Summarizer

Donating fuel to terrorists on the other side of the planet isn't cheap

>If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. I sort of think it maybe is an exaggeration, you're evidently of the opinion that the U.S happens to have enough battle ready troops with the requisite hardware positioned within a few hours of Cuba so that they can invade and flatten in the time it takes to fly from Miami to Havana? I don't know, but a Destroyer would take about 10 hours to get from Florida to Cuba. It seems your definition of invade and flatten is just dropping bombs, but that definitely does not handle the invade part of things, and it remains to be seen as to whether, with drones, being able to fly non-stop is the great technological advantage it once was. Some preliminary evidence from around the world suggests in a drone led conflict it confers the ability to have expensive hardware destroyed and pilots killed non-stop.

The real thought experiment is ~600m people in central/south American within ~6000km, i.e. IRBM range of US gulf coast, where ~50% of US oil refinery and LNG plant production are. Now that Iran has validated mid tier power can cobble together precision strike complex, it's only going to be matter of time before relatively wealthier countries realize only way out of M/Donroe is to build conventional strike against US strategic infra. This stuff going to get commoditized sooner than later with competing mega constellation ISR. It's pretty clear building up conventional airforce/navy etc will simply get overmatched vs US projection and only credible deterrence is PRC style rocket force. There's a fuckload of places to hide 8x8 missile launchers in the Americas. E: 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.

Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renewables. If US smart they would do this. But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range. But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.

The problem is they are not would be attackers, they're countries building up domestic defense that US would have to preempt ala Cuban missile crisis, and sustain preemption over entire continent, with each preemption legitimizing rational for more build up. Of course US can try to coerce INF for conventional in Americas, but commoditized conventional precision strike are conventional... and commoditized, it's the kind of product where specialized dual use components may need to be sourced... among millions of TEU traffic, but otherwise local industries can build, like Iran. There's also no global pariah status for proliferating conventional missiles for self defense and hence accessible to many players, coercion / enforcement would require trying to mow grass to keep capabilities out of 600m people...in perpetuity... tall task even for even US. Especially considering form factor of missiles... i.e. sheltered / hidden, they are not major battlefield assets like ships and planes that needs to be out to have wheels turned. Ultimately it's not about winning vs US, it's about deterring US from historic backyard shenanigans by making sure some future time when US is tempted, and US always tempted, it would risk half of CONUS running out of energy in 2 weeks. Like the Iran logic is extremely clear now, no amount of defense survives offensive overmatch, the only thing left is to pursue some counter offensive ability that can have disproportionate deterrence value. The thing about US being richest country is US has a lot of valuable things.

It's location, it's also recognizing refineries in PADD3 are, in fact, technically specific and different from other regional refineries which cannot pickup the slack. Light/sweet vs heavy/sour geographic refinery mismatch are not interchangeable, some products other refineries can produce with low yield, some can't be produced at all. Hence specific highlighting their complexity AND productive/yield levels. US has never tried to survive this level of disruption, which is not to say it couldn't, simply it will be at levels that will significantly degrade CONUS beyond any historic comparison, enough to potentially constrain/deter US adventurism in Americas. Some specific products like SPECIFIC mixes of aviation fuel, only some PADD3 refineries are setup to produce or produce significant % i.e. IIRC something like 90%+ of military JP5/JP10 come from PADD3. That's why I said "specialty" aviation fuel, not just general aviation fuel. Or taking out out Colonial pipeline which ~2.5m barrels - US doesn't have 10,000k extra tankers or 5000 extra rail carts in reserve for that contingency. Turning off export has nothing to do with this, there isn't enough to keep in-nation due to refinery mismatch, or not enough hardware to move it in event of pipeline disruption. Of course predicated on timeline/execution, i.e. US can potentially fix refinery mismatch and harden/redundant over next 10 years. We don't know if/when Monroe countries will start adopting their own rocket force. Just pointing out after Iran has demonstrated defense is useless for midtier powers and mediocre offense can penetrate the most advanced defense, the only rational strategic plan is go hard on offense for conventional counter-value deterrence. The logic like Iran, it matters less RoW suffers more, only specifically that US suffers as well, the harder the more deterrent value. And due to sheer economic disparity, could be trillions for US vs billions for others, even if trillions for US is relatively less.

