I think you are right; and what you're saying reminds me of a story from Malcolm Gladwell about the 1981 Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament [1] that Doug Lenat won. He used some type of genetic algorithm (he never released his source) to find that swarming the challenger with many small boats would dominate as a tactic. Miniature swarms, which drones are cheap enough and more than capable for, are not a tactic that people are use to. I fear that a swarm could be terrible in its destruction if used to hurt people, individually targeted or for mass harm.
Same idea as Gen. Paul Van Riper's strategy in the Millennium Challenge war games ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 ). He spammed the enemy with cheap speedboats and motorcycles, forcing the organizers to rewrite the rules to make the game "fair."
I guess a cloud of drones can probably be shot down with some sort of EMP. It's unclear to me how to ensure the EMP is powerful enough to go through the shields of the drone without damaging the systems of the warship it protects.
Both of these articles are fascinating - underdogs with clearly superior strategies dominate, and rather than learning from that, the powers that be just change the rules to prove themselves right. How shortsighted
