The question remains, does it cost more to deploy this than the cost to build the drones+explosive? And can it deal with a swarm of drones? Drones that drop from a high altitude? How about just dropping white phosphorus munitions?
At some point stationary expensive equipment will have to be kept far away from the battle front. Anything within drone distance will be an easy target.
Jamming tech is useful when the drone is manually controlled. If the drone has a camera, map, gps, imu etc, it will be difficult jamming all of these at the same time for a enough to get its dead reckoning totally of course...
There are a number of EMP weapons now that can fry a non-hardened drone. Some have been given to Ukraine by NATO countries.
White phosphorus is not the wonder weapon that the media makes it out to be. The US started using it in WW II as a type of smoke grenade/artillery round. If the burning phosphorous hits skin it does create nasty burns, but it would do little harm to a buttoned up armored vehicle.
Some of the counter measures probably will be expensive. The US gold plates everything military.
Point defenses to take out drones will have to be co-located with all stationary facilities. The world's military manufacturers will be making a lot of anti-drone weapons. It will make fighting more expensive than it is now, but that's been a trendline in war for over 100 years. In 1914 deploying large fleets of aircraft was considered prohibitively expensive, but only thirty years later the allies were putting 1000 bombers with equivalent numbers of fighters protecting them over Germany and the Germans were throwing hundreds of fighters at the raids.
Swarms of drones will be one technique that will be tried to over come defenses, but sending out a swarm of drones also depleted your own supply of drones. And sending a swarm of drones to one target leaves other targets uncovered. The US is attacking with 300 Abrams and the defender has 1000 drones. Sending out the drones in swarms of 100 targeting one target can potentially disable 10 Abrams, then the defenders still have 290 to deal with.
The Iranians have a swarm tactic to deal with US carriers. They have thousands of small craft capable of launching one anti-ship missile each. The plan is to send out a swarm of these boats to overwhelm the defense of the carrier task force. In that case, it may work because carriers are a limited resource. The US only has 11 commissioned carriers with three under construction and one of the active carriers will be decommissioned in 2025.
Tanks are much more problematical to target with swarms because they are much more numerous. A defender would need a staggeringly large fleet of drones to counter a large armored force and there are only a few armies in the world which will be able to do that. The US Army being one of them. Unless the US devolves into another civil war, it's unlikely the US Army is going to need to take out fleets of Abrams with drones.
Hellfire missile aside (and it take a large drone to carry one of those - not a quad copter), there is nothing I know of that a drone can carry that can penetrate the armor of a M1A2 tank.
Tanks are not dead. And it's exactly why Ukraine has been begging for them.
All tanks have thinner armor on top of the turret and the engine deck has no armor at all because the heat from the engine has to vent somewhere. A drone hit on the engine deck probably could disable the engine, which probably wouldn't destroy an Abrams, but would put it out of action.
