Cheaper Missiles, UAVs, and Especially Guns Are Key to Drone Defense

Commentary

The Red Sea fight and other battles over the past year have laid bare the stark reality that the Navy has known for years but is only now starting to address—defending against drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with missiles costing $1 million to $28 million each has created an unsustainable cost asymmetry. In the Red Sea area alone, some 15 months of defending against Houthi drone attacks and some cheap low-end missiles, U.S. warships fired roughly 120 SM-2s, 80 SM-6s, a handful of ESSMs, and an undisclosed number of very expensive SM-3s, costing about $1 billion.

Here is the per-unit cost per missile:

• SM-6: $4.3 million
• SM-2: $2.4 million
• SM-3: $11.9 million to $36.4 million for the Block 1B and more than $36.4 million for Block IIA
• ESSM: $1.8 million
• RAM (RIM-116 rolling airframe missile): $905,000

These are high-end interceptors designed for threats such as ship-killing subsonic and supersonic missiles and aircraft, as well as defending coastal land-based targets. Against a $20,000–$50,000 Shahed-style drone and even smaller drones, they are gross overkill. Every time a destroyer expends an SM-2 or even a RIM-116 to shoot down a slow propeller-driven UAV, it is burning a million dollars to kill something that costs less than a used car.

The past few years have driven home the danger of relying on million-dollar-plus missiles to defend against asymmetric threats to their ships. In response, the Navy has begun installing low-cost counter-drone interceptors on Arleigh Burke destroyers, such as Raytheon’s Coyote Block 2 and Coyote Block 3, a UAV that uses microwave and electronic warfare to potentially knock out multiple drones per use and is recoverable and reusable. Both Coyote variants cost between $100,000 and $125,000.

The Anduril Roadrunner-M is jet-powered and designed to take on more powerful drones and even subsonic cruise missiles. It destroys its target by striking it and blowing it up, but if, for some reason, the target is destroyed before it reaches it or is a false alarm, the $500,000 missile-UAV hybrid can return to the ship, be refueled, and be ready for another intercept attempt. Additionally, a mystery multi-cell launcher that appeared on the USS Carl M. Levin in early 2026 is widely believed to be testing Zone 5’s White Spike or a JAGM variant, which will yield per-intercept-attempt costs in the neighborhood of $50,000–$100,000. On littoral combat ships, the Navy quickly adapted existing Hellfire and JAGM launchers for aerial targets at about $200,000–$325,000 per shot.

Combined with the ship’s existing layered defenses, they will reduce the number of times our Navy has to use million-dollar missiles to shoot down $20,000 drones. These systems do lower the costs of destroying a drone. However, the UAV solutions can be attrited by enemy UAVs with similar capabilities. Still, deploying these less expensive systems is a big step forward.

A More Cost-Effective Way to Kill Drones

An even bigger step forward would be to adopt the Oto Melara (now Leonardo) 76/62 Super Rapido gun, which has already been used successfully by Italian and French ships in the Red Sea to kill drones. Two of these compact, rapid-fire mounts per destroyer, firing DART guided rounds or standard fragmentation or proximity-fuzed ammo, can easily handle the vast majority of slow UAVs and drones.

At the current inefficient low-rate production levels based on relatively small-batch contracts, DART-guided projectiles run about $20,000–$25,000 each. Plain unguided or proximity-fuzed fragmentation rounds cost roughly $1,000–$1,500 apiece. In actual combat, Italian ships have downed Houthi drones with bursts of just six to eight cheap unguided rounds, spending about $10,000 per drone kill instead of millions of dollars’ worth of missiles per drone kill.

However, the cost per round or drone kill could be reduced further if the ammunition for 76 mm guns were produced at scale—i.e., hundreds of thousands of smart rounds and millions of high-explosive fragmentation rounds—versus current boutique production levels involving lots of small batches. Producing at scale changes everything. If the Navy were to standardize on the Super Rapido across dozens of Arleigh Burkes and other Navy ships, involving multi-year contracts for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of rounds, the economics would shift costs dramatically. The core electronics in DART and Vulcano-family rounds (RF receivers, GPFS modules, fuze logic, actuators, MEMS sensors) are based on mature, shared components already used across Leonardo’s 76 mm, 127 mm, and 155 mm lines. At high volume, these electronics should drop to well below a thousand dollars per round, even when package hardening is included.

Modern, dedicated mass production lines could reduce per-round costs to one-fifth of current levels or further, as DART rounds come in at just a few thousand dollars each and standard high-explosive, fragmentation rounds come in at hundreds of dollars. These costs per round will produce reliable per-drone kill costs ranging from about $1,000 to $10,000.

Further, each of the 76 mm guns can defeat a simultaneous attack by four subsonic (Mach 0.8) anti-ship cruise missiles, greatly adding to a ship’s anti-missile defense. And while the 76 mm guns are not as effective against supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, combined rapid fire from both mounts as a last-ditch inner defense has a decent chance of bringing down even a supersonic anti-ship missile should the ship’s more expensive interceptors fail.

Deep Magazines and Volume Fires

Two Super Rapido guns provide about 160 ready rounds on-mount (roughly 80 per mount) that allow a very high firing rate of 120 rounds per minute per gun. Once the ready rounds are expended, the gun crew can manually feed the gun and maintain a firing rate of 20 to 30 rounds per minute. So, in a matter of five minutes, two 76 mm guns can put about 400 rounds down range. A further advantage is that ships can carry thousands of rounds in the magazine. The truly deep magazines of these advanced guns, combined with their faster firing rates and accuracy, allow them to deal with large drone swarms. Using smaller missiles and UAVs as another layer of anti-air defense to counter drones makes sense for certain types of drones, but they do not provide the deep magazines necessary to deal with multiple waves of drone swarms. And they are also highly effective against small boats and sea drones heavily laden with high explosives.

Clearly, cheaper missiles and UAVs need to be part of our Navy’s layered defense, but our Navy should not continue to discount what modern guns firing advanced kinetic or explosive ammunition can bring to a ship’s defense and offense. Currently, our destroyers mount five-inch guns that have limited anti-drone capabilities, but billions of dollars have been wasted over the years in largely unproductive efforts to produce advanced guns with capabilities comparable to the 76 mm Oto Melara’s line of advanced guns and ammunition. Hence, it makes far more sense to license this proven technology than to spend years and billions of dollars reinventing the wheel. The Super Rapido and its DART and Vulcano ammo are combat-tested. Italian and French ships have already demonstrated that these kinds of advanced guns can provide the high bang-for-buck defense and offense our Navy lacks.

Weather dependency, limited range, power requirements, massive installation weight, and the ease with which drones and missiles can be modified to defeat lasers mean they are not a good solution for our Navy for the foreseeable future. And although missiles are here to stay, technology has advanced to the point that advanced guns can deliver the high bang-for-buck firepower our ships currently lack. Substituting a few VLS cells for proven, cost-effective, all-weather guns that will significantly upgrade our ships’ offense and defense makes a whole lot of sense. Not doing so is a betrayal of our sailors.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.