How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets

[Q]

The problem originally presented in this topic is not specific for fighters but is caused by the way SE IV treats damage to units:
Units are not treated as ships with individual components that can each be destroyed but as one single target that will be destroyed completely or not at all. In fact a unit is treated like a component of a ship.
I believe the amount of calculations would have been too high (at least for older computers) if each unit would be treated like a ship.