[tgflynn]

I don't see any real similarity between those two situations.

There aren't any details in the article on the size of the drones or their distance but I think a destroyer would have a wide range of weapons available from which to choose the appropriate level of response.

Doing nothing and hoping it goes away doesn't seem like the wisest response to this type of incident.

[refulgentis]

Not trolling you, genuinely trying to bridge a communication gap I see both sides of: they, and I, reacted literally to I think what you meant to be hyperbole, i.e. by saying "Surely one of the people on the deck with a shotgun could have a go at it without revealing too much secret information", you meant to say "why didn't they take any aggressive action?":

The other comments speak to various factors why it was more complicated, and just affirming that decision wouldn't have enabled action, TL;DR: you don't start throwing $500K missiles at lights 1,000 feet above deck when you're right off the coast of the US, and also we don't have nearly all the info here, just a subset of a subset of docs that got through via FOIA two years ago, you can safely assume that would have been considered at the time