Truly modern fighters have advanced defenses across the EM spectrum. Hardening a drone against those defenses makes them no longer “small” and “cheap”. Also, drones typically have much lower speed than a modern fighter. An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone where a key property is that it is much faster than the fighter, but this makes it expensive.
An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone
Yeah.
And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.
No, because all the things you got rid of to make drones cheap when fighting tanks are required when fighting fighters. You only need to be slightly faster and slightly more maneuverable than your target to take it down, while older AT weapons were much faster: so slower drones could still be just as effective. This is not true for fighter jets.
> Ares is building a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles.
Not sure what this has to do with my claims about not being able to use cheap drones for taking down fighter jets. Military ships, like tanks, are also somewhat slower and somewhat less maneuverable than fighter jets, I believe.
I think it would already be a big advantage not needing a very expensive launch platform like a fighter jet, even if the unit price of the drone was a bit higher than that of the missile.
