This leans towards my belief that the US is fundamentally fighting last century's war against adversaries that have _massively_ evolved.

Look at the Ukranians: they are currently fielding an entire suite of counter-drone tech: fast pursuit systems to hit Russian drones on launch, cheap FPV drones for last-mile intercept, integrated radar/acoustic monitoring to target and respond to launches... and of course, the Russians are responding with IR floodlights and air to air launchers on their drones, or even just launching a bunch of cheap foam decoy Gerbera's in the middle of their Shahed's to soak up intercepts. Meanwhile, the front lines are basically static -- any infantry from either side that tries to go into the kill box gets picked off by loitering drones.

And the best the US can field today is "$1mm per Patriot" or "cover a tiny area with Land Phalanx (which also costs something like $4k/second burst)".

This betrays your ignorance of drone defense tech.

The US had APKWS (anti-drone guided missiles) operational in the 2010s and these have been widely deployed. They are effective and cost less than a Shahed. These are just mods of an existing dirt-cheap rocket for which the US has an effectively unlimited supply. The Europeans have similar systems under development.

The US has deployed high-power anti-drone laser systems for a few years now with several operational kills. These are still new but are expected to replace CIWS. It can kill a drone for the cost of a Starbucks coffee and has a virtually unlimited magazine.

US pioneered military drones and defenses decades before the Ukraine/Russia war. There are many operational lessons to be learned from that war but both sides are using drone defense tech that is considerably less sophisticated than what the US has available.

Isn't Ukraine helping now with the anti missile/drone defense?