Affordable guns in a layered defence against drones

Should modernised guns such as 40 mm weapons help defend civilians against increasingly capable drones?

Modernised guns offer a way to produce defences in volume, with missiles and fighters forming other layers while lasers remain difficult to scale.

Defending many civilian locations requires weapons cheap enough to manufacture in quantity and controllable enough to deploy widely. Modernised guns are favoured on those terms. The assessment of lasers is more cautious because producing the necessary optics at this scale would require extensive manufacturing infrastructure. Building gun-production capacity is considered likely to be easier and cheaper. A hypothetical British network would combine CAMM and 76 mm guns beneath a further layer of fighters. Lasers would supplement these weapons while their ability to provide defence on the required scale remains in doubt.