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.
Watch what CIWS can do. And of course you can’t stop all attacks but to sink a ship is gonna be massively difficult. Even if your drones get through they have to have enough force to actually do damage.
It possible but it would be very hard. The US warship in question is almost certainly going to be an arleigh burke class destroyer.
You first huge problem is that the electronic warfare systems on a one of them are probably the most advanced electronic warfare systems on earth. Unless your drone is extraordinary it will get jammed and fail.
Over and above that the ship will have 100+ air defense missiles and short range air defense. For a larger drone attack this could be augmented by air support. As the drones are slow enough to give you time to get the air support there.
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.
Take this with a huge grain of salt because I know very little, but I think low cost drones have really changed war. I think they make a lot of expensive equipment vulnerable just as you posit. But it’s hard to imagine anyone besides maybe China totally overwhelming the U.S. with drones. And at that point there is still the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, so I can’t see it happening unless one side or the other is stupid enough to risk a nuclear war.
Lasers!
But seriously, lasers soon?
Honestly nothing.
The doctrine most state level actors are turning towards is to overwhelm air defense using drone swarm tactics and while CIWS is trying to knock all the drones out of the air sneak a couple of antiship missiles.
Modern conflict has shown how effective and efficient drone swarm tactics are. Antiship missiles easily run over $1 million a pop, “kamikaze” drones $20,000 or less.
Mix them together and a bad day happens.
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.
It goes both ways. If Houthi missiles can reach US ships, US missile ships can reach Houthi launch positions. The other corollary is the ships can move, generally land positions are stationary. If you’re talking about ‘spamming missiles’ the US does it better and it has satellite recon
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.
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