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
I don’t have a full answer to this question, but I can say that the US Navy has been thinking about this problem for 20 years. The [Millennium Challenge 2002](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002) was an infamous war game exercise which simulated a naval invasion by a US fleet (“Blue”) against a fictitious Persian Gulf country (“Red”). The war game was partly computer simulation, partly real-life military exercise with real ships.
The US marine general who was commanding the “Red” forces used a strategy of low-tech non-electronic communications, swarms of small boats, and a massive cruise missile salvo to “sink” an aircraft carrier and fifteen other Blue ships, ending the simulation on the second day.
The simulation was then restarted on the following day with new rules that hampered Red’s tactics and ensured a Blue victory. Ever since, people have debated whether the Red general took unfair advantage of the limitations of the simulation, or whether he exposed a real weakness of US naval doctrine, and whether the Navy tried to paper over this loss to save face, or whether they just wanted to avoid wasting two weeks of simulated wargames, or all four of these at once. (Nobody’s hiding the outcome at this point, the questions are over how to interpet it.)
Anyway, the US Navy has had plenty of time to think about this simulation, and while I’m sure that many of their responses are classified, some of the weapons systems the Navy has deployed since 2002 — such as upgrades to the [Phalanx CIWS system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS) and the development of [littoral combat ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship) — seem to be intended to counter the threat of small boats and missile swarms. It’s worth mentioning that this simulation took place before drones were readily available, though a CIWS will eat attack drones for lunch.
So, is the Navy now actually prepared to deal with a threat like this in real life? Hopefully we never have to find out.
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