No, that is almost all incompetence. With the last step coming from some fairly simple technology that we already have.

Let’s just go through your bullet points:

• They are effective because they can pop up at the least expected of times.: They can be deployed anywhere the enemy can get troops within a fairly short range of your troops. Snipers could already do that. So could sappers. I am going to address this below in “overextended”
• Can easily be deployed near or even on the frontline. : Almost exactly the same as above but I’ll add: if you are near the frontline you are near artillery. And… okay, actually, I think our modern high precision laser/satellite guided artillery shells might be MORE expensive than a dji mavic. But that speaks more to military overspending and would apply once we have “military drones” in this role.
• They are much much cheaper than the intended target. So you can send dozens of drones to destroy one parked plane or docked ship.: See below on “Phalanx”
• Paraphrasing but “Shooting drones is hard”: See “Phalanx”
• How do you protect from multiple low profile unmanned boats laden with explosives coming at your warship in the dead of night on a moonless night?: The exact way you do so now? You have sentries supported with computer vision to detect anomalies. You have lights positioned behind said sentry to improve visibility. And so forth. This is literally “russian soldiers are horribly untrained and undisciplined”. Again, scouts/snipers are a thing and have been since WW1 (goes back a lot farther, but that is more or less where the modern concept was born)
• Make no mistake drones are a game changer. They will not outright win the war, but they bring many advantages to a battlefield. Even just the live feed updates that can allow commanders a birds eye view of the battlefield in real time will change maneuver warfare.: Which is not the topic at hand. Increased surveillance is nice and we already see cheap (by military standards) drones being used to augment a soldier’s awareness. It gives infantry a limited “satellite” with minimal paperwork or coordination. The downside being that they are generally pretty detectable by a trained force but it still helps a lot. But this discussion is about their offensive capabilities. ** I haven’t even started on 6th Gen fighters with fighter drone integration:* Which are also a LOT more expensive and get back to that “What if we could fire a hellfire missile into a nursery without needing to risk a pilot?” territory

• Overextended: The vast majority of this boils down to the failed blitz at the start of the war. They had no front line and had to have long logistics and reinforcement convoys going through the entire country. This made them INCREDIBLY vulnerable. That is why they fell really fast from the isolated cities but it is taking time and effort to drive them out of their current fortifications. Because now they… sort of have a frontline. Which means you have a good idea of what direction an attack will come from and can set up defenses. And convoys will be closer to “a tank and a couple APCs” rather than “fifty trucks carrying moldy bread”
• Phalanx: This is literally a solved problem. The US (and I think also russia?) and their allies already have missile defense systems like the Phalanx CIWS. The idea being that the position of a missile is tracked and a massive spray of bullets are sent in its direction. Comparable to flak back in the day but with computers. Drones are a MUCH slower target so you need even less warning. Just set up a few raspberry pis and cameras (or, if you have an overinflated military budget, through a few Corals on there) and use the same gun mount some kid made that every tech youtuber likes and you have an anti-drone turret. For… not much more than the cost of those dozens of drones. Add in some microphones that listen for quad copters and you have an early warning system that will tell people during an offensive to close the hatch of their APC. And, because these are drones and not missiles, you can duct tape said camera mount to a light machine gun.

Just to make it clear: Drones will revolutionize war in the same way that night vision has. And they already have been doing this. Drones for surveillance have been getting deployed with recon units for years now. And… just go ask Iraq and Afghanistan how they feel about drones for the offensive capability. But the use of consumer grade drones with grenades and c4 attached (because clearly Ukraine are big fans of I Did A Thing) are more or less an anomaly with a lot of other explanations. And against a military that is not being actively constrained because other nations don’t want this war to end too quickly: We would be seeing laser guided munitions doing MUCH more damage in the exact same situations. And if russia were… let’;s just say competent? The drone based attacks would largely be isolated cases (which they already may be. Propaganda is hard)

But, much like with night vision: There is a limited window of dominance. Their takes are often times very questionable and naive, but Task and Purpose’s youtube channel has touched on this a lot. There was a time where the US and its allies were more or less unstoppable at night because of NVGs. We could shoot anyone we wanted and nobody could stop us because nobody could see us. Then… even consumer grade night vision has gone a long way toward stopping that. Maybe aiming is hard. But those handy dandy beacons we used to not kill each other? Those stick out QUITE a bit to a sentry with the cheap goggles and that is usually enough to turn on the flood lights and alert the camp. Same with thermal vision being rendered MUCH less effective by a freaking space blanket.

And, because I am having fun, it is anecdote time. A year or two back I went out into the woods with a couple buddies and a few of the interns we were working with. Using open source computer vision and anomaly detection libraries (the same stuff that Frigate and other event detection solutions for home security cameras runs on) and a webcam we wanted to see how “real” “sniper school” was. Trained on some photos we had taken over the years and maybe an hour in the field. Then we went to go place a few objects somewhere on a mountain side.

When we turned on the camera? it freaking detected some of the twigs we had broken while walking off the trail. Like, almost instantly we had the trail and could even see where I had slipped on the trail itself after scrambling across some class 3 (okay, more like 4…) terrain to place an object.

ALSO detected a lot more trash that we picked up on the way back up to grab our shit.

Through drones we are seeing a first hand view of the war. First time I’ve seen a person shot, someone blown up. It’s not like the Hollywood films that’s for sure.

No bleeding, missing arms like every war film in Hollywood. You don’t see anything, they get shot and just become lifeless. No visible blood or anything. Similarly the drone dropped grenades, I would have thought they would be missing body parts.

But on the outside you wouldn’t even know it’s terminal injuries. And there was another one where the tank commander landed on the roof due to a cook off in what seemed to be in one piece. But then someone calculated the G force as 300gs.

Thanks to drones I now know people mostly go out on a whimper and not a bang.

A reaper drone is listed as 30-64 million USD

F35 is 100 to 400 million

F16 is very misleading for a lot of reasons, but is listed as between 12.7 and 80 million.

But also? Pilots are REALLY expensive. And the only risk to a drone pilot is carpal tunnel… and getting the shit beat out of you by the rich dude who wanted you to cuck him? I still don’t know what was going on with that.

Have you looked at the US’s massive military aimed towards that exact sort of power projection recently?