There is now large-scale use small drones in warfare and there is now a rapid pace of improvement. The massive and effective military use of drones has been proven in the Ukraine war. The most effective countermeasure is electronic jamming.
DARPA has large request for bids for swarms of autonomous drones.
Autonomous Multi-domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms (AMASS)
AMASS will create the ability to dynamically command and control (C2) unmanned, autonomous swarms of various types (i.e., swarms-of-swarms) with a common C2 language for Theatre-level counter-Anti-Access / Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities. The two-phase program (Phase 1 Base and Phase 2 Option) will be experimentation and scenario-focused, including incremental and progressive development, integration, and demonstration of capabilities with increasing quantities of different swarms and complexity of mission scenarios.
DARPA is soliciting disruptive ideas from small businesses and nontraditional defense contractors for novel antenna designs, materials, manufacturing, or processing as the first topic issued under the agency’s Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems (BRIDGES) initiative. The topic area aims to explore new designs that would offer significantly increased performance or substantial reduction in size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) compared to current state of the art.
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This COTS drone era will be brief.
Soon, there will be directed energy weapons (lasers, masers etc.) that will clean out close range airspace very quickly with the guidance from passive sensors like cameras fed into AI targeting systems.
These anti-drone ray-guns will give off heat from the gun itself and the power supply. A typical drone fleet will have to incorporate thermal sensors and heat seeking munitions to counter this.
The heat from the emitter can probably be made very directional. The power supply is harder to mask long term so it will probably be physically separate from the gun in order to at least save the gun when hit by anti-measures. Thermal decoys will also be used, which puts higher requirements on targeting logic (==more expensive).
Later, advanced (expensive) flying high speed anti-drone drones will replace the ground based directed energy weapons. Remotely operated drones will also be a temporary thing because they are easy to jam. Autonomous AI drones are more expensive and this will shift the balance away from COTS.
All this is described in your 5 decades old sci-fi novel and seems highly predictable.
You are right that military large Laser arrays will change the battle, eliminating most airborne weapons.
However aiming accurate laser burst without Radar is practically impossible.
So the question is how to take down the Laser or their Radar systems?
Since Lasers are completely ineffective against Tanks and against kinetic weapons (tanks arrow anti-tank shells), then Tanks return to be the main weapon system.