If you don’t have people in them, you don’t really need all that expensive armor to protect them. If you don’t need that expensive armor, you can make them much smaller, faster and cheap. If they are cheap you can make a lot of them.
Picture thousands of units the size of an ATV which are fast, armed and autonomous.
Now picture them landing on the shores of America.
Scary.
In past I have wondered if the US could create “economy car” flying drones. That is, a very simple aircraft with an engine, a fuel tank, and fly by wire controlled by an off-the-shelf computer with hardened data storage, so that if it was fried by an AESA radar, or the equivalent, it would continue to fly with its last to-target directions.
A “beer can” body over a low cost frame, with an off-the-shelf engine. The brain is modular and can be plugged in just before ramp launch. A simple weapon like a 500 to 1000 pound bomb. One use, expendable.
In concept it could be made for under $20,000 each.
A Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, after program cost of $66.7 billion, has a per unit flyaway cost of $150 million.
For the price of a single Raptor, you could build an *armada* of, let’s be conservative, five thousand of these drones. If properly directed and launched, say one thousand of these would be impossible to stop short of using an airburst nuclear munition. Over your own territory. Which creates its own problems.
While an advanced fighter aircraft could easily shoot down a dozen of these drones, that doesn’t matter. By the time it returned to its airbase, there would likely be no place left to land, much less refuel and rearm.
With each successive wave of drones, the enemy nation would be far less capable to defend itself. And *then* you send in the high performance and stealth aircraft to take out their hardened targets.
Oh, and flying tanks as well.