Feels like the title needs some sort of "2002" notice - the reporting is recent but the actual wargame was done in 2002 and only recently declassified.
So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
A Shahed is only useful against stationary soft targets, which an aircraft carrier is not. It also doesn’t have the kind of heavy warhead or terminal guidance required to defeat the armored structure of naval ships. Shahed doesn’t have any kind of countermeasure avoidance. Adding these would massively increase the cost.
Naval anti-ship drones have been around for many decades. This is a highly evolved area of military technology with a long history of real-world engagements upon which to base design choices.
The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed and you still need a swarm of them to get through.
Modern Shaheds can be controlled through satellite links like StarLink, with high quality video. Also, targeting a large pile of metal in the sea should not be difficult with something like a radar.
Any kind of radio control should be discounted when attacking a US carrier fleet, they will just be jammed.
Autonomous optically guided missiles/drones would fare better, but those are still vulnerable to being blinded by laser systems like HELIOS[0], and of course being shot down by anti air missiles or CIWS.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Laser_with_Integra...
This underestimates the requirements. It requires sophisticated real-time terminal guidance. This is not a cheap feature. Modern anti-ship drones dynamically select a precise point of impact based on their observation of the target to maximize probability of hitting a vulnerable spot. Especially with a weak warhead like the Shahed, most points of impact would be scratching the paint.
The model you are talking about was basically how things worked in the 1970s. Technology has improved a lot over the last half century.
For now only the USA has reliable access to anything like Starlink / Starshield. Radar isn't any kind of magic solution: it has limited range and field of view.
I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?
I suppose there is an opportunity cost to saving up all your weapons. What is the enemy doing in that time where you stop throwing things at them?
Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...
Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.
Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.
A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.
I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.
Hasn't this always been the case? A hmmv vs random ieds. A tank vs a bunch of shoulder-mount rpgs. etc.
And yet, in a recent conflict of the US navy vs swarms of drones, no ships were lost.
> no ships were lost
how much ammunition did the US navy use to shoot down incoming drones, and what are the cost of those vs the attacker's cost?
Does that even matter? US GDP is orders of magnitude larger than Iran. The American way of war has long been based on minimizing casualties through overwhelming materiel superiority and profligate ammunition expenditure. Back in WWII the USA literally out produced Japan by 1000:1 in some types of munitions. Our industrial base has decayed a bit lately but that's a fixable problem.
It is about force projection though. Ok, you have a bunch of drones in the US, now how do you use them to attack Iran or in the pacific theatre?
Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.
Projection works up until someone calls the bluff, just like Iran did.
> I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
$13 billion dollar military toybox?
Let’s think.
EMP.
Nets.
Defensive Drones.
Superdome.
Finding the solution isn’t hard - choosing and implementing it takes time when you’re a stumbling behemoth.
> Finding the solution isn’t hard
Finding a solution isn't hard until your adversary adjusts their tacts slightly and bypasses it a week later
Right.
So, better be Agile, and have segmented groups doing really different things in different regions,
not taking 10-25 years to develop new overpriced platforms
while World Wars are being fought on DJI.
I suppose everyone is going to want some really good goggles before they turn on some laser based CIWS replacement!
Right. It’s a $10+ billion dollar asset.
Melty-laser systems look cheap, compared to losing that even once.
what is a superdome?
Giant metal cover, maybe like an eyelid.
See also: NFL stadiums in the US
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