If I’ve learned anything from watching combat footage from Ukraine, it’s that shotguns are very effective at taking down drones. Who would’ve guessed the thing used to kill birds kills drones?
Shotguns are ineffective against drones more than 100ish yards away. ISR drones commonly work well beyond this distance. Shotguns are also ineffective against FPV drones because their high speed demands marksmanship and fast reflexes in order to hit them. Shotguns don't work against any of them in the dark because you can't see them.
So the take-a-way here is that we need to shrink Patriot Batteries down to fit in a backpack and make 100,000 units so we an assign them at the platoon level.
Sure a buckshot works great against a drone or two, but what do you do when there's a swarm of them? We're getting to that level of sophistication with them pretty quickly.
You either need more guns or more range, I guess. Swarming the other guy first is also an option, or sending drones after the drones, although you lose any cost advantage that way.
I know the is NCD, but it sounds like the professional military thinkers are expecting things to keep shifting towards emphasis on mobility and concealment, just because the post-identification kill chain is getting so foolproof.
That 88 is an amazing shotgun for the money too. It has interchangeable barrels, so you can use an 18" barrel for home defense, and even add a pistol grip for that config if you want, then it has a long, vented, hunting barrel, with threaded interchangeable chokes that accept anything made for the Browning Invictor choke. You can take the hunting plug out of the shell tube and hold up to six shells. They're reliable, lightweight, accurate, powerful, and have pretty good recoil pads. They're made by Mossberg in the Mossberg factory. Oh, and like we were saying, they're dirt cheap!