Downvoting a description of a technical solution for smaller nations based on actual evidence from existing conflicts is silly. You might not like the politics you perceive from someone using particular vocabulary, but the proof is there. The USA's supremacy has been challenged in a meaningful way (along with every other major military power). The strategies of the large powers will have to evolve.

> Iran has 90,000,000 people. More than 2x Ukraine Population size is relevant but not the most important factor. Russia has 146,000,000, more than 4x than Ukraine. It doesn't guarantee that Russia will win the war. > On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. Ukraine also had Bayraktar TB2 overhead which distracted Moskva's crew and provided targeting information. Russia probably didn't sent a fighter to down it because skies around Ukraine are contested. Skies not only around but over Iran are not reallty contested. Having said that Iran could sink an american ship if the navy will become complaicent and will assume there are no threats. > The size of Iran means that knocking out drone and missile production for long won't work. Russia has been trying to do that to Ukraine for years now. Russia cannot fly planes over Ukranian territory. The US can fly not only F-35 but even B-52. That's a big difference. The only thing which could prevent the US from knowking out missile and drone production is insufficient intellegence.

Don't forget the coastal geography. Iran's coastline in the Persian gulf is longer than California's coastline, and they can do drone attacks anywhere in the Gulf, not just the narrow strait portion that everyone seems to focus on. Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.

> Mass-produced drones today are a simple airframe, a lawnmower engine, and the smarts of a cell phone. Ukraine has people making them in basements. Presumably, so does Iran. The ships the LCS are intended to replace are significantly more capable at absorbing damage from this type of threat. If you are willing to go up to destroyer class, you are probably approaching immunity for this scenario. > Former CIA intelligence officer Robert Finke said the blast appeared to be caused by C4 explosives molded into a shaped charge against the hull of the boat.[6] More than 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of explosive were used.[7] Much of the blast entered a mechanical space below the ship's galley, violently pushing up the deck, thereby killing crew members who were lining up for lunch.[8] The crew fought flooding in the engineering spaces and had the damage under control after three days. Divers inspected the hull and determined that the keel had not been damaged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing

I agree with some of your points, but I'm not sure about the drones. I don't think the kind of drone you can build with a lawnmower engine would be likely to do any significant damage to any but the smallest ship. And the US/Israel coalition has a much greater airpower advantage enabling them to target drone production than Russia does. Cuba is in no shape to do anything. Even if they had drones, the leadership there is very unlikely to use them since doing so would result with almost 100% probability in the US killing or capturing them.

> I don't think the kind of drone you can build with a lawnmower engine would be likely to do any significant damage to any but the smallest ship It's not really a lawnmower engine, but the L550E clones used in the Shahed drone are roughly the same scale as a big lawnmower engine (higher power/weight, but similar horsepower), and they've successfully taken out $100 million radar installations.

I don’t think air dominance will hold up for long if a plane costs billions and a drone a couple thousand. Any interceptor rocket the US uses will set them back millions versus literal peanuts on the other side. Add that Iran is basically a mountain fortress and they’ll run out of money very quickly; disregarding that prolonging the war will be __very__ unpopular in the US. They really got themselves into an unwinnable bind

I'm not sure it will last long once we see a few videos of drone kill of US soldiers on /r/dronecombat Ukraine must defend itself against an authoritarian Russia where nobody can publicly complain about what's happening. This is not the case in the US, unless they go full dictatorship.

