> Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins.

Nope. The calculus is not about individual components, but about overall cost of the entire system and all of its associated support. What was the material, labor, and opportunity cost to install the turret? What was it protecting (which is now presumably destroyed by drones, or captured by the enemy)? You're also still assuming that you're facing off against guerillas fighting an asymmetrical war on a shoestring budget, but that's not the case. Whatever force you're fighting can be trivially bankrolled by a peer power who is happy to bankroll them to make you bleed to death. China will be happy to build plenty of cruise missiles, and plenty more drones.

The argument is literally that it is problematic to send 100 k$ interceptors to stop 1 k$ drones and then you turn about and argue you can end 100 k$ cruise missiles to stop 1 k$ turrets. Your argument is inconsistent with the entire premise.

You have presented no evidence as to the overall cost of this mystical unstoppable drone swarm. In contrast, we do know that shotguns, machine guns, and bullets are cheap, mass-produced, and mass-deployed by the tens of millions.

The key unknown of my proposal is the bulk cost and production of a small automated turret or fighter drone that can economically and flexibly deploy cheap bullet interceptors to asymmetrically defeat expensive drones. However, the operational requirements for such devices are simple and within the range of existing technology.

There is no clear evidence that cheap explosive drone swarms are magically cheaper than cheap fighter drone swarms or cheap ground drone swarms. It could easily go either way and without a rigorous actual analysis you and I are both unqualified to determine what is actually dominant.