> A patient observer of the war in Ukraine could have updated some war doctrines.

A patient observer? Any random idiot of the street that cares to watch the news occasionally could've figured that out.

> If you are an American tax payer, I would understand it if you were banging your head on the table right now

Oh I am, and my representatives hear from me very, very often. Unfortunately, it falls on deaf ears. Seemingly no one around me cares, and our leaders certainly don't. I feel like I'm going insane and living in some kind of weird bizzaro world.

Shooting Patriots at flying lawn mowers (I suppose you mean Shaheds, Gerberas, and the like) is crazy. Patriots are key to shooting down ballistic missiles.

To the best of my knowledge, the explosives-laden lawn mowers flying over Ukraine are mostly destroyed by cannon fire from the ground, cannon / machine-gun fire from aircraft (including converted GA aircraft), and interceptor drones.

I expect the US armed forces to be testing oodles of various cheap drones by now. E.g. the US has used Shahed-lookalike drones while attacking Iran recently.

AA artillery (radar guided, I'm sure even better improvements with modern tech could be made) seems like a pretty easy win here as well? Cheap bullets, downside being populated areas might impose a risk due to low-flying objects and the interception trajectories needed.

Something like the Phalanx only not $50k/burst.

That's really neat hah.

The US deployed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon... to "cheaply" kill incoming slow munitions. It requires planes in the air but that's sort of table stakes for an operation involving the US in general.

We can make plenty of those rockets. They are cheaper than Shaheds! Though that doesn't count the plane time! $20k per hour per plane at least.

As the cat and mouse game continues, Shahed style weapons used against countries with any meaningful defense, like "drone interceptors" or helicopters or old warplanes, the munitions will continue to evolve towards "Just a guided missile at this point", where the situation again transitions back to the economics of cruise missile vs patriot.

The Hydra pods can be used against any precision weapon up to subsonic cruise missiles, so their versatility and pricetag only gets more effective, while every effort making the Shahed more survivable only makes it more expensive and harder to build.

In an interesting twist, a good air force now ends up doing good work against cruise missiles.

If cruise missiles try to go faster, supersonic, to make these Hydra pods ineffective, they end up getting more expensive rather quick, at which point the $4 million patriot missile makes sense.

The Patriot isn't even a fiscally efficient anti-missile system. The Israeli Iron Dome can intercept subsonic cruise missiles and costs about $100k an interception.

Most "Missile Defense" munitions are expensive because they have to be capable against ballistic missiles, which are much more difficult to intercept. MANPADS are sometimes effective against cruise missiles and they are often cheap and plentiful, though putting them in the right place at the right time is the hard problem there. The Hydra pods are actually better in that case because a modern jet will reposition rather quickly. Then the problem becomes noticing the incoming munitions early enough to get a plane on its tail.

All this still depends on industry to build it though. These missiles are cheap in bulk but that still requires the factory exist, and that isn't always cheap or easy or fast. In Ukraine, drones get a secondary benefit of being a very survivable industry, as it uses entirely commodity components and even 3D printed parts so it can easy disperse and scale however you can manage.