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
It’s such an interesting question.
It’s also been done before to a simulated US invasion fleet of Iraq (without the drone part).
[How Iran defeated the U.S. military in a war in a simulation – IFMAT](https://www.ifmat.org/05/20/iran-defeated-military-thankfully-simulation/)
[Millennium Challenge 2002 – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)
I misremembered a bunch of stuff, they weren’t man portable for the first attack. But they over whelmed the weapons systems (there were some ops rules preventing use of certain types – which I’m not sure on invasion if civialians are within miles of fleet they’d respect the rules).
>Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue’s [navy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy) was “sunk” by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and [suicide attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack) that capitalized on Blue’s inability to detect them as well as expected.
Something I hadn’t read in the thread yet … It’s incredibly tough to prepare & move that amount of equipment without being noticed though. If the enemy detects or see’s it coming aka ships in water or they notice build of up humans in parts of the city that didn’t match last month etc.
Part of it is too finding the fleets. It’s harder than you expect (and easier if you have insane amounts of money / infrastructure.
Then there’s all the stuff everyone else mentions, about reprisals, winning one fight just means you got some attention from the nation you just sucker punched & Japan found that out the hard way in in the 1940s.
Final though, the remote control drones are going to be easier to handle if you know an attack is coming, you just jam them. AI controlled or image recognition type ones might be harder.
Latest Answers