I think the poster's point is that FPV drones & accurate/advanced shells mean that you get all the downsides of WW1 trenches and no-man's land, PLUS new downsides of trenches not helping so you're constantly under threat of death no matter where you are. Plus: the more people huddle together the better the target they are, so you get to hide in small groups (or solo) in the hopes that the economics of killing just you doesn't pencil out and the drones will kill someone else while _they're_ sleeping, instead of you. If you're looking for more reading maybe start with WW1 trenches, then look for YouTube videos about Ukraine drone usage? The drone stuff may be too new for lots of writing about it, but you'll get an oblique view of it by looking at how the Russians put those roll cages / turtle shells over their tanks, etc. If you find anything and wanted to share it that would be interesting (if morbid)!

> the US has enough intelligent people 'intelligent', yes, big scary performative navy/gear, very very costly, here take most of the tax dollars. This is whats going on since WW2, where are these intelligent people who couldn't understand this?

> destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers No. This is absurd claim that can't physically comport with sortie generation math. CSIS report from first 3 weeks noted Israel did more than half of strikes on ~15,000 targets... all Israel's hits would be from land basing. 2xCSG at surge for 3 weeks = ~6k sorties, ~20% for kinetic strike (80% of sorties supportive, cap, tanking, ew etc). Optimistically carriers hit ~2000 targets when not standoff during first 3 weeks. Likely strike compositions: Israel from land, 50%, US from regional land ~35% (we know lots of none carrier aviation was involved), carriers ~15%. The real kicker is CSGs since been pushed to standoff - kinetic strike ratio to dwindle to single digit % sorties at those distances, making carrier cost:strike ratio even more unfavourable. This something most expect from peer/near peer adversaries, not Iran, i.e. carriers seem vulnerable to lower tier of adversaries than originally thought.

Quick, what's the difference between a suicide drone and a guided missile?

Cost, production capacity, radar cross section, speed, range, payload. Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload. Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload. Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve. Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer. Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.

Do you mean stuff like FP-5 Flamingo? These are really cruise missiles. Why would you call it a suicide drone? Because it has wings? Tomahawks have wings. Because the design is based on a target drone, so what the capabilities are very much inline with munitions we call cruise missiles. The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really. Otherwise both are long range guided munitions.

Flamingo is pretty close to a cruise missile in many ways. You correctly observe that this is a continuum but most but not all drones have props whereas all missiles are either rocket based or jet engine based and missiles tend to be a lot faster and do not allow for a change of plan after launch. So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.

Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.

At the moment, cruise speed and manufacturing price.

Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences

- 2-4 orders of magnitude in cost. - One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.

You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service? Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.

Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets. Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships. Assuming the opponent will be dumb is .. dumb.

It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.

> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy. I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war. Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer. If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those) To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat. the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)

Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.

Cost.

The point is a country like Iran can, in 2026, force the US Navy to keep an large stand off distance. How much further could a country like China keep the Navy back? What about in 10 years? Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.

> is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are. The country with 0.3% of global spending in military is putting a noticeable dent in assets of country that has 35% of global spending in military and are begging allies for help coz they can't even stop the drones With that level of difference you'd expect whole thing to end already and yet it is not. So any actor at even 10% scale of US going all in in drones would probably obliterate US navy without all that much. US is behind and frankly invested in wrong tech over the years. That is not to say carriers are going away any time soon, you need to ship the firepower to the target somehow, but one filled to 3/4 with drones would probably be far more effective

I agree in general, but I quibble with the "noticeable dent" part. I think that Iran is doing well given the enormous difference in power between it and the US/Israeli/Gulf Arab coalition, but the only way in which it is putting a noticeable dent in that coalition's assets is economical. And it is only capable of doing that because it is next to a vital narrow waterway and not far from some of the Gulf Arabs' fossil fuel facilities. So I don't think the situation generalizes.

Long-range anti-ship missiles of old are also obsolete, they and their launch problems are also too expensive for their vulnerability. A salvo Shahed-style drones launched from expendable unmanned vessels would overload a carrier group air defences way cheaper than old school ASMs from frigates.

