chrisl

As aside about small changes that make a huge difference the improved effectiveness you get from ~40 meters of cable from the Stugna-P launcher to the control panel continues to impress. Of course the next step is a digital data link that lets the operator be hundreds of yards away. We also haven't seen the Israeli spike missile yet. A widespread demonstration of them would great for MANY reasons.

So everything for fifty kilometers back from the forward edge will will entirely diffuse drone systems with the absolute minimum of highly stealthed humans. And then you will have a fires complex with as much protection as an Aegis cruiser, and a price tag to match?

Things like Shahed don't really have sensors other than GPS antennas as far as I can tell - they're given GPS coordinates and they fly to them and blow up.  At shorter ranges (<93 km) they can be programmed to loiter and then be given an updated set of coordinates.  But it doesn't appear that they have any kind of target sensors.
Something that has optical or IR sensors could be blinded by a laser as long as it's in whatever passband the optics have.  If it's not laser guided, an operator might consider putting a filter for common laser wavelengths to prevent being blinded.  If it's laser guided you at least have to let the guide laser wavelength through.

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

Lasers are cool, but they have a lot of limitations, not the least of which are power consumption and the fact that they provide a very detectable return address.  Like a ginormous beacon.  And it may not be looking at 5 or 10 targets spread over 180 degrees (really more like pi steradian), but 50 or 100, some of which may be decoys just to distract it.  
The key word in autonomous defense will be "distributed", just like the attackers.  If you have a distributed defense system against them it's much harder to overwhelm and less susceptible to complete failure if just one gets through or you have a temporary malfunction.  And it can be distributed over a much larger kill zone before it gets to your capital equipment.
The first thing you need to be able to do is detect all the drones.  They're small, they can have few metallic parts, they may not emit much RF if they're truly autonomous, there will be a lot of them, and they'll be taking different routes.  You want a mesh network of sensors that all move around (on their own AVs), have a variety of complementary sensors, overlapping search space, and can communicate with each other.  If any single one (or ten) drop out it doesn't matter - you have a bunch of redundancy.  You have to have a variety of sensor types because  it will be easy to make a small drone invisible to any single particular sensor type, but difficult to make it invisible to many simultaneously and still keep it small and cheap.
As the mesh system detects them, the individual elements will communicate with each other to decide which one of them will kill any particular drone.  The sensor drones may or may not also be the killer drones, and there will be a variety of killer drones and mechanisms.  When they start shooting back at the attacking drones they'll take into account the risk that they'll give themselves away, and for a small number of apparent attackers might take turns so that one starts shooting at them until it gets identified and hit, then the next one, and so on.  A lot of the kill methods will be kinetic because it's cheap and you can store a lot of propulsion energy in a small space.  Some of them will be like dragonflys that just entangle the incoming drones.
If you do have a bigass laser or Phalanx type system, that will be the last resort and essentially located at your "AV carrier" to get the few the dribble through the mesh.  Ideally it will never fire, because as soon as it does it gives itself away and the next wave is headed straight for it.
 

The stuff going "bang" at the pointy end is rounding error.  Making it so that stuff can be there to go "bang" at the right place at the right time for an enormous range of possibilities isn't cheap.

Lasers are cool, but they have a lot of limitations, not the least of which are power consumption and the fact that they provide a very detectable return address.  Like a ginormous beacon.  And it may not be looking at 5 or 10 targets spread over 180 degrees (really more like pi steradian), but 50 or 100, some of which may be decoys just to distract it.  
The key word in autonomous defense will be "distributed", just like the attackers.  If you have a distributed defense system against them it's much harder to overwhelm and less susceptible to complete failure if just one gets through or you have a temporary malfunction.  And it can be distributed over a much larger kill zone before it gets to your capital equipment.
The first thing you need to be able to do is detect all the drones.  They're small, they can have few metallic parts, they may not emit much RF if they're truly autonomous, there will be a lot of them, and they'll be taking different routes.  You want a mesh network of sensors that all move around (on their own AVs), have a variety of complementary sensors, overlapping search space, and can communicate with each other.  If any single one (or ten) drop out it doesn't matter - you have a bunch of redundancy.  You have to have a variety of sensor types because  it will be easy to make a small drone invisible to any single particular sensor type, but difficult to make it invisible to many simultaneously and still keep it small and cheap.
As the mesh system detects them, the individual elements will communicate with each other to decide which one of them will kill any particular drone.  The sensor drones may or may not also be the killer drones, and there will be a variety of killer drones and mechanisms.  When they start shooting back at the attacking drones they'll take into account the risk that they'll give themselves away, and for a small number of apparent attackers might take turns so that one starts shooting at them until it gets identified and hit, then the next one, and so on.  A lot of the kill methods will be kinetic because it's cheap and you can store a lot of propulsion energy in a small space.  Some of them will be like dragonflys that just entangle the incoming drones.
If you do have a bigass laser or Phalanx type system, that will be the last resort and essentially located at your "AV carrier" to get the few the dribble through the mesh.  Ideally it will never fire, because as soon as it does it gives itself away and the next wave is headed straight for it.
 

