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
They would if they could. A hundred drones that have the range and explosive power to significantly damage a ship 50 miles away is a lot harder to amass than 50 quadcopters with 10 mile range and 10 lb payload. A hundred missiles with jam resistant seekers and guidance are even more expensive and all of these are hard to hide and hard to coordinate and hard to aim, especially when you’re being sniped by predator drones or tomahawks or HARMs or sdbs every time you stick a toe out of a cave, while under a curtain of jamming. Then you have to deal with the aegis system and Hawkeyes guiding standard missiles and sea sparrows and fleet defense fighters like the f-18 and then you have to a ton of CIWS options (phalanx, searam, mk 38, mk 45) decoys, smokescreens, flares, chaff, evasive maneuvers etc…). A US carrier group can reliably defend against swarm of a hundred incoming drones or missiles. It would take something more like 200 or so really packed together to really saturate the defense in depth and you’d really want jamming and decoys of your own to help them along – capabilities which the houthis have not demonstrated.
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