I disagree: lots of cheap drones would be extremely effective against an aircraft carrier. They don't need to sink the ship; they just need to damage the jets or disrupt operations on the flight deck. Even a small drone is a serious threat to a jet. How can a carrier defend against a drone swarm? They only have so much ammunition for those CWIS guns, and defending against the swarm will probably cost a lot more than the swarm itself does. Of course, this assumes the carrier is within range of the drone swarm, but that seems to be the assumption in this line of argument. Eventually, I think they'll have more cost-effective defenses against small, cheap drones, but they don't have them yet.

The Shahed drones have more than enough range for this, easily. Whether they're "cheap" I guess depends on your perspective; they're certainly not as cheap as some handheld drone, but they're still pretty cheap compared to all the stuff the US is using now.

An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target. The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.

That isn't really true. There are expensive and important bits on the outside-- radars, optical sensors, etc. that could be damaged by very small things. Even $400 dollar drones would force some kind of defensive system to start shooting if the ship is to remain usable. The ship would of course also become progressively more vulnerable as this goes on, so I don't agree that ships have some kind of D&D-style DR that means that anything costing below a million does nothing.

> Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. It's pretty hard to imagine a scenario from the nineties where there are so many speedboats in an attack that all four CIWS on a carrier use all their ammo at once. (that's an awful lot of suicidal jihadis, or whatever) On the other hand, if the CIWS are targeting clouds of aerial drones and jetski drones at the same time, that could be a pretty bad scene. About fifteen seconds of fire per CIWS (1550 rounds), five minutes downtime to reload, between one and three seconds to service each target...

> An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. Problem isn't a single drone, it's the cost of intercepters. Iran could launch a swarm of 100s of drones with few antiship missiles mixed in to hone in at same time. CSG has to spend $million+ interceptors and will quickly run out of them. US hasn't taken anti drone defence seriously, or the cost of doing it seriously before going in.

The cheap drones Iran makes get a GPS coordinate plugged into them and they fly there. Carriers rarely stay in the same place for long so they'd be effectively useless against them.

The immediate counters and questions raised are: * cost of adding encrypted mobile comms to receive target location update, * turn about time on russian sat intell on carrier positions, * observed carrier path patterns wrt drone flight times ( or fractions of flight time if mid air updates can occur ) * numbers and timings of drones that can be launched with alt coords to play predictive battleships with.

> It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. Unless Iran bought some CM-302 missiles from China, the mere threat of which appears to mean that China and Iran now control the oil in the gulf. But ELI5 me maybe I don't understand realpolitik

If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space. The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.

> If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world. > change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon. It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now. > the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)

The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth. You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes. But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.

> This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world. Not quite. It is hard to build an airplane, it is easy to build a drone. So if the battle comes to who is going to send more drones, then a big carrier will lose: it doesn't have a factory to build drones.

> It's a return to battleship economics. The real economics of battleships (and their precursor ships of the line) were: Given expensive armaments (cannon), it is cheaper to concentrate these on a mobile platform that can geographically reposition itself than build / deploy / supply equivalent power everywhere , and the former allows for local overmatch. Sufficiently cheap and powerful unmanned guided munitions (drones, cheap cruise/ballistic missiles, UAV/USV/UUVs) are a fundamentally different balance of power, especially with enough range. What does make sense is a return to cheaper escort carriers, where the carrier should be as cheap as possible (preferably unmanned) as the platforms it hosts are no longer exquisite.

Both can be true - carriers and traditional air force are not obsolete but also western armies are unprepared to deal with the threat posed by a large number of cheap drones which can quickly deplete traditional air defense (based on SAM systems).

From what I see in news both the US and the UK are using expensive missiles to shut down Shahed drones and laser weapons are not mentioned at all - either they are too rare or not yet working reliably enough to risk letting a drone to get withing the range or laser weapons (which I assume is smaller than for missiles).

