this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.
We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out
The only reliable counter to a drone is likely another drone.
I suspect Peter F Hamilton got it close, in the Confederation series, with WASPs. They are space based weapon platforms. They carry a mix of offensive and defensive subsystems, and operate with swarm logic.
I could easily see a larger drone carrying a swarm of 1 shot micro drones. When close, some would be sacrificed to get better sensor data, others would go on the attack. Conversely, a defensive target would launch their own swarm. It's goal would be to stop the attackers getting a good shot on a high value target. It might also counterattack, either against the mother ship drone, or backtracking to find the launch site.
Jamming would also be part of this. A jammer could easily cut off the swarm from external data sources. Live satellite or remote surveillance systems would be cut. Point to point lasers are far harder, as are burst transmissions. Local sensor drones could easily punch short range data back, or paint targets, until they are destroyed by defensive systems.
There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.
Between GPS (jammable but likely gets you into the target area), dead reckoning, optical flow sensors and increasingly impressive onboard camera processing, RF jamming will soon be irrelevant.
Almost a decade ago I was flying agricultural mapping missions that were 99% autonomous, and the parts that weren't were problems a military drone doesn't have (soft launch and landing)
The clear counter is autocannons, likely fully automated themselves to manage large swarms. The other would be cheap anti-drone missiles that either are basically a drone themselves or a glorified model rocket. Possibly tiny, cheap and fast interceptors launched from fixed-wing drones. The weak point of drones is literally their physical weakness.
It's worth noting we are at the start of an arms race. It will iterate all over the place.
For example, smoke and chaff deploying drones would make defensive fire harder. Anti air can be either baited (and so depleted) or rushed. Lasers can be shielded against, at least for a time. Jamming can be countered with line of site communications.
In turn, each of these can be countered.
A key thing of note is that your solutions are heavy. Fine for defending a static target, but problematic when dealing with defending a mobile unit etc infantry of transports. In those situations an extremely rapid, focused highly dynamic response would be required. The obvious way to deploy those fast enough is to have them automated and airborne, aka a drone swarm.
I might be completely wrong, current drone warfare is akin to the invention of the smoothbore musket. How it will develop remains to be seen (for better or for worse).