If those shaheds cost $20,000 which is low balling the cost than that Gepard just eliminated $340,000 worth of drones.
The cost quickly balloons from there for russia as the cost per flying bomb/shahed goes up from having to make them more sophisticated and capable of flying higher to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.
The idea that mass flying bomb attacks are more cost efficient than other types of attacks or that there is no way a defender can’t affordably chew through mass flying bomb attacks with expensive equipment in an affordable way is not really true, under certain conditions it is but under others this is the least efficient strategy possible.
Re last paragraph: Technically the same caveat applies to Ukrainian mass drone attacks, right? Or is there a difference?
Great question, there is a difference in strategic goals and in how dysfunctional russian air defense is.
The strategic goals differ in that Ukraine is attempting to jam up and collapse the russian military-industrial war machine with mass drone attacks, targets in these attacks are selected with a lot of intel and are carefully planned to cause rippling chaos in logistics, on the other hand russia’s mass flying bomb attacks are essentially just randomized terrorism meant to scare a country russia is not powerful enough to physically invade into surrendering. This is a generalization of course, but there is a major difference when you zoom out and compare the two strike campaigns.
Once russian air defense eventually figures out how to shoot down low flying mass flying bomb attacks (it is astounding they haven’t figured it out how to do it better by now) the effectiveness of Ukrainian mass drone attacks will drop but there is another crucial difference here.
Ukraine has carefully and methodically dismantled russia’s air defense network, so at this point it is cost efficient for Ukraine because there is nothing to shoot the drones down basically.
You ask a good question though and I do consider the idea that mass flying bomb waves are inherently cost efficient against layered air defense networks like Ukraine’s which feature a variety of cost-tiers of tools for interception, a dangerous falsehood drawn from the dysfunctional tendencies of russia and how it has fought Ukraine in this war.
Ukraine isn’t relying completely on mass drone waves for force projection however and many people miss how the current mid-strike campaign on the near rear of russian frontlines was facilitated by Ukrainian artillery dominating russian artillery. Ukrainian counter-battery drone teams, counter-battery radars, tube artillery and HIMARS have gotten brutally good at hunting down russian artillery, to the point that for russia any given artillery piece and crew is more like a disposable “one or two time use” asset than something that can be integrated into a survivable, durable fighting force.
The problem this creates is not only an existential one of no longer having the artillery pressure to maintain a frontline (whether conducting an offensive or not) which russia has attempted to plug with glidebombs launched from fighter-bombers, the lack of consistent russian artillery pressure further creates the operational opportunities to hunt down russian drone teams and air defenses with longer range strike assets (since Ukrainian defenders aren’t being slammed on the head day in day out with suppressive artillery barrages) whether they be drones, tube artillery or HIMARS.
This has begun to litter the russian frontlines with wide open gaps in their air defenses that Ukrainian drones can fly through uncontested and under these conditions mass flying bomb attacks are extremely cost efficient. Russia is however not in the same position, their artillery backbone was broken and now their air defense backbone has been broken and thus for them cheaply made one way flying bombs with shitty sensors on them are in my opinion are strategically impotent.
The mass waves of drone attacks you are seeing Ukraine conduct are a logical, sensible route to take advantage of the massive gaps in russia’s air defenses as efficiently as possible, thus the mass flying bomb attack is really best optimized to attack a force like russia’s that has been bullshitting a proficiency in air defense for decades and failed to adapt their doctrine believing falsely that their war machine could not be dismantled from the air.
edit On that final point, mass flying bomb attacks against US military bases in the region by Iran were similarly efficient because it has been a known factor for decades that a fundamental weakness to US force projection in the region has been the large amount of exposed infrastructure all over the region functioning as sitting ducks, the shahed is optimized for this type of situation, but this wasn’t a new vulnerability. I am not sure any serious military analysts truly thought the US military and oil infrastructure in the region around Iran was sustainably protectable in the event of sustained conflict with Iran (which isn’t to say that there aren’t many high ranking military officials who ignored this reality), drones excaberated this problem by an order of magnitude but they did not create it.