The US relies primarily on a weapon system called APKWS to shoot down drones. These guided missiles are cheaper than a Shahed. A single fighter jet can carry ~40 of them. These weapons have been around since the early 2010s, they aren't new, and have been deployed in the Middle East for many years. They were literally designed for killing swarms of Shahed-style drones.

We can barely build FFGs, to say nothing of bigger drone carriers that would still be dwarfed by aircraft carriers. So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.

Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.

You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying. Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger. The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach. Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?

You don't even need to say "lasers" : that's the future. CIWS is already a thing today and Ukrainians have downed Shaheds with ground fire from small arms. There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic). There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).

100% interception … drone interception is NP complete dude, there’s nothing you can do against 1000 drones like that, and they’ll get cheaper, faster, smaller, bigger, more manoeuvrable. So 10Million bucks to down an aircraft carrier. With 0 casualties to your side.

Sure, my point is just that lasers you can get the cost per 'kill' to literally a few $. So even the 'cheap drones are cheaper then other interceptor' argument doesn't work.

Somewhere in the next decade we'll wake up to a large military base, port or airport utterly wrecked by some party spending << $100k.

Fair, it's not an aircraft carrier. But you can turn any container vessel into a cheap rough equivalent. Take the coastline, then maybe 30 km inland and see what installations you could reach. Pearl Harbor on a shoestring budget is a realistic threat now.

This is just making the very common categorization error here: you're equating low performance drones, implied to be about DJI sized, with the performance of an F-35. Now you're about to say "but I meant drones with better capability!" And they do exist: and they're no longer that cheap, nor compact because it turns out a drone with roughly the performance of an F-35 will need an airframe, engine and sensor suite...roughly as expensive as an F-35. And suddenly this is no longer a platform you can just crash into things. Nor will you be ordering them by the thousand. Nor do they fit in a cargo container.

I've seen the range of drones that is available and they are very impressive, the variety is precisely what makes them so powerful: you can adapt mix and match to whatever mission profile you have in mind and there most likely will be something that you can use unmodified. And if the task requires it modifications can be done on very short notice. An F-35 is of course going to absolutely outclass any drone. But a hundred million (roughly) spent on drones is going to do more damage than that F-35 and is going to be more versatile. The second that F-35 lands it is going to be at risk from a (low cost) drone attack. And some aicraft aren't even safe in the sky anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACjCP-Dt3GY Speaking of Aircraft Carriers, how is the Ford doing?

Mix and match how? Your entire one-way arsenal is sitting in cargo containers off the coast of an enemy nation by definition within drone range. At this point you've built a very slow, very short ranged undefended arsenal ship. Your proposal is to put a large supply of systems closer to enemy forces and the you're implying that somehow this wouldn't be vulnerable to being attacked while landed?

Check out the 'Toloka' family for one sample of what drones are like. They've been used in strikes already.

Yes, it's is a submersible, but it is also a drone. > Which is notably not going to be launching a drone the size of a even a Shahed, nor anything close to the same range. It doesn't need to. It is its own munition with a anywhere from 500 to a couple of tons of explosives on board. And a very impressive range.

You could do this anywhere in the world for a very small amount of money. The implications of the Ukrainian war have changed the balance of power for ever. No airport will ever be safe again.

sneaking weapons into some countries is harder than into others, making things that fly long distances gets exponentially harder as distance goes up linearly.

That's true, but when things get cheaper you can afford to lose a lot of them. Suddenly every container vessel is suspect. That trick has a lot of potential and harbors are relatively soft targets and easily accessible from just outside international waters. You could do a shitload of damage to most countries by just targeting a few key locations well within the reach of a basic drone and what sub $1000 drones can do is changing by the day. Armor and artillery are basically useless against a fleet of seaborne drones.

you don't have to do a lot of damage to have a dramatic effect either. Imagine an airport near the coast, you don't have to destroy the airport but if one drone flattens the tires on one out of ever 50 planes on a runway the airport might as well be a smoldering crater. It's like a ddos attack and similar to what's happening in Iran today. All it takes is one drone to hit one tanker and a > 0% of it happening again and no one is sailing because their payload is uninsurable. In the same way, all it takes is one drone to disable one airliner and a credible threat it could happen again and no plane is taking off from that airport ever again.

