flying higher faster and being more stealthy those would still be hard pressed to actually loiter over enemy territory and survive but they would perform surgical strikes on predetermined targets or would scout from afar with very powerful sensors perhaps the biggest difference would be air monitoring in a war of weaker belligerence radar coverage is usually not full but intermittent and not long range blocked by terrain features as aerial based radars can't be afforded when big countries go to war multiple platforms would be monitoring the airspace a few hundred miles over the front line while drones do have somewhat smaller radar returns unless we're talking about dedicated stealthy drones which would be quite expensive detection ranges against them would be considerable coupled with the fairly slow speed of drones there would be far fewer surprises and both sides might have more time to focus their defenses in vital areas the likes of reaper or such drones would be very vulnerable they're slow they're not that hard to spot by modern day sam and fighter jet raiders and they're basically easy prey without radar warning sensors chaff flares decoys etc one modern missile might very well achieve over NUMBER_TOKEN percent of effectiveness rate against such targets unlike semi-disposable kamikaze drones drones like reaper are quite pricey and could cost NUMBER_TOKEN million dollars each much more than missiles even the simpler turkish biroketar drones cost five or so million and that's with lower wage costs in turkey so going much farther over the front line would not be feasible operating combat drones right over the front line would however be very much in vogue lightering suicide drones would be used on a large scale for sure in a way u.s cruise missiles are already such weapons as they can circle for hours and receive fresh targeting data the us also uses small drones capable of kamikaze attacks such as switchblade and coyote but they're of different class really they're very tactical platoon level weapons which points to the possibility that for engaging sams of pure opponents the us still believes heavy and fast and large platforms are the way to go that can apply to large jamming planes being used instead of smaller jammer drones or a large stand of recon platforms being used in place of small short-range recon drones or cruise missiles used just like kamikaze drones to go after individual sam sites the chinese are for example very much proliferating a special class of anti-aircraft artillery simple enough to be cheap and with a very limited capability but one tailored seemingly against kamikaze uavs incoming missiles and so on old style anti-air artillery had a more varied mission set but it can be fairly complex and expensive simpler newer class aaa systems are proliferating trading fire rate and in some instances sensors for range and caliber basically aaa tailored against slower incoming targets flying in fairly simple patterns against very simple uavs like various small form quadcopters which are designed to be cheap and disposable even jamming by fairly simple jammers can work if the overall defense system tracks the threat first and has jammers available everywhere and deployed which can be a tall order still given that each such handheld jammer or vehicle mounted drone detector doesn't really cover a large area there are quite pricey toys which is why we have only now in the last few years seen the likes
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