Low-cost, mass-produced drones are overwhelming traditional air defense systems, which were designed for fewer, high-end threats. The result is a cost and scale mismatch, where defenders struggle to detect and respond quickly enough to large swarms of cheap UAVs.

The AeroVironment (AV) argues this is an architectural problem, not a technology gap. Legacy centralized defenses cannot keep up with the speed, volume, and coordination of modern drone warfare.

AV proposes a distributed counter-drone model (Halo_Shield) that spreads sensing and response across many nodes to improve scalability and reaction time, guided by the principle that systems must be both advanced and simple enough to operate effectively in real combat conditions.