The demand for an effective, and above all inexpensive, defense against long-range strike drones has been rising for years. Unsurprisingly, weapons makers compete to promote their own "antidotes," often presenting them as cost-effective solutions.
In reality, most of these offers amount to little more than sales pitches. The hard truth is that a genuinely cheap counter-drone system does not exist today and is unlikely to appear in the foreseeable future. The German defense publication Hartpunkt lays this out in detail. Below, Defense Express highlights its key points.
Read more: Ukrainian Wild Hornets Workshop Revealed Impressive Effectiveness of Their Sting Interceptors Against Shahed/Gerbera Type UAVs
First, any system to counter long-range drones requires two critical layers: Effectors — lethal or non-lethal means to destroy or neutralize the target. Detection — without which the effector is useless.
Whenever "cheap" solutions are advertised — be they loitering munitions, miniature missiles, programmable-fuse rounds, or simple bullets — the promoters routinely omit the broader system costs.
This is because the expense grows in proportion to the size of the area to be defended. The wider the area, the more detection nodes and effectors must be deployed and networked into a coherent system.
A notable example comes from a CSIS study (July 2022), which estimated that building a nationwide low-altitude threat monitoring system in the United States would cost around $15 billion. And that was based on relatively inexpensive options such as acoustic sensors, radar aerostats, and integrating civilian weather radar into a unified grid.
The cheaper the effector, the shorter its effective range — and the more of them are needed. For instance, a high-end system with a 20 km engagement range could cover the same area that would require roughly 360 "cheap" systems with a 1 km reach.
Promoters also tend to overlook launcher and system costs. A laser shot may cost only cents, but the laser system itself is enormously expensive.
As Hartpunkt stresses, there is no truly cheap anti-drone system. What does exist are partial solutions that can reduce costs within an inherently expensive architecture, usually by focusing narrowly on a single threat.
Ukraine's experience illustrates this dynamic. Early in the war, mobile fire teams with machine guns countered Shahed drones effectively. But when russia raised drone operating altitudes, those teams lost much of their utility. Ukraine then began deploying anti-aircraft drones, only to face russia's mass production of faster rocket-powered drones like the Geran-3, which outpace slower rotary-wing interceptors.
This cycle underscores a basic rule: offense drives innovation, while defense reacts. Attackers adapt once they understand a defender's capabilities, leaving the defender constantly one step behind.
In practice, any claim of a "cheap" countermeasure must be judged against the total system cost and its real effectiveness. Moreover, planners must recognize that any single solution risks obsolescence almost as soon as it enters service, wasting scarce resources.
The conclusion is stark: there is no "magic pill" called a cheap anti-drone defense — not with today's technologies and not in the foreseeable future.
Defense Express would add that the technological race between drones and counter-drone systems should be seen as a separate front of the war. For Ukraine, this is not a procurement problem to solve once, but a continuous struggle requiring adaptation and innovation.
Germany, meanwhile, is only beginning to consider a national counter-drone architecture — a capability it currently lacks. This gap was highlighted in a recent incident: when russia launched just 20 cheap foam Gerber drones at Poland, the defense response cost many times more than the attack itself. Shooting down only four of those drones cost roughly 245 times their price, based on munitions cost alone.
Read more: Ukraine Deploys World's First Drone-Based Air Defense: the Nemesis Regiment Downs 60 Shahed and Geran Drones in Two Months
