Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails.
The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article.
Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.
Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…
Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted.
https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.
Vulnerable does not mean obsolete.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAS_groups_of_the_United_State...
Obviously, everyone scoffed at this when reports first came out. How can a $250 consumer drone take out a multi-million-dollar modern tank?
Yet here we are. Neither side are fielding tanks any more because they're vulnerable to drones, and therefore obsolete [1] (caveat: we haven't seen the end of this cycle of development and response, so it's possible that tanks work out how to defend against drones and continue being relevant. I suspect it's more likely that tanks go the way of cavalry. Machine guns were the answer to cavalry. Tanks are an answer to machine guns. Drones are the answer to tanks. The answer to drones won't be better tanks).
The Ukraine war is not a naval war, so we're not seeing the same rapid development of new naval military doctrine. But if a naval war kicked off, it's reasonable to expect the same rapid adoption of new technology would play out, with the same results. Large, expensive, weapon systems (in Ukraine tanks, in naval war ships) are vulnerable to massed attacks by smaller, cheaper, weapons using new tech that we haven't used like this before.
[0]https://theaircurrent.com/ukraine-special-report/ukraine-dro...
[1] https://www.army-technology.com/features/mbts-vs-drones-are-...