[Vespers War]

I think it'll be interesting to see how both 1 & 2 work out. A couple articles I read had one of the Epirus folks describing Leonidas as essentially firing a thousand "bolts" (my term, not theirs) of radiation a second, so a hundred drones may not be enough since they'll need a couple minutes to cross the beaten area of a Leonidas, giving it enough time to fire literally tens of thousands of shots at each drone. And while individual FPV drones can be effective if they hit a vulnerable part of a vehicle or any part of a soldier, individual hits have also been pretty useless if hitting even lightly armored parts of a vehicle, so one successful drone may take out a valuable piece of kit, but it's also possible ten drones will get through and just scratch the paint on some IFVs. Larger drones can have more effect on target, but they're also easier for that second layer of gun-based air defense to engage.

Each shot is also a narrow cone of radiation, so while the tracking radar might be vulnerable to HARM, I'm not sure how well the HARM missiles that rely on continuous lock would do. I'm also not sure how well HARM would survive being blasted by one of the HERF units. And as a third point, most air forces are pretty crap at SEAD - they have few or no dedicated assets for it and most of their pilots don't get enough flight hours to dedicate enough time to SEAD to get good at it. Even with HARM and using long-range rocket artillery to hit low-mobility air defense systems, Ukraine hasn't suppressed Russian air defenses, and Russia's only even partially effective tactic against Ukrainian air defense has been to try to deplete their stock of SAMs with drone and missile attacks. China might be more effective, but the current war has shown that effective SEAD capabilities are part of very few countries' repertoire.

Overall, my feeling is that it'll change warfare, but drones being an unstoppable weapon reminds me of the 1930s claim that the bomber always gets through - true at the time, but a temporary technological advantage that will become untrue in a near-peer environment but might still hold true when one side has an overwhelming advantage either technologically or industrially.