Ukraine is using old training aircraft with a guy with a shotgun in the back shooting the drones down.

Just think the small Cessnas and pipers littered around that could be used for a similar task.

https://youtu.be/GrzzYTXgnMQ?is=zChAgYfc5ZEi25gt

Edited out bad grammer

Yea the Gepard seems like a much better fit for those cheap drones.

Unfortunately it's been long discontinued and it's successor Skyranger is still facing some technical difficulties as of recent reports.

It's not meant to. That's why Ukraine receives the support it does, because they take the brunt of it.

Yeah, obviously F-16's & humans scale very poorly for this. However:

- At one-a-day scale, political and risk considerations probably favor the expensive solution.

- Using F-16's reveals nothing about your current anti-drone defenses. (Yeah, it's also a real-world basic competence test for your air force - for better and for worse.)

- If your intel people want more data on the drones, an F-16 can haul a whole lotta intel-gathering equipment to the show.

- If you're dealing internally with some head-in-the-sand traditionalists dragging their heels on updating your doctrine/equipment/training to deal with drones, then "real world, right now" examples are probably useful.

(BTW - do the articles say "a2a missile" anywhere? F-16's typically mount a 20mm cannon, a cheap drone is not a hard target, and cannon rounds are dirt cheap by compare.)