If I you can project power globally , but as soon as a human is put on the ground they're disintegrated by a 100 dollar drone, how important was your ability to get there?

Irrespective of the political leadership, it's unlikely that USA military is completely oblivious about the new modes of wars - cheap drones, AI, rapid build-outs (e.g. in China). On the contrary, they are likely deeply aware of it. That being said, it is also likely true that USA has become more bureaucratic and there is a high chance of deer-in-headlights situation. USA remains the shining city on the hill, though probably not for long, unless we pull up socks and innovate, work, work, work and build, build and build.

Cheap airborne weapons have irreversibly changed warfare. IIRC a Patriot missile costs something like $4 million. Using them to shoot down $50k Shahed drone is a losing proposition. That's not only because of the price, but because the drones can be produced a lot faster. Even Iran's ballistic missiles are a lot cheaper and faster to produce than any defense system that can reliably destroy them.

At the heart of this is the fact that America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale. High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude. It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.

We (the US) probably spend too much per munition and do not have manufacturing capacity like China. We're not helpless, but i dont get the sense we have plenty of stock either. Both are problems. (1) In this back and forth I'm surprised mines in the straight are not mentioned. (2) im having difficulty seeing how cheap drones incapacitates a carrier. They are there to project force well into enemy territory for precise strikes. The carrier can be some distance from the shore. Now, the question turns to strike what? Surely drone manufacturing plants and barracks would have to be on list or ... they'd be less effective. (3) if drones are sub-mach speeds why not shoot down with a glorified gattleling gun as opposed to expensive missiles or lasers?

> We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII. When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs, you get the "Oh we produce high value products, mostly military". Then you get posts like this. How is one to reconcile these ideas? Is Lockheed Martin the Ferrari of weapons?

UKR = entire country of +40m is on the battlefront so they can do total war mobilized homefront distributed system... so can Iran. But it's very different for force projecting security guarantor US - can't convince paying protectorates to pivot total war defense posture in peacetime, that's what they bribe US not to do. And ultimately whatever model of distributed lethality / survivability (which US planning foresaw) is less relevant that US global commitments requires high end hardware that has to be rotated / propositioned selectively, and sustainable only in limited numbers vs adversaries mobilized on total war. But the fundamental problem is US adversaries are catching up on precision strike complex. Iran isn't asymmetric warfare, but restoration of symmetry. It's not so much US getting weaker as adversaries getting stronger, and without monopoly over mass precision strike (which naval / air superiority / supremacy is only delivery platform), US expeditionary mode simply on the losing side of many local attrition scenarios. Ultimately all US adversaries will gain commoditized local precision strike (even deadlier if bundled with high end ISR), at varying scales due to proliferation requiring persistence across global theatres US simply doesn't have numbers/logistics for. TLDR: US expeditionary model is bunch of goons with rifles in trucks, driving around neighbourhood where everyone had knives that could not get in range. The second everyone else buys guns, then rifles, the expeditionary model breaks.

Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads. The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.

is china helping ukraine also? The real "force multiplier" is basically the same as it was 100 years ago: fancy advanced tech works great to clear large, unoccupied spaces with no terrain costs; it still won't go into a jungle, climbmountains or fight in the streats. Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon. So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land. America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.

Americans have been sold an image of the US being an omnipotent presence, due to its Navy. It is a legitimate question to wonder why a relatively weak, long embargoed country has the power to control the waters when the US has spent a pretty penny on all these warplanes and aircraft carriers. If little Iran can prevent the US from being able to establish security in a little straight, it (ideally) shatters that image and causes some soul searching for what US taxpayers are buying with the military.

