I bet we could get a cruise missile to "land" on a runway. The only catch is that it usually does this concurrently with a planned rapid disassembly.

That's the "essentially" part. The key bit here is "cheap counter to the F-35 you can mass-produce in the hundreds or thousands for every F-35 you'll face".

Nothing says you can't have a few dozen/hundred drones with SAMs, either.

But you can't handwave away the difference without understanding how it would affect the cost of your "cheap counter to the F-35." Do you know how much an AIM-120 costs? How much it weighs? How much reinforcement the wing structure of a drone would require to carry, launch and land with this weaponry?

> AIM-120 cost

$300k - $400k

> How much it weighs?

152 kg

> How much reinforcement the wing structure of a drone would require to carry, launch and land with this weaponry?

According to General Atomics;

"With a 1,500 lb (680 kg) payload, its wings are 'more than sufficient' to mount larger air-to-air or air-to-surface missiles."

The last quote is for the Reaper, a new version of the Predator that costs 4x as much. $16m is much cheaper than a fighter jet, but when you start deploying them in swarms of 20:1 ratios, the numbers don't work.

You're flailing around moving the goalposts at this point. The Predator/Reaper drones are more generalist platforms than you'd need for a disposable drone built around an air to air missile.

You cannot just blindly put missiles on a drone without any radars or sensors. The current Predator platform should be how much it would cost...minimum.

Well, no. Originally drones could not land. That's a modern feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_drone

In general, you don't want a missile to land. You want it to blow up really close to the bad guy.