I’ve read about many instances of Houthi drone attacks and missiles being successfully intercepted by US warships. I have no doubt that these ships are capable of completely neutralizing these types of attacks in a vacuum… but given the cost disparity between the drones/missiles and the defense equipment used to stop them… what’s stopping the opposition from spamming so many at once that the ships can’t keep up?
Instead of repeated, futile attacks, what would happen if the opposition stock piled all of their resources and launched them at once, in waves, one right after the other?
Surely there must be some finite limit to the amount of defensive ammunition (not sure of the right term here) the ships are able to carry at sea.
Is it just a matter of the ships being so well equipped that any force capable of exhausting their supplies is simply impractical- even if the drones are pennies on the dollar in terms of comparative cost?
In: Engineering
Every defense system has a limit to how much volume it can successfully intercept. However there are a couple of things that make such an attack not worth it. Warships rarely travel alone, meaning that basically you don’t have just one ship’s defenses to contend with but two. Secondly even if they could get some drones through they’d have to pack a hefty punch to actually deal significant damage. Of course while the attack is happening the ships will be trying to figure out where the drones are being controlled from, and they can do that. Yes you can obfuscate a signal in a chain long enough that it cannot be traced in time but getting to the source is not necessarily the goal, just cutting it off at any point in the chain. Lastly, even if they did succeed, then what? They’ve poured a significant amount of their resources and painted a huge target on their backs for what? Taking out a single ship? Maybe symbolically that has some value but practically it has none. They’d have to repeat that dozens of times to get the US Navy off their backs and they can’t. The US has invaded countries for less.
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