I have to think this s—t is just for show. The kinds of countermeasures a drone swarm can develop would easily defeat those systems.
I would be designing ways of attacking those drone swarms which are completely different and would just require WWII technology.
Well I seem to remember the reason SAM were developed was because the aircraft were staying out of ground gun range.
Maybe a layered defense. Something. I don’t know hunter/kill drones with a 50 cal quad back up for close in targets?
After all the quad 50 set up has been around since WW2
“...I would be designing ways of attacking those drone swarms which are completely different and would just require WWII technology.”
Posters’ knowledge of air defense and anti-air systems is incomplete when it isn’t dated.
There is no anti-aircraft system dating to 1945 or earlier that would do any good.
Gun systems were the only ground-to-air defense systems to see use in combat during World War Two. They enjoyed some success against mass bomber formations arriving at high altitudes, but had to be fielded in very large numbers for that tactic to work. They were almost useless against maneuvering targets, and targets at low altitude. Range to target was always the key parameter and no human can judge range accurately enough (not even fighter pilots, despite what they tell you).
Human eyes, hands, and minds have only limited abilities to aim a machine gun to hit an airborne target; the 50 cal quad mount (M45 through M51 nomenclature), manually trained and fired, was a last-ditch system with very low probability of hit.
http://www.radartutorial.eu/06.antennas/Conical%20Scan.en.html
Anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) hit probabilities began to climb during WW2 when conical-scan tracking radar was married to gunlaying computers (all analog): the gunlayer system took tracking information from the radar, developed tracking data on the target, predicted where it would be at the end of the shell’s time of flight, then sent commands to the gun mount, to aim it so the shell would go to that predicted location. Some set fuzes too. If the target made a turn or other sudden maneuver after the gun was fired, the shell would miss.
No one uses conical-scan now, and most gun systems have become obsolete. Too easy to defeat. Better radar and target-track systems have been fielded, but all AAA is inescapably limited, because once the shell leaves the gun tube, its trajectory cannot be corrected.
Ground-to-air missiles were developed because it was possible to correct their flight path after launch: they could be guided. Either by radar, or by passive homing on emissions from the target (”heat seeker”). Electronic advances were necessary, and many missiles (especially air-launched ones) still exhibited remarkably poor probability of hit well into the 1970s.
Manned fighter aircraft have been almost useless since before 1937: throughout WW2, they carried almost no payload (P-51D Mustang had less than 15 seconds’ worth of ammunition: that’s not even five three-second bursts, for those unfamiliar with math), and the speed and range involved in air combat outstripped the human ability so see and react before 1940, and require a command-and-control net to do anything at all. The equipment for the net is large and heavy, so the Army cannot take much of it with them into the field. The capabilities of manned fighters against drones have not yet been demonstrated; bioqubit is right to be skeptical about swarming.
CWIS like in the image posted by ro_dreaming, in post 8, will not be of any use. It cannot be mounted on a vehicle: too big, too heavy, too much power required. It works OK over water but when trying to track and hit targets over land, it is very limited.
Anti-armor missiles like BGM-71 TOW and AGM-114 Hellfire will not work: too short-range, too slow. Anti-armor missiles are designed specifically to function in ground combat; parameters for aerial use are different.
The US Army did develop and field field-mobile air defense systems including M48 Chaparral and M163 Vulcan, but both were withdrawn from service decades ago.