Fighting fire with fire in the air:
As the result of a joint American-Israeli effort an Israel firm has created a new quad-copter optimized to take down enemy quad-copters and small fixed-wing UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Called Skylord it has been tested for over a year in southern Israel (Gaza) to bring down the kites and helium balloons and Hamas has been using from Gaza to transport incendiaries or small explosives into southern Israel. Skylord has brought down 2,500 of these devices so far.
This is the kind of thing I advocated in this Army article discussing how to defeat drone swarms that can target forward American troops.
Small drones operating in swarms operate in the "brown skies" just over ground units and beneath the capabilities of friendly aircraft and missiles designed to knock down planes and missiles.
And making maneuver companies carry around equipment to shoot down those drone swarms is a major burden and distraction from fighting the enemies in front of them.
Ideally, most of the air defense burden for maneuver companies would be carried by units at higher levels that can extend combat air patrols with drones over those companies.
Companies and platoons should have some ground-based air defense systems for last-ditch point defense but the companies and platoons should not have to do it all.
Skylord essentially does the job by poking a stick into the spinning blades of drones. So this is a far cry from my hope for kinetically armed drone fighters. But it is a start on the concept.
