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I think what a lot of countries, like Germany (German here), for a lesson, is that your current stock of weapons is most useful in the beginning of a conflict as the conflict rapidly changes weapon development and your weapon will need heavy upgrades or they are no longer useful. All western weapons get less useful by the minute.
If anything, Western precision artillery and rocketry became more and more useful in disrupting Russian logistics.
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Your linked weapon has a range of 40km and a payload of 5kg. Meanwhile the US has repurposed their SDB1 program with an M26 motor and now uses it for artillery purposes with 150km range and a warhead weighing 93kg but since it is a bomb from 2006 it is not a threat, right?
Turns out a plastic airframe with a chainsaw motor, RPG warhead and some mostly COTS electronics can inflict similar damage for a small fraction of that.
These are more directly comparable to Israel's Harpy/Harop, still costing fortunes are they com from the 80s and carry all of proper military development the red tape.
"FTA: they would involve placing aluminum AM-2 mats along a strip of highway, up to 1,500 feet long. This will be sufficient for the stealth jets to carry out short takeoffs and vertical landings while protecting the road beneath them." "AM-2 matting consists of 1 1/2" x 2' steel rectangles coated with a epoxy nonskid material, available in both 6 and 12 foot lengths, and are assembled in a brickwork pattern to form…
They would send out personal to remove FOD (foreign object debris) before any operations and before laying those mats, I assume.
When I want to know more about the future of warfare as a hacker news reader I base my opinion on a few cherry picked twitter/reddit videos (plus literal Russian propaganda) and this makes me more knowledgable than military leaders and qualified to dictate the direction of military procurement.
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To name a few:
1) Drones do not have the superhuman capabilities that people who know nothing about aircraft design seem to think they have. Removing the pilot does not let you pull more Gs because almost all aircraft are structurally limited. If you try to pull 30Gs in a fighter sized aircraft the wings will fall off. If you make a limited AI which can do specific tasks better than a human then you just stick it in a fighter which ALSO has a human in it to cover the other parts which the AI sucks at.
2) Drones with the same capabilities as manned aircraft are not actually cheaper than manned aircraft. They have all the same expensive parts and they're the same size.
3) Until human-level AI becomes available drones are strongly limited by communications meaning that a drone fighter is about the same cost, but less capable.
4) You cannot just replace expensive systems with swarms of cheap systems. Smaller aircraft with fewer of the expensive systems are fundamentally lacking capabilities meaning that for many tasks they cannot do the job, full stop. A lancet is not 1/10000 as good as a B-2 at attacking a target 2000 miles away because it does not have the range to get there. If you put a cheap numerous system up against an expensive system which the cheap system has literally zero capacity to engage, it doesn't matter how many of the cheap system you throw at the fight, they won't win. This is why expensive systems which can operate with complete superiority tend to end up being more economical overall in warfare. As the saying goes, there's nothing more expensive than having the world's second best air-force. Not having your aircraft blown up is typically preferable, even if they were cheap.
Cheap drones have their place but they do not replace existing high-end systems.
Sikorsky is gonna bring back the Comanche. I can feel it. Yeah baby!
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30405/behold-sikorskys...