Seems like small drones are the best weapon against big drones. Kind of curious that they seem to assume that the drone needs an operator. If I were defending against a drone swarm I’d want my drones to be piloted by AI.
with capped actions-per-minute and reaction time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698
And if you manage to automate some of that - automation make your drone swarm vulnerable to disruption. Enemies can wait near automatic refueling/recharging station and capture the drones one-by-one for example. They can put a gps tracker on the automatic drone transport system and shell the enemy base once it gets there. Or they can put a grenade on a captured drone, release it, and detonate it when the drone is recharging destroying the whole swarm cheaply.
Ultimately there's a trade-off between automation and resilience that should be familiar to web developers.
> and unless we're talking one-use drones (so, guided missiles really) - there's a lot of maintenance. Somebody needs to transport the drones to the front, program the goals, recharge the batteries (which takes hours often), rearm them after the mission, download the gathered data, change the encryption keys, etc.
If we're talking single use drones you can launch them like rockets, or from an unmanned vehicle. There's also no real reason for them to be propeller drones. A modern Tomahawk missile can "loiter" in the air for 2 hours before being directed at its real target.
The concern is with multiple use drones, the biggest vulnerability will be your maintenance / base station so you'll want humans defending that. But also anything that puts them within a reasonable drone range puts them in artillery or SAM range.
Maybe you can have a big "carrier" drone transport them to where they are required, like in StarCraft.
Or maybe you can make the small drones recharge directly from the grid, by landing on top of power lines and deploy the necessary connections.
A bigger problem would be sensor overload from all the friendlies, you'd probably want those loitering to follow a course determined by a PRNG predictable to everyone who knows that day's key. But that's just very basic crypto put to novel use.
AI piloting technology remains very primitive. We don't have anything yet that can cope well with a dynamic air combat environment involving multiple unpredictable threats, EW, countermeasures, and complex ROE. That's just total science fiction today so we can expect to have humans in the loop at some level for many years to come.