If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
Did you see the Youtube link?
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn’t a “Static” defense, this system is more mobile than infantry. It will move with the infantry, it will protect the infantry, and the infantry will protect it.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But you can have an AA Gun on a Pickup truck follow your infantry around, protecting that company. If you have 100 men out on the field, it makes sense to give them at least one AA Gun to protect themselves against a wide variety of drone threats. Or if one AA gun per 100-men is too expensive, then maybe per battalion (~500 men). Etc. etc.
If the enemy drone is moving less than 200mph, the cheaper AA Gun will reliably protect the troops, as long as the person watching the RADAR doesn’t fall asleep. And at 115mph, even a Shahed is slow enough that AA Guns reliably work. Most drones are far slower than that.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
That’s called an F22 Air Superiority Fighter.
Yeah, that’d be nice, but I’m assuming those are off the table for obvious reasons.
The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
Lets start with basic problems first. How can a battalion survive a typical onslaught of Russian drones?
Well, anti-air guns. Bam. We work our way up as the more important, lower-level problems get solved. I know people are talking F16s now, so maybe we’re at the point where fighter jets are the next step forward.
No one is going to shoot at a cheap AA Gun (like the “MACE” system) with hundreds of drones: the hundreds of drones will mostly get shot down and ultimately the price wouldn’t be worth it. Bullets are far cheaper than drones after-all. Now whether a particular MACE will try to shoot down high-flying drones like Shahed is another question, but its also just another problem all together.
MACE’s job is to protect the infantry inside of its shield. And its highly effective at that.