Are we configuring drones for missions to take out enemy SAM radar? Is this sort of mission best done by manned aircraft? Does the unmanned nature of drones make such a mission moot?
Isn’t most current SAM radar only activated for a few seconds just before the missile fires? And drones are designed small enough not to be a target for SAM sites.
So the drone wouldn’t even detect the SAM radar, since it wouldn’t be turned on at the time.
Another post, another ‘drone = small, cheap, usually a quadcopter’ assumption.
Let’s use ‘UAV’ instead of ‘drone’ to indicate the possibility that ‘drone > bread box’.
Even assuming that everything you just said is true, drones/UAVs/long-lived cruise missiles can carry radar of their own, which they can turn on and off at will, like an aircraft pilot might. They can even blink it in response to a radar pulse they sensed, and, remember, something close to you going slowly looks like something far away from you going really fast.
AFAIK the answer to the OP is “not yet”. The UAVs that can carry Hellfires are about the size of bizjets but with pitifully slow & ungainly performance. So plenty big enough to be seen & targeted by SAMs, and utterly unable to evade them in flight. Sitting duck targets in other words.
Meanwhile, the Hellfire is a small, light, short range missile which is much less of each of those things than the HARM missile usually used against SAM sites. As such, even those UAVs big enough to carry a few Hellfires would struggle to carry a HARM. Not to mention struggling to carry the detection and targeting system.
“Wild weasel” was a meaningful mission in the era of (relatively) low lethality and ECM-stupid SAMs. It didn’t work all that well, but it was better than the alternative: nothing. In the current era of high lethality ECM-smart SAMs that mission has largely fallen apart. The current equivalent is stealth; even smart SAMs can’t kill what they can’t track.
The intent now is to use an all-stealthy attack fleet to smart-bomb the SAM sites to pieces on Day One, then a non-stealthy fleet accompanied by high-end jamming on subsequent days to prosecute the rest of the enemy target set including the reconstituted remnants of the enemy SAM systems.
Which plan will be pretty effective against 2nd rate powers even if equipped with the latest and greatest SAMs but not too many of them. E.g. attacking an Iran- or Egypt-like country. Trying to prosecute WWIII into China or Russia or (in bizzarro world) Western Europe would not work well.
The type of aircraft the OP is asking about is known as an unmanned combat aerial vehicle, to distinguish it from UAVs that are primarily used for intelligence collection and may have a limited strike capability. Current UAVs are basically optimized for endurance, as opposed to being able to operate in a hostile environment. The vast majority of UAVs in operation today stand literally no chance in a contested air environment.
A UCAV would basically be a replacement for manned combat aircraft. It would likely trade off endurance for stealth and larger payload. Some type of autonomy is likely needed, since you couldn’t count on having a pilot sit in a trailer thousands of miles away and count on having constant satellite communications with the aircraft.
An operational UCAV is at least 7 years away, and very likely more than that. And such a UCAV is likely to be more in line with, “I am programmed to fly to these coordinates by this route and drop a bomb on these coordinates on a non-moving target.” The ability to find targets, like SAM sites, and attack them semi-autonomously is probably a couple decades away, for both technological and policy reasons. The ability to trust a computer to kill people is a huge, huge moral and legal issue.
Drones are sometimes used as “bait” for SAMS. The SAMS target them and while they’re shooting down drones other aircraft are targeting and destroying the SAM radars and missiles.