I'm going to use the US military as a reference. I think that guns are the best bet because of a few factors, some of which you also mention. APS or a modified APS like system that can slave the existing guns is probably the most workable in the near future. The plethora of guns on automated turrets would most likely allow this with very little hardware and software additions and basically any gun now serving a remote turret is more than capable of destroying a drone albeit at differing ranges. The 25mm bushmaster is going to be able to kill drones further away than a 240. 
The vehicles are already networked and digitally connected so the big leap would be a sensor package that is looking for drone type targets and keeping everything on the same page. Your thought is great and would work well but it is probably a lot easier and faster to field sensor packages onto the existing forces than it is to generate an entire new mesh web. In the future that will probably be needed but I don't think we will see anything like that for awhile. In the meantime I'm betting it is back to guns.
If any new platform is added then there needs to be a choice made between reducing your combat power by removing existing vehicles and replacing them with the new laser/AA asset or adding additional vehicles to your TO&E and coming up with the extra personnel to man and support them. If you use what is currently available there shouldn't be much change to formations and just adding capability. 
The other problem with the with both the lasers and the sensor drone screen is that they need to be able to maneuver with your elements. So they need to be fast and have the endurance to keep up all day long. If they don't have those then you have deprived yourself of battlefield mobility and that is one less thing your enemy has to do. Then if you aren't mobile you need to be more worried about arty PGM's (as illustrated in this conflict) and I don't think lasers or drones will be knocking artillery rounds out of the sky any time soon. 
I do completely agree that we are going to see a new layer of conflict with both sides fighting for air superiority at the low level with drones. Kind of like a USAF mini-me. Air superiority drones will definitely be part of the near future and will play a very important role but I'm betting it will be more along the lines of gaining and maintaining control of that layer of the air war than it will be about defending individual units, if that makes sense. It will have the same net result of normal air superiority where it defends the units in the AO or theater or whatever space you maintain superiority over, but will be fought at more of the air campaign level and not by individual ground units deploying their own fleets. 
More than likely I am wrong and things won't work out exactly as I see them, but this is just my take and how it makes sense to me with where technology is and how we tend to fight. The squad, platoon, company and BN are going to have a bunch more recon drones available and probably combat support drones as well. The control of the airspace above the battlefield will be mostly done by others and will just be another box on the combined arms list that needs to be checked. The US Army Drone Corps will cover from the ground up to a few thousand, the USAF will take it from there to the top of the atmosphere and then the Space Force will secure "To Infinity and Beyond!!!!"......
 

Hmmmm replacing one common target with an even bigger and more specialized target doesn't seem like a good trade off. 
The future is drone v. Drone, with every piece of heavy equipment having an organic autonomous armed & recon drone unit slaved to it. The howitzer emplaces,  DRONE 1 detaches from the tow truck cab and automatically goes into CAP.  It returns for recharge,  Drone 2 goes up. 

There are also huge new expenses coming up, we are at the beginning of the drone precision AI revolution, not the end. If you can't deal with something AT LEAST as good as a Shahed 136 in swarms of several hundred at a time, you are not ready for the next war. 
https://www.nammo.com/story/the-range-revolution/
Just the number of guided and extended range 155 that is necessary to be ready for the next round is staggering. I am going to make this my sig line "ammo is expensive, until it is PRICELESS"

The stuff going "bang" at the pointy end is rounding error.  Making it so that stuff can be there to go "bang" at the right place at the right time for an enormous range of possibilities isn't cheap.

Yeah, no.
But since the ammunition is quite old by now, it could be well past due date. Then we have to scrap it, of course. I guess in that case, Ukraine would win the call for bids.
? wut? No, we don't. Germany may be exemplary for some things, but it is definitely NOT for military spending. That is right in line with airport planning.

The stuff going "bang" at the pointy end is rounding error.  Making it so that stuff can be there to go "bang" at the right place at the right time for an enormous range of possibilities isn't cheap.

The stuff going "bang" at the pointy end is rounding error.  Making it so that stuff can be there to go "bang" at the right place at the right time for an enormous range of possibilities isn't cheap.

BANG!

At squad level dispersions it might be tricky, but at platoon level a bunch of cell phones that are meshed (no outside network required) could probably do it - a vaguely modern smartphone has more than enough computing capability in it, and many have enough DSP that they should could do waveform comparison on the fly to make sure the computation is using the same signal from all of them.

I think we're more or less in agreement.  Sat intel absolutely isn't a substitute for small drones, but when the weather is bad, neither side is going to be flying small drones (and maybe not even big ones), and hi-res through the clouds once an hour over a battlefield is going to give the side that has it an advantage over the side that doesn't.  Yes, satellite has been around for a long time, but in the last decade the capability and coverage has gone *way* up and the cost has gone *way* down.  You can look at what the NRO was giving away to other agencies a decade or more ago because it wasn't useful to them anymore and start to guess where things have gone since then.  

I had rockets with cameras on them when I was a kid.  It’s a lot lighter acceleration than an artillery shell. I’ve done concept designs for fancy-ish optics that could take that kind of impact but haven’t managed to get anybody to throw money at me to make it happen.

As someone with a cancer diagnosis, it's fairly clear that's not as true nowadays as it was when it killed my mother... Some cancers, or late diagnosis have very poor prognosis. Pancreatic's one of those. But as a general statement, it's no longer true.

Nature solves it by hunkering down in inclement weather. Birds don't fly in storms or even heavy rain.  
I'm not sure we have any truly all-weather aircraft.  Maybe something like this, flying above the weather:

At the end though, bigger is better as far as rough weather resistance is concerned.  Flying in high winds, into icing etc requires a bigger and faster platform. Same is true for ships and storms, or even arctic wildlife.

I shot a Hyundai gig last week, 6 days. On D5 afternoon it was pouring rain and 35-50km winds up by Newmarket. We were shooting in carrot farm country, so extremely little hedge/tree growth near us. In addition to the U-Crane car and a truck-rigged RED Komodo, we had a drone unit, "DRONE BOY" from Toronto, shooting with their FPV "Beast" drone.
"Beast" as a name is a bit of overhype...it's a perfectly good drone, well operated, but anything above 35km is almost unusable. Gusting is the worst, with rain being the nail in the coffin - you can't protect the lens much on a drone like you (somewhat) can on a rigged or craned camera. The drone could also easily flip (despite top/bottom rotors) and faceplant itself in a carrot patch.
In later casual conversation with the drone guys, I asked was anything in development to handle these kind of wet, windy conditions. Basically, no, becuase - Physics is a bitch.  Essentially, the problem is the physical format of a camera-carrying drone - it's a horizontal, wide frame that in higher winds is fundamentally prone to turning into a wing and flipping itself. Your engines are fighting that uplift constantly, which drains the battery quicker than a teenager empties their parents wallet. To help you can increase the weight of the frame, but now your engines need even more power, etc, etc - Oh hello, engineering design death spiral...
By the time you've got a drone designed to where it can smoothly and easily handle this weather and above then you might as well get a proper helo.
Situations like this (sorta rough weather but totally workable in), which overwhelm your average size+* drone are why there will still be blank spots in the tactical ISR of any battlefield.
It implies also that good infantry will make better use of bad weather to penetrate enemy positions, especially if they bring a few disposable drones.
 
*I cant speak to MIL-specific designs, maybe they can handle rough weather better but...physics doesn't care if you're a civvy or a sergeant...