“The A-10 is combat proven; has loiter time, deadly gun, and carries a range of missiles.”
The USA is not just broke we are 30+ trillion in debt.
The A10 is $22,531 per hour according to a 2023 GAO report.
A single 30x173mm shell is $65-100 EACH that gun fires 4000 per min or more property 66 per second you shoot 2-3 second bursts or you melt the barrels. So $6600 per second or $12,000 per engagement.
The odds of hitting a small drone with a shell is small that gun was designed to put 50% of it’s rounds inside a 40 FOOT circle at 3000 feet range. You would need some form of either proximity fused ammo $$$ per round or some kind of air burst fuse setting (time, number of rotations, radio or laser rear facing sensor and a radar tracker on the aircraft running that radar to send a detonation command) again $$$$$$ for the radar pod and $$$ per round.
Missiles yeah about that a AIM9X...
AIM-9X (Block II)~$472,000 (Air Force)~$430,000 (Navy)
AIM-120C-8 model was around $1.9 million in July 2025.
Cheapest would be the APKWS (Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System) rocket is approximately $35,000 per unit.
Stinger’s are $120,000 to $150,000 per missile.
Remember you are shooting at a $20000 or less drone.
The proper way to down drones is with other pusher prop drones. Using commercial grade smartphone 50 megapixel cameras the triple lens kind that have low light and shortwave IR night vision modes. Using the processors and gyros and magnetometer of a smartphone and also the 5G NR radio module for realtime comms basically take a low end smartphone out of its case minus it’s battery and wire it to the drones power supply. AI software to pick the enemy drop out of the sky or against the earth surface background and plot an intercept course. Once close have a 6 barrel or better yet a revolver single barrel.shotgun shooting TSS(tungsten super shot)@ 18 gram/cm^3 denser than depleted uranium a #1(4mm) size where a single pellet can full penetrate deer sized animals. A 2oz 3.5” mag 12 gauge load at 10 yards would smash a drone’s electronics or control surfaces to bits. Then drone kills cost $10 the cost of a TSS shell and the flight time cost of a recoverable drone. Make it gas powered , rear pusher prop, and launch and land them off a truck bed catapult with.A two wire hanging snag line like we do Scan Eagle drones. Easy peasy.
Is this the way the U.S. military is taking out drones today? It sounds more aspirational than operational.