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
You don’t even need to wait until the point defense guns are out of ammo, you can overwhelm any point defense system by throwing enough stuff at it.
But getting that many drones/missiles together is costly. Even less expensive rockets have a fairly high price.
And, you don’t actually know how many you’ll need. The actual abilities of US Naval point defense are classified, maybe each gun can shoot down five missiles per second. Or one. Or ten. Or one every half second. So how many missiles (which cost money) do you throw at a destroyer in hopes that some get through by sheer weight of numbers? You can experiment and find out, but that’s an expensive experiment, and of course the US military is now looking for you so… you know, not exactly a great outcome.
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