The challenge of cheap drones: finding an even cheaper way to destroy them

The aerial target is coming at you or your friends. It can kill any kind of vehicle, including a tank, or hit an ammunition store, command post or even a surface-to-air battery worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Or it may go after a single soldier.

Your challenge is that the target, a quadcopter drone, is really small, manoeuvrable and hard to detect.

None of that is the biggest challenge. Rather, the confounding problem is that the thing is incredibly cheap, having cost the enemy some low multiple of $1000—far less than the usual cost of shooting down anything. If you use expensive means to knock down such a drone, the other side’s easy answer is just to build more of them and exhaust your budget.

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