Right up there with using two million-dollar Tomahawks to flatten some empty tents!
Who knew Patriot could see and track something that small?
In a long sustained war, this kind of thing will seriously impact the war fighting capability. High-tech weapons can be effective, good for troops on the ground, but it is economically impossible to produce a vast number of them. It cannot be made quickly either.
That’s the real take-away from this episode. Yeah, it may be overkill to take out a $200 drone with a multi-million dollar missile, but I’d like to know what the radar cross section of that quad copter is. Propellers increase your RCS, but even when that is factored in, it’s still a very size target.
Making it more impressive: target tracking radars (and the missiles that rely on them for guidance) have velocity gates; below a certain speed, the target simply can’t be seen. Looks like the Israelis (and Raytheon) have done some modifications with Patriot to engage very small, slow-moving targets—one heck of an engineering feat.