Brute forcing by spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on a military is not analogous at all to brute forcing in a game of chess, whatever that means. Regardless of the analogies, the reality is that even with all the resources the US spent on its military, after a whole month, it cannot guarantee safe passage through a body of water adjacent to a small time adversary. Which, as an American, is embarrassing in terms of ROI on tax dollars spent.

Nowadays it's about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Sure, 99% of the time a Shahed-136 might "lose" against a Patriot, but a Patriot missile costs 200x what a Shahed does. Laser and EWar approaches are going to be more successful long-term as the price per "shot" is dramatically less, but deployments are slow.

The US uses APKWS and similar against Shahed-136. These guided missiles are cheaper than the Shahed-136. Why would you assume the US uses Patriot missiles against a Shahed-136? That isn’t part of their doctrine and the flight profile is a poor fit. These have been operational in the US military for almost 15 years now and are widely deployed in the Middle East. You may want to update your priors. The US military anticipated all of this. While these are cheaper than the Shahed-136, lasers have the advantage of unlimited magazine depth, so it is obvious why the US would invest in that.

> Sure, 99% of the time a Shahed-136 might "lose" against a Patriot, but a Patriot missile costs 200x what a Shahed does. From what i understand, i think people use other systems than patriots to shoot down Shaheds except as a last resort. So the cost difference is bad, but its not nearly as bad as it would be if you were using something like a patriot for every drone.

Ukraine has been striking down Shaheds with even cheaper drones for several years now. No reason to use unproven technology when there's a practical means available.

If I were on the JTF staff I would point out that those are measures of performance, but not measures of effectiveness. The proof of utility is achieving the mission. That is not to take away from the sailors, or military members in navy or any branch. I wouldn't want to be out there right now. They are doing hard things. But the things they are doing aren't achieving the commander's objectives. I will concede that our objectives in this campaign have been less than clear or well thought out, but there is a truth to the idea that we have built our military for a different war than this. million dollar tlams fed by decade old targeting information and all decisions centralized in a slow, unreactive and ultimately counterproductive joint targeting cycle won't win this.

> Sure, but keeping the straight open is not really important, sure gas, fertilizers and a few other commodities are going to get more expensive, but there is no need to put thousands of sailors in harms way. What is the point of having by far the worlds most expensive military if it can’t be used to at least ostensibly improve the lives of citizens? It’s a giant money pit that does… nothing?

Straights have been impossible to force since Churchill tried to force the Bosphorus in 1915. Placing ships in a narrow target area that can be pre-sighted is a losing proposition, a single artillery gun could mission-kill a destroyer in hormuz - mines/torpedos/drones could sink a ship in a place where rescue may not be possible.

Limited range? Shaheds have over 2000 kilometers more than tomahawks. And btw, if you can get a submarince close to your target, torpedoes and missiles are going to be much more effective than drones. Space is limited on platforms, a submarine might have space for 60 drones or 30 missiles, given the immense cost of the submarine, going with the missiles is the right call. The trucks launching shaheds that iran is using can fit like 5 such drones, a similar truck could probably fit 2 to 4 cruise missiles the only reason they are using drones is the rapid production and cost associated with drones instead of the cruise missiles.

Look at SSGNs. Not drone carriers, but TLAM is pretty close to drone warfare from the US's point of view.

Ehm, there is the tiny issue of cost and overall inventory size ...

But sir, how do we stop an old guy on the bow of a rusty fishing boat firing a $50 rpg at the oil tanker?

The problem is that we need to adapt to the asymmetrical aspect of drone warfare, as Ukraine has done. The best description I saw of the current state is “flying IEDs”. Drones and ballistic missiles make area denial asymmetrically cheap for a defending forces. This lesson needs to be incorporated because it would be the same tactic used by China to deny access to the South China Sea.

'matsup' is correct. Iran only needs to score 'one point' to win the whole game. If they can threaten tankers, then the gulf will remain closed, and that's that. It's really debatable if the US really has the capability to play 'whack a mole' and get all the moles.

