Forget the military threat, imagine the chaos a person could cause with a few thousand dollars worth of shape charge drones if they wanted to, for example, disable a national power grid. Large substation transformers have lead times measured in years. It would cost a few hundred bucks to destroy one. I imagine a guy in a box truck doing a tour of the US, dropping a shape charge drone or two with cellular data connections outside 30 or 40 major substations and activating them all at once.
Once the grid goes dark we're going to suddenly find out that black start of an entire electrical grid is a very difficult thing to do.
Yes, but even now I don't think people have understood.
I suspect these turrets are fine with a couple of drones, but what if it's 5000? What if they're autonomous so that they can fly at 1/2 a metre?
With autonomy and something to allow long-distance flight it actually challenges the whole capable-airplane paradigm. People aren't thinking like this at all.
They aren't thinking real saturation, i.e. let's say, an attack with 10000 modernized V-1s, either. I believe that 10,000 modernized V-1s could cost as little as 50 million USD. So less than a single F-35, which has no chance of even reaching more than a couple during such a saturation attack.
I think Ukraine is already using mothership & hunter drones to target slow-flying drones (Shaheds and similar).
Very soon the most challenging part of anti-drone defence is going to be detection since fiber-guided drones can already fly tens of kilometers at low altitudes where they’ll be virtually undetectable with radar. You can literally fly them just above ground if necessary.
Once the grid goes dark we're going to suddenly find out that black start of an entire electrical grid is a very difficult thing to do.