I come from the infantry, currently work in digital stuff, and my experience with the artillery corps is mostly limited to firing 2 illum rounds out of a 60mm in the middle of the day in August. But in the world where we face a threat of constant ISTAR and attack from potentially autonomous flying 40mm grenades to SRBMs en masse we need to appreciate and embrace the fact that every single person from the co-driver of an MSVS to the actual AD gunners are all sensor-shooters in the air defence battle. Under the coordination of the appropriate experts certainly, but tying back to the future armour thread I'm a firm believer we need to look at all future vehicles as having a C-UAS role at a minimum and go to 35-40mm guns that switch over to airburst and engage drones as needed. I see it as no different than putting ATGMs onto IFVs and other vehicles, they may not be hunting tanks as a role but I think it's pretty irresponsible and potentially deadly to deny them the ability to engage a major threat when it comes at them or they stumble onto it.
If we have auto plants being shutdown, we should think about converting one over to our own Shahed-esque production. Complexity wise they don't seem much more (actually seem less?) complex than a modern economy car. Excepting possible payloads, how cheap could we make them if we built them Honda Civic style at a thousand+ a day.
Yes - where would we ever store them all, or pay for it (sales? Poland and the Baltics might want some) I'd vote start shipping direct to Ukraine, maybe split some off to the US if it'll help with trade negotiations.
EDIT: Turns out France is doing
something along those lines, Chorus loitering munitions, looks roughly 3x the length and wingspan of the Shahed. A lot larger and presumably larger payload/range. 600 a month to be built by Renault.