However dilute the effect is, if they are able to hit a few gas/oil carriers with drones there, nobody is going to use that body of water.

> Iran doesn’t have the resources to deny access to the entire Indian Ocean. I have what may be a scale issue in my imagination, so bear with me if this is silly. There are reports of international drug transport via seaborne drones in the 0.5-5 tonne range, and of these crossing the Pacific, and the cost of the vehicles is estimated to be around 2-4 million USD each. If drug dealers can do that, surely Iran (and basically everyone with a GDP at least the size of something like Andorra's) should be able to make credible threats to disrupt approximately as much non-military shipping as they want to worldwide?

If drug shippers can make drones cross the Pacific for a few million a time, why can't Iran reach the Pacific shipping lanes? I think the main limit on them interfering with that shipping would be that China becomes unhappy with them, not that this is infeasible? (Also, at these prices I don't think it will be limited to Iran, or even to nations, so countermeasures will need to be invented).

Given it is reported to be successfully targeting Israel with cluster ammunitions in warheads, I am curious what stops Iran from targeting US ships even far outside the strait? I would have thought if you could send multiple missiles with cluster bombs simultaneously at short notice it would be very difficult to counter and impose catastrophic cost. Is anti-missile defense is just that good on ships that no amount of simultaneous missiles and decoys can overcome it?

What are you talking about? Better missiles dont stop Iran from closing a tiny waterway in their border. US weapons are pretty damn good for the most part. But trade protection is just not something fancy advanced weapons can solve. Military planners have known this for a long time. If anything, if you were serious you would say that the US didnt pay enough tradesmen and technician to build enough of the needed weapons.

The U.S. can't win this war. John Kiriakou did a nice analysis on this on his recent podcasts. "Iran just has to prolong the war and survive it to win". Trump on the other hand needs a decisive win fast, or the economic and political fallout will be too big. As long as Iran can launch cheap drones and keep a small but steady pressure there is just no path out of this for the U.S. except to go home.

Much further than that. At least 200nm using drone ISR to cue Shaheeds, 500nm with satellite ISR. (With a 90kg warhead.) There are also many fishing vessels in the region, originating from a number of countries (e.g. Oman, Iran, Pakistan) which can report sightings of VLCCs. Once you have sighted the ship it is an undergrad project to implement target classification and recognition using off the shelf algorithms. It doesn't need a fast GPU because naval engagements are very slow, a cheap mobile phone can do it.

And boats, amd submerged drones, and mines...

Also Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under United States Joint Forces Command in mid-2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy. In particular, Red utilized old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network: Van Riper simulated using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications in the model. Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes. There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper. Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps. And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.

Why though? Iranian missiles aren’t new and they seem to be the only threat to the aircraft carriers.

Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.

I haven’t read the article but what exactly are you going to blast? You can fire the Shahed drone from the back of a pick up truck. They could be scattered all over the country they’re cheap as hell to make and they could pump out hundreds of thousands of them.

> Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.

Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand and launching it. The range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran, an absolutely impossible task.

Carpet bombing doesn't cover a large area. Besides which there is nowhere to stage so an enormous campaign that isn't also in reach of one way drones. The vast areas in the East are where you can strike shipping. You would only strike the West if your intention was to kill Iranians rather than end the war.

> can't deny access to a coast that large with carpet bombing, especially in a mountainous terrain. It has never worked. You'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to do that I think this is more an open question than “it has never worked.” Nobody has tried to area deny FPV-drone navigators. Bases on lines of sight and line channels, one could probably back out from transit paths to the places one would need to be to hit that target, and then ensure anything there is turned from psychology to biology before a critical moment. You couldn’t do this with smart munitions, and couldn’t along the entire Hormuz coast. But for critical junctures that our closest allies (minus Kuwait) need to export? The math seems feasible, if fundamentally untackled.