Such small caliber guns have coverage ranges of a kilometer or two, who said anything about concentration?
If the enemy has airstrikes, masses of artillery and shit available to spam at every .50 AA with some electronics strapped to it, drones are the least of your problems.
Still, you get to pay for a lot of less capable units, and your money for hescy weapons is reduced.
What do you think i meant by WW2/Cold War style battalion level air defense?
Much bigger troop formation, I'd assume, with specialized air defense vehicles.
Towed and truck/halftrack mounted AA had production numbers going into
tens to even
hundreds of thousands. With modern higher availability of light trucks, probably a larger proportion of them truck mounted.
If those can actually counter drones correctly, and survive against other bigger threats like light artillery, mortars, etc.
At this rete the target gets juicer and juicer and easier to track and spot for artillery, and possible in dsnger of anti-vehicpe mines.And the units will be limited to fairly easy to access ground where such vehicles can operate, this negdting some of the infantry's advdnteges.
Being able to spread out and fo through more difficult tersin without sinking in mud or needing something resembling a good road.
In modern incarnation:
The Czech defense company Excalibur Army finalized the production of 15 Viktor mobile anti-aircraft gun systems for Ukraine. Ukrainian industry news site
militaryleak.com
Great, we are reinventing the technical truck, might as well buy a Toyota Helix at this rate.
Yeah, but that's for spec ops and recon that can't have a vehicle watch them from the rear with a cheap lead dispenser, for them expensive gear is kinda expected.
And I think that for adequate garrisoning/ground control you will need a lot more flexible, small detached units.
And those drone fights show how fucking tricky it is, and high chances of damage even to the attacking drone. Also doesn't work against suicide FPVs because they come in too fast to intercept like this yet are some of the cheapest.
Original air combat IIRC started when a bunch of WWI pilots started shooting themselves with revolvers IIRC, they were shooting their own propellers in the process, things evolved quite fast from there.
They may be cheap, but a burst of 7.62, .50 or 20mm would usually be even cheaper and quicker.
If you can adequately hit a bunch of moving tsrgrte coming at you at speed, maybe.
Assuming they don't use computer assisted controls and guidance to dodge, or some of them don't disperse smoke or chaff to fuck with your visibility or sensors.