocket [1] was designed to take out soviet bombers, in a time when guided missiles were too immature to provide the required precision. A more modern guided nuclear anti-air missile (with features such as PAL security and tritium boosted fission for a higher / dialable yield) would probably work quite nicely for reducing swarm density.
The way I see it, we're probably headed towards a cold (at minimum) war between sino-russia et. al. and the western allies, so (in the absence of something more effective) tactical nuclear weapons to counter aircraft swarms will become more tolerable as tensions continue to rise - far better to use one to take out a drone swarm and cause drama than risk losing an air wing (or something else that interferes with force projection). Hopefully I'm wrong though.
If you can develop a drone swarm that can totally own an airspace then chances are you can develop drones that can beat them.
If a drone swarm proves lethal to a multi million dollar aircraft of ship, tactical nuke could be a suitable response.
Unlikely, sure, I'm just saying though....
Airwar is not about who shoots more planes, it's about who will blow up enemy's airbases first.
Animated example of a convoy getting hit by lasers:
Live example:
Energy dissipation of a laser in atmo is going to require crazy amounts of energy to go even a moderate distance, so either those lasers are being fired from something really close to the airfield, or else you've got some S.H.I.E.L.D style flying aircraft carrier thing.
A weapon without munitions, is a useless weapon, even if it costs $300M a pop. A war is won by a soldier, and lost by a logistics officer.
The maximum what a few fit men can load very slowly, unassisted is 250kg, and usually only 100kg by a single man. Gravity fed refueling is also quite time consuming.
Since we're being realistic, you could use the launcher I sketched out as an elementary school student. It had missile tubes on every surface, including around the wheels.
Why do we have air-superiority fighters? It's to shoot down any aircraft that might be harassing our ground units, and to ensure that our own CAS/attack aircraft can freely harass their ground units without opposition. An F-22 with an air-superiority loadout is pretty much useless in the ground war. So just let it fly around, and if it shoots down 8 drones with its 8 missiles, big deal. There's hundreds more where those came from. Meanwhile any aircraft that are actively strafing, cluster-bombing, etc. the ground forces have to fly straight through the drone swarm, with likely pretty cataclysmic results.
Now which of these mission profiles can destroy an infantry company more cost-effectively? The JDAM may blow up a vehicle plus any infantrymen around it at the cost of $20K. The drone can individually target each infantryman with a bullet from a range of ~50-100 ft, for perhaps 100 kills for a $1000 drone, and it can be tactically controlled by other infantrymen on the ground, with instantaneous communication, to respond exactly where it's needed and avoid friendly fire.
If drones are going to be used for CAS, then they need a control channel or Skynet AI. Any control channel in use will depend on LOS, and will be jammed to oblivion in a real war.
I think there's an impedance mismatch between some folks who assume "countering" an F-22 or B-1B means shooting it down, and others who assume "countering" it means making it cost-ineffective to achieve your strategic aims. For the latter folk, having your manned aircraft constantly plink away at your forces and shoot down your drones is still mission-accomplished as long as your drones are doing a lot more damage than your forces are receiving.
The aircraft-carrier vs. battleship debate is again relevant. The two times that an aircraft carrier and a battleship got into a direct fight (HMS Glorious vs. Scharnorst, and USS Gambier Bay vs. IJN Yamato), the aircraft carrier got reamed, and sunk in short order. But this didn't matter, because aircraft carriers and battleships almost never got into direct fights. There was Pearl Harbor, Taranto, and Malaya before the belligerents realized that sinking battleships was pointless, and then there was Sibuyan Sea and Okinawa when there were no more targets left. In between were a long string of carrier vs. carrier battles where the battleships were used as AA escorts or moved to shore bombardment & convoy escort duties. Similarly, why bother countering a few smart bombs when your drone swarm terminates every enemy soldier on the battlefield within an hour and makes any attempt at interference suicidal for manned aircraft?
If you knew where the plane is headed, the question could become: can you create a wide enough curtain ahead of time that can home in on the incoming plane? Chasing is not needed that way.
Plus, the kind of small drone you’re describing can’t operate at the altitude of a fighter jet. As the air thins out you need a lot of speed to keep sufficient oxygen flowing into the jets, and non-jet aircraft can’t operate. So unless the drones are going to be blimps, a drone that can climb to fighter jet altitude is going to be pretty big and look a lot like a fighter jet.
So that's a big if.