I believe that the recent conflicts are good examples that EW doesn't work. Perhaps USA has EW that would work, but Russia is (was?) generally considered to hav

I believe that the recent conflicts are good examples that EW doesn't work. Perhaps USA has EW that would work, but Russia is (was?) generally considered to have effective EW, and we are seeing EW systems themselves getting directly taken out by drones. I think that we don't have effective countermeasures now; you just have to expect and tolerate drone strikes just as you have to expect and tolerate artillery strikes. CIWS systems are rare, bulky and expensive - you can use them to protect certain high-value targets (e.g. ships) but they don't scale to protect infantry emplacements, moving vehicles or the perimeter of large bases. Anti-air missiles work against the larger (and more dangerous) UAVs, however, the problem is that if you have to shoot down cheap drones with the current very expensive missiles, then you still lose on a cost/efficiency basis. The role of aviation a couple decades ago involved a limited amount of very effective but very expensive aircraft - and we have effective but expensive countermeasures. The current situation involves lots of cheap aircraft hitting expensive targets (e.g. tanks and various vehicle-based weapon systems). So we need either to have lots of cheap countermeasures, or accept the drone reality which means that high-value targets don't survive, so instead of a single great but expensive tank you'd need perhaps four quadbikes with rocket launchers, or a dozen small unmanned tracked vehicles.