Drones as the crucial element for air defense building against drones and cruise missiles at the rear and battlefield

Drones are an effective tool for organizing offensive and defensive actions in modern warfare. The war between Russia and Ukraine has shown that inexpensive drones can cause critical damage to military equipment and civilian objects of high value. As a result, inexpensive drones used for air attacks have become an effective tool for inflicting very large economic losses on the enemy. They also create a great psychological impact on the population, which leads to significant physiological exhaustion. Such losses exceed the cost of the drones themselves by tens, hundreds, and even thousands of times. Indirect losses can reach a cost ratio of even hundreds of thousands of times. Thus, today a new extremely effective combat weapon has appeared on the battlefield. Today, the problem of developing new technical systems for shooting down aerial drones has arisen. Existing air or ground-based systems of various levels (aircraft, helicopters, cannons, surface-to-air missiles, machine guns, etc.) are focused on shooting down fundamentally different air military platforms, such as aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, etc. Therefore, these technical systems have a high cost and are too economically unprofitable for shooting down not only manned but even autonomous drones. Therefore, the use of existing platforms to shoot down air drones quickly economically exhausts defenders. The purpose of the article is to develop approaches (designs) for the functioning of an air defense system using special drones both for rear defense and on the battlefield. In this case, it is proposed to use both existing drones and technical platforms, and promising directions for the development of new drones and platforms for air defense are described. A description of existing strike drones and the design of protection systems against them are given. It is proposed to create a new class of drones – drone hunters – to destroy enemy drones. Some platforms for destroying enemy drones are described in detail. A hierarchically organized system for organizing the protection of the country's territory from enemy drones using hunter drones with various structural details is developed. A system for organizing protection from enemy drones on the battlefield is briefly described. A concept for a universal organization of a hierarchically echeloned organization of air defense against enemy drones is formed. It is emphasized that many drone defense platforms can be effective against cruise and/or ballistic missiles. The results obtained in the article form a new approach to developing strategic programs for the development of drones in the conditions of modern warfare.