What are the aerodynamic abilities of a drone swarm? That is, to what altitude can a swarm reach, to interdict an incoming aircraft? How fast? My impression of current drones is that they are fairly small, less than 2 metres diameter, which implies pretty tight limits on range, altitude, speed, and time-on-station. So even if you have thousands of them, a conventional bomber can come over at an altitude the swarm can't reach -- or a fleet of bombers can hang off the border for hours, probing at random, until the drones run out of juice -- or a fighter can make a fast pass, dodging the much slower-climbing swarm, and drop chaff or smoke or an EMP weapon to confuse the swarm.

Bottom line, I seriously doubt drones could permanently block access to a national airspace.

look at airplanes a century ago and from the perspective of someone then try to extrapolate from those to an sr71 or a space shuttle in just a generation or two

Something like the “Dog Dod Grid” from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age...

>> Atlantis/Shanghai occupied the loftiest ninety percent of New Chusan's land area - an inner plateau about a mile above sea level, where the air was cooler and cleaner. Parts of it were marked off with a lovely wrought-iron fence, but the real border was defended by something called the dog pod grid - a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats...

>> These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern about ten centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher.

Further reading: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=243

There is a long history of people claiming that new weapons would make war impossible, going back to the crossbow. So far the predictions have been wrong.

> Entire wars could be made impossible.

Maybe, but it might make others go nuclear if there aren't conventional options available anymore.

Canard or red herring used to justify militarism and military aggression. In our world when countries get too powerful to fight they usually simply don't and use proxies to fight conventional wars.

anti drone swarm drone: several dozen large-ish sized x8 hexacopters, capable of 2 hour flight time and carrying a 10kg load, with a gimbal mounted semiauto 12 gauge shotgun + large magazine of birdshot shells.

Drone swarms are possible, sure, but it's also quite possible to miniaturize existing concepts of antiaircraft missiles and guns, and automate those.

Or build swarms of disposable 2 meter wingspan size drones that can fly above a drone swarm, and drop chaff consisting of long lengths of fishing line. Tangle propellers.

Basically something like this, which is a bit smaller than the Zipline drones:

https://www.banggood.com/Believer-1960mm-Wingspan-EPO-Portab...

...100 years later it’s all nanoscale and we’re living in ‘The Diamond Age” and wondering where it all went wrong.

Drones are small and hard to see with small cheap sensors. You have to see them to shoot them, the range of a shotgun is very small, and the sky is a big place.

anti anti drone swarm drone drone swarm: a swarm of those.

or, fly a C-17 sized aircraft at FL400 over the anti-anti-anti-droneswarm and drop many metric tons of unspooled fine gauge fishing line. More seriously though, if small drone swarms will be limited in the altitudes that they can reach (being limited by battery life, not enough motor runtime to ascend to FL200, travel laterally, and then down to a ground attack again, for instance), any modern air force that can establish air superiority over a battlefield... Will have a lot of different options to attack drone swarms from above.

Please, China and Russia, don't do this.