Ukraine and Iran are showing us that scrappy low-cost and improvised drones are the future. The asymmetry with slow procurement, long-term and very expensive delivery is so stark that I feel Europe (Ukraine excluded) and the US have no good answer here.
Cheap systems are certainly a game changer, but I don't think they completely deprecate high performance, high end systems like this. Cheap drones by definition lack powerful long range sensor suites and associated power systems, because such a package would mean they'd no longer be cheap. They have limited range, are slower, and are less able to react dynamically to a changing combat situation.
I can see a system like this acting as the sensor and control node for a flight of cheaper drones. We've had cruise missiles for many decades now, and they're drastically more capable than cheap drones, but they didn't deprecate manned fighters. Something like this might.
These small proxy wars are irrelevant. Scrappy drones are only used because that is all these small countries can produce. For superpowers, the goal isn't to stockpile mediocre equipment; it is to develop intellectual capabilities. During wartime, manufacturing can then be rapidly ramped up. You cannot invent and develop advanced tech overnight, but you can rapidly scale production.
Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.
I’m not saying scrappy drones are the key to victory in all circumstances.
But look at Iran - their air defenses and navy are destroyed. Yet they can inflict massive damage on their neighbors with drones within 10 minutes flight distance, making them hard to stop.
By doing so they’re keeping the price of oil high and are able to put economic pressure on the US completely disproportionate to their military capabilities.
So even though drones are not the full solution, without an answer to them you can’t win either.
Drones seem to have reached their zenith of operational freedom. I’m genuinely surprised the U.S. and Israel don’t field gun- and laser-based anti-drone demonstrators.
Except, they're not. And by the way, they are two completely different conflicts.
With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.
In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.
