what is stopping US warships from being overwhelmed by drone/missile attacks?

Question

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

Answer 1

The Navy is typically careful to stay out of the range of such things from happening.

They tend to like to operate in uncontested space or at ‘standoff’ range.

At these ranges a drone would need a lot of fuel to reach the ship and be fairly big to carry enough explosives to do any real damage to the ships armor.

The radar on a naval vessel is rather insane and there is almost always a forward looking aircraft extending that range.

Anything that could do enough damage would easily be picked up with a lot of time for the targeted ship to react.

At that point you would need to basically exhaust the ammunition of every jet, vertical launch tube, sub, gun, short range air to air system, electric countermeasure , CWIS, and possibly even lasers between when it’s detected and when it needs to go kaboom to do the job.

There’s also a saying if don’t mess with America’s boats so even if you spent your entire economy on drones to try to sink a carrier battle group you have had better spent 3-5x on defending the retaliation because the US simply doesn’t out up with that type of bull.