Still, you get to pay for a lot of less capable units, and your money for hescy weapons is reduced.
In terms of the costs of training and equipping a western style infantry battalion with weapons and vehicles, it's little money.
Much bigger troop formation, I'd assume, with specialized air defense vehicles.
Battalion level. As in added to every line battalion.
If those can actually counter drones correctly, and survive against other bigger threats like light artillery, mortars, etc.
They can counter drones correctly. Might wanna stick them on a MRAP, armored car or 8x8 APC for frag resistance.
The alternate route as i mentioned is to just take any of the above that infantry already uses and has a RWS, then adding a software and sensor update to the RWS with a "CIWS MODE" button, and computer going "it flies, it dies".
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.
It's a ranged weapon. If the infantry has to stray away many kilometers from vehicles and repel drone attacks while doing so by themselves, it better be doing something worth using the really expensive options.
Of course that's for the rich armies who do prefer to do shit with lots of vehicle involvement either war, because it's hard to imagine another scenario where the infantry of such a country is without land or air vehicle support in such shit terrain and attacked by enemy drones.
But for conventional moto/mech infantry, vehicle based solutions are the way to go.
Great, we are reinventing the technical truck, might as well buy a Toyota Helix at this rate.
The devil is in the details, or specifically, the sensors and electronics attached to the gun mount. If its stationary, on a truck, a MRAP or a full on 8x8 or tracked APC chassis is a variable with own pros and cons.
And I think that for adequate garrisoning/ground control you will need a lot more flexible, small detached units.
If they are to be flexible in any meaning of the term, they have light trucks at least, and those can tow an AA gun, if not have it mounted.
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.
And the prices of these evolved planes went up faster than the plane's altitudes.
Airforces shrank from tens of thousands of aircraft to thousands and then low hundreds for all but superpower ones. Spitfire alone was built in over 20k in just a decade, that's more than the whole standing USAF now, bah, probably more than all the world airforces combined right now.
Eventually that got us multi million dollar supersonic jets that cheap AA couldn't touch, and in turn AA started using fraction of a million dollar missiles to shoot them down.
Phantom was built in 5k, F-16 4.5k, and F-15 barely over 1k, and the 5th gens are being considered in hundreds usually.
The problem with drones is that they are cheap and spammable. Get them into a performance "arms race" against any weapon, drone, SPAAGS or anything that is in the same economic category, and there's no way prices won't go up, which in turn will make them less spammable, and in turn MANPADS will get back to being a worthwhile counter.
If you can adequately hit a bunch of moving tsrgrte coming at you at speed, maybe.
For a person, not easy. But military grade aimbots are not a new technology, and they do it with supersonic missiles since longer than we are alive, what's a 100 or 300 km/h drone for them.
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.
They could do that. In the end they can even go straight to reinventing a
UAV version of supersonic jet. But then it will no longer be a 1000$ spammable slightly modified commercial drone, it will have the price of a supersonic jet. As i said, force the cheap drones into a performance arms race, and they will stop being so cheap very quickly.