The answer is a few letter: ATF & FAA.
If the original intent and clear meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution had been honored, armed drones and countermeasures to them would be common in the USA.
If the US looses a war in the next 20 years, it will be the fault of the ATF & FAA.
The US is over a decade ahead in deploying countermeasures to small drones. Systems like T-HEL were deployed over two years ago to an unspecified combat zone for field tests. There is a multi-layered approach to countermeasures including detection, jamming, and kinetic and energy attacks.
The US doesn't really have a program to weaponize small drones because it does not need one. You do not need a DJI phantom with a VOG-17 grenade on it being piloted by a soldier within artillery range of the enemy when you have operators at Creech and Holloman shooting hellfires at targets halfway around the globe.
Where jamming systems like Russia's Breakwater has been seen, repeatedly, on drone footage being observed and attacked by small drones, US systems like MFEW-AL are so effective that they are almost impossible to test in the US due to the coordination needed to ensure that cellphone coverage for the entirety of Kern County, CA or Clark County, NV isn't annihilated by its output.
Detection is also where coming capabilities will eclipse the rest of the world. DARPA has several programs to develop and commercialize detection techniques that are very impressive including Moving Target Recognition and Target Recognition and Adaption in Contested Environments, where multi-spectrum systems orbiting overhead will automatically detect, recognize, categorize, and alert persons and other systems in the area of a flying drone (or moving tank or truck) from 60,000 feet (or from SPAAAACE, in the future).
The vision is that automated surveillance hits get pushed out to systems on the ground, jammers activate, kill systems switch to "auto", and ELINT systems hunt for the transmitter so that target tasking can happen and a hellfire or artillery round deployed.
It's going to take time to design, build, test, and deploy those systems but they're coming and for all practical purposes nobody else (excluding Israel) has even started.
It's very exciting.
>Why is the US not a decade ahead
carry a big stick, but never pull it all out. just enough to win the stick-measuring contest.
The pitcher doesn't throw past 50% in warm-ups for a reason.
You know who benefits from the "idea" of an "incompetent" U.S military?
Us. Our intentional false projection of insecurity is just another layer of obfuscation.
A swarm of drones in any city could be neutralized within seconds if warranted.
You severely underestimate the power of the most powerful nation of the planet.
But between youtube, cheap IR cameras, 10k-Neuron-Net running on a raspberry pi, github open source swarming algos, extremely cheap 3'D printing, hap-hazard innocuous chemicals, and a global ubiquitous surveillance state...
A "sufficiently motivated citizen" could literally walk down the street, encounter an altercation, and snap their fingers, and have their opponent 'neutralized' within seconds, all with off the shelf hardware and open source software, right now.
These people exist, but do we really want to stir them?
it will certainly be interesting. this is why we are Ukraine, to figure it out now.
The FCC killed the hobby and in the process, made us fight with one hand behind our backs. Still, the future of autonomous drones means maybe we won't have human operators for the swarm so maybe it's moot.
How can you claim this with confidence?
Source? To my knowledge, we’re not sending anything newer than the Iraq War to Ukraine. That means decent missiles but crappy drones.
US is sending all sorts of gear, not just dusty stuff from the back of the shelf. Sure, there would be reapers, but also modern stuff from switchblade drones (in use since 2010) to Phoenix Ghost (designed a couple of years ago).
one way this war has been calamitous for Russia as it has shown NATO how unprepared they are for Russian electronic countermeasures. Let’s see if NATO can learn and adapt in time.
Not sure what specific drones have been sent, but we're definitely sending stuff newer than the Iraq War; heck, Ukraine has received the newly-developed GLSDB before US forces got it for other-than-testing use.
And in real combat it turns out that the Russians have easily suppressed them with GPS jamming. Also the steerable artillery.
It’s useful to the US to learn this before they try to depend on it in combat themselves. They’re going to have to switch to vision.
US doctrine involves SEAD and immediately obtaining overwhelming air superiority, not being confined to the ground or artillery duels.
Look no further than day 1 and 2 of Desert Storm - Ukraine hasn't mounted an operation even remotely resembling the scale or complexity (and can't.)