There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).
But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now.
Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
The difficulty is choosing to fire a lower probability of kill weapon while defending a high-value asset (the ship) during a limited window of engagement.
By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails.
The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article.
Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.
I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to defend an aircraft carrier sized target against a sufficiently concentrated missile/drone attack within say a 5 minute window 200 km offshore.
Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…
I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms.
Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted.
https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
I think the point is that the ship is itself an expensive and vulnerable method of delivering drones to a target (because warfare has become all about delivering more drones to the target than the other guy can cope with).
If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.
Define drones. Define missiles. How big are these drones? Are they group 1? Group 3[0]? Can this ship with missiles use its group 4 drones to find and fix these patrol boats so it can toss missiles at the opposing patrol boats? Can the patrol boats do anything about the missiles incoming at M3? Can I use some group 4 drones to drop a bunch of group 1 drones in the vicinity of those patrol boats, where they have no response because they don’t have medium anti-air capability?
Vulnerable does not mean obsolete.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAS_groups_of_the_United_State...
Patrol boats are fine for low intensity coastal security missions but mostly useless in any high intensity conflict. They can't operate effectively far from shore. And close to shore you might as well use land based aircraft and missiles.