I think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws.

On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for making them blow their $1k active countermeasures on your $500 missiles before sending a real one in to finish the job. Heck, even just forcing your adversary to treat every sky like it's hostile is worth a lot.

Both approaches are clearly worthy of development.

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swiftcoder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> $1k active countermeasures

Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?

They are currently trying to shoot down Iranian drones with $4 million Patriot missiles

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cucumber3732842 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?

The IR flare or 30mm bullets or whatever, not the whole system that fires it.

	▲	swiftcoder 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The $4 million is the sticker price of the PAC-3 payload, not the launch system (reports put the missile battery + radar setup at ~$350 million, before you load any ammo)

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Hasz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work.

	▲	phkahler 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work. And addressing that should also bring down the defense budget. Oh wait...