Summarizer

A big mistake here was simply underestimating the scale of Iran. Iran has 90,000,000 people. More than 2x Ukraine. More than 2x Germany. More than 2x Iraq. More than any country in Europe. About 2/3 of Russia. Expecting to win a war on the cheap was a fantasy. Especially since Iran has been fighting Israel for years. On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. That finally made it undeniable that sending naval vessels anywhere near a hostile shore is a thing of the past. Countermeasures can take out some attacking missiles, but not all of them. This is a real problem for the U.S. Navy, because they've invested heavily in craft intended to operate near hostile shores. Littoral combat ships and amphibious assault ships are intended to operate offshore of trouble spots. This worked a lot better when the trouble spots couldn't do much to them. 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. Ukraine produced 4 million drones last year, and production continues to increase. Ukraine even exports drones now. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE have been making deals with Ukraine for air defense systems. Iran exports drones to Russia. 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 US can't just pull out, either. The enemy gets a vote on when it's over. Israel, Iran, and Yemen now all have to agree. Probably the best deal the US can get at this point is a cease fire with Iran collecting tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba, Cuba allies with Iran, it turns out that Cuba has been stocking up on Iranian drones, and Cuba becomes a forward base for drone and missile attacks on the southern US.

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.

I like the size and population take, but the industry perspective is bad: Russia doesn't have air superiority. US and Israel do. Cuba becoming a base for Shaed drones? You are out of touch with how much industry you need for that. They are cheap, but they are not FPVs or off-the-shelf Mavics.

> 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 saw a teardown of an Ukrainian drone a while ago and I was surprised how similar the setup was to the IoT project I worked on. I could be setting up a good chunk of the software part of a similar system myself and I am not that specialized of an engineer.

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.

Russia is a buyer of Iranian drone tech. Iran has also done a very good job marketing their maneuvering reentry vehicles in the last couple weeks.

Agreed. Minus the nuclear and air defence, Iran is more advanced than US and Russia in many other weapons capabilities.

You have it backward, Iran is not shipping shahed drones to russia anymore its not 2022, the trend reversed and russians are teaching iranians about their mods that improve penetration chances. russians are now fully self-sufficient with shaheds. The rest I fully agree with, although its a half-assed effort that will likely backfire long term.

It's not just drones, but parts for drones. It's also munitions, shells, missiles. It's about production volume. The Ukraine is also getting large supplies of the same from the West. No side can produce domestically, what the other can product domestically + import. The imports matter. It's nice to wave away policing Hormuz, by simply asserting it can't be done. Is this accurate, however? In terms of oil, the US has recently cut China off from Venezuela as well. Short term supplies are important, "the future", a cloud of probabilities about oil shortags helping China, is not immediately apparent. It's suffering shipment halts from two lead suppliers now, both which were non-open market shipments, and volumes are unclear. I wonder, what if the Ukraine suddenly stepped up and crippled deliveries of Russian oil to China? Or what if Saudi Arabia was told "don't do that". From where I sit, it's China that's being most directly affected by these actions in terms of energy supply.

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.

I didn't take it as exhaustive. While you're alluding to high-end reapers/etc., the majority of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict have foam wings and low cost components.

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.

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

You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy. Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable. TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about. This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.

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.

> Could launch a swarm of 100s of drones. As far as I know we have never seen that happen against a single target. I believe the reasons are operational not cost related. A single truck can fit like 5 shaheds. For 100 at the same target at the same time you need to coordinate 20 crews just to get them in the air all these drones need to be controlled to some degree as well. It's possible but we have not seen such an attack. We have seen hundreds of drones targeting hundreds of targets against an entire country. So it's definitely possible, but I wager it's harder than it sounds to send 100s of shaheds against a carrier strike group. Shahed drones are very slow, and can thus be very easily distinguished from antiship missiles and can also be intercepted far befpre they reach the ships. You are thinking SM-2s. But the best way to deal with such a threat is a flight of f-18s with a bunch of laser guided rockets (like 50 or 70) and a targeting pod, intercepting the drones hundreds of miles from the target.

How exactly do drones project power globally?

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

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.

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.

Enough planning for the Secretary of War to buy defense stocks and the son of the president to own a drone manufacturing company. Just not planning for anything that might help "make America great again".

I think both missiles and drones can launch from trucks.

One thing that struck me is seeing his months long struggle, where the only injection mold designer he could find was near retirement age and wouldn't be doing it for too much longer, the tool & die expert he talked to died between when he interviewed him and when he made the video, he had to deal with suppliers lying about where their parts came from, and some American suppliers could only provide low quantities without him paying to upgrade their tooling. Then there's a comment from someone in China saying that over there, he'd be able to bring his product to mass production in about 5 days in whatever quantity he wanted, and at a higher quality (more corrosion resistant metal, more durable silicone, etc).

They have a working operational system and battle tested tactics, not only procurement. It's not the rifle that distinguishes the special forces, but how it's used. They built a network centric warefare with starlink and cheap android tablets down to the drone teams in the field. They built a network of cheap acousting sensors (old phones) as passive sensors and using ML models to find the drones cheaply and increase the coverage. (Radars are expensive and easy to hit because they emit). What they achieved is a "sensor fusion like" distributed system buid on cheap components and updated realtime. And all this is battle tested in the new environment of transparent battlefield (there is always a drone looking). Also a lot of real-life electronic warfare stuff and drone applications. This is what's missing in the US army. They are optimized for a symetrical 20th century warfare.

The position of the article seems to me to be it 'won't' because it can't. And that is an accurate assessment. It would take much more than the forces in the region, to secure the "strait". To actually secure the strait, you have to secure the entire Persian Gulf. It doesn't matter if tankers can pass through the strait only to be blown up just of Qatar. At it's widest the Gulf is about 360 kilometers, well within the range of most drones, aerial, surface and underwater. So they would have to protect every ship in the gulf