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Aren’t 90% of casualties now from drones. Artillery is only relevant for exceptional expensive rounds and systems because they are otherwise stationary targets to drones that are way cheaper, more accurate, and longer range?
Not necessarily. Artillery is relevant when there are bigger things you want to explode, like proper infantry columns, tanks, and whatnot. That said, the cutting-edge of anti-tank artillery rounds is itself a drone. If you're dug in, shelling the area is a lot less effective.
In this context, drones are very sophisticated anti-personnel cruise missiles that operate in the same effective range as a mortar (that have some anti-tank usage as well; it's not hard to imagine sticking a Bonus "warhead" onto a drone, but it would be quite inefficient to do that because AI targeting and spotting is good enough and you have much better effective range with that).
That's fantastic for dug in positions and trench warfare, because you can just crash the explosive right into/on top of the enemy (and perhaps the only scenario in which a shotgun could be effective against such a weapon)- it just takes time and effort to do that right now because you have to have your guy sitting there driving the thing, and you have to spend money and drones to train him too.
I think that drone response is itself mostly going to be automated, but building those kinds of things takes time. Micro-caliber CIWS systems, EW systems listening for a drone lifting off prompting immediate and automated counterbattery fire, etc. They'll get there, they just aren't there now.
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