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
Yes the ships could get overwhelmed in that situation. You’ve probably seen videos of the C-RAM system in action, it gets posted on Reddit and other places with some frequency. It’s the grey multi-barrel cannon with the tall dome behind it. Basically the strategy is to use radar to track incoming and then put a wall of hot lead in front of it. It isn’t a very efficient system, but it is an effective one.
The kind of attack you’re describing is unlikely though. While the US was figuring out how to fight insurgencies for the last two decades, insurgents were learning how to fight Western armies. One thing they learned was strike fast and move. They know they can’t win in a stand up brawl. Instead they rely on quickly setting up and launching an attack, and not being around when the attack lands. If they assembled a big stock pile of weaponry it would create significant risk of being discovered and attacked, effectively wiping out there ability to fight in one fell swoop.
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