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
Self-preservation.
Whoever would do that would have to target and destroy the entirity on the US Navy in order to not have holy hell rained down on them. That would require a worldwide coordinated attack. And they would have to hope that they had more drones than could be destroyed before they could make their attacks and actually accomplish their goals.
And an attack on that scale would be met with the rest of the US armed forces.
Modern ships have anti-aircraft guns for objects of all size and advanced radars that can detect drones coming from miles away. They also have signal jamming equipment and probably some crazy stuff the public doesn’t even know about. The ships are also very well designed, so most explosives that could be carried by drones would hardly make a dent.
As others have mentioned, there’s also the possibility of retaliation. A single missile from a US ship could wipe out dozens of drone builders, and enemies know this. Even if you damage the hornet’s nest, it’s still a bad idea to throw a rock at it.
Probably its crazy hard to launch big bunch of drones into one target without colliding them into each other.
I have doubts as to whether they even want to. Sure saber rattling and lobbing some rockets to build local support and keep the US from getting too involved makes sense, but not inviting a real retaliation by sinking a ship. My understanding is the Houthi (and I may be recalling the totally wrong faction) are the ones who are against hereditary control? They probably want the US to stay out of it more than anything. But I could be totally wrong. It just makes more sense to me to pretend to try to sink the boats.
Imagine you’re playing a game where you have to protect your castle from flying balls. You have a super cool water gun that can shoot down lots of balls really fast.
The bad guys throwing balls at your castle have a whole bunch of them, but they’re not very good at aiming. You’re really good at using your water gun, so you can shoot down most of the balls before they hit your castle.
Now, what if the bad guys saved up all their balls and threw them all at once? That would be tricky, but your water gun is still really powerful. Plus, your castle has other defenses too, like strong walls and maybe even a helper with another water gun!
Here’s the thing:
* Your water gun has lots of water: Just like warships have lots of missiles and bullets to shoot down the drones and missiles.
* Your castle is strong: Warships are built to be tough and can take some hits.
* You have friends: Warships often travel in groups, so they can help each other out.
* The bad guys aren’t very good: It’s hard to aim lots of drones and missiles accurately, especially from far away.
So, even though the bad guys have a lot of balls, it’s still really hard for them to overwhelm your castle. You’re just too good at defending it!
Is it just that the ships are so well equipped? Yes, that’s a big part of it. They have powerful weapons, strong defenses, and smart sailors who know how to use them. It would take a huge number of drones and missiles to even have a chance of overwhelming a warship, and even then, it’s not likely to work.
They would if they could. A hundred drones that have the range and explosive power to significantly damage a ship 50 miles away is a lot harder to amass than 50 quadcopters with 10 mile range and 10 lb payload. A hundred missiles with jam resistant seekers and guidance are even more expensive and all of these are hard to hide and hard to coordinate and hard to aim, especially when you’re being sniped by predator drones or tomahawks or HARMs or sdbs every time you stick a toe out of a cave, while under a curtain of jamming. Then you have to deal with the aegis system and Hawkeyes guiding standard missiles and sea sparrows and fleet defense fighters like the f-18 and then you have to a ton of CIWS options (phalanx, searam, mk 38, mk 45) decoys, smokescreens, flares, chaff, evasive maneuvers etc…). A US carrier group can reliably defend against swarm of a hundred incoming drones or missiles. It would take something more like 200 or so really packed together to really saturate the defense in depth and you’d really want jamming and decoys of your own to help them along – capabilities which the houthis have not demonstrated.
Oceans are, it is worth noting, very large. This makes it quite hard to find things on them. Cheap, low cost drones have limited range and sensor systems, making locating a target hard.
Once a target is found, you must reach it. A relatively slow modern warship is capable of sustaining a speed of at least 37 kilometers per hour. This is faster then most cheap, low cost drones. Once detected, simply driving away from a drone swarm can prevent an effective attack.
Beyond that, there are electronic countermeasures. Very powerful jammers can prevent low cost drones from effectively operating and disable electronic sensors, preventing them from functioning.
Last, their are point defense systems able to destroy drones like the RIM-116 missile and radar directed guns, and coming into use are things like the HELIOS, an absoloutly tortured acronym from Lockheed Martin for a anti-drone/anti-missile laser.
Range. A fully loaded navy vessel can hit you from miles away with all sorts of deadly force. A drone has limited range and you’ll likely be spotted long before you can get close enough to launch an effective drone attack.
Most replies here are either gloating about the might of the US military-industrial complex or focusing on air-borne drones.
That’s a mistake for a couple of reasons.
First, US naval assets have been taken out by poorly armed/resourced groups before. [USS Cole bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing) Just in general, it is very comforting to think “US military is super strong and can do anything to anyone anywhere” – the reality is often quite different and humbling.
Second, airborne drones are not the only type of unmanned assets fleets need to worry about. We’ve already seen semi-submersible drones deployed in the Black Sea by Ukraine – to notable effect against the Russian Black Sea fleet.
The actual answer here is simply a matter of resources, organization and intelligence.
US ships are not invincible on a technological level – it’s just that the people actively targeting them at the moment lack the ability to stockpile the necessary systems, to coordinate the strikes with sufficient precision, and to track their targets reliably.
All of those things are solvable problems by a determined, well resourced adversary – and I would hope that people better placed to answer your question are thinking very hard about it.
Every defense system has a limit to how much volume it can successfully intercept. However there are a couple of things that make such an attack not worth it. Warships rarely travel alone, meaning that basically you don’t have just one ship’s defenses to contend with but two. Secondly even if they could get some drones through they’d have to pack a hefty punch to actually deal significant damage. Of course while the attack is happening the ships will be trying to figure out where the drones are being controlled from, and they can do that. Yes you can obfuscate a signal in a chain long enough that it cannot be traced in time but getting to the source is not necessarily the goal, just cutting it off at any point in the chain. Lastly, even if they did succeed, then what? They’ve poured a significant amount of their resources and painted a huge target on their backs for what? Taking out a single ship? Maybe symbolically that has some value but practically it has none. They’d have to repeat that dozens of times to get the US Navy off their backs and they can’t. The US has invaded countries for less.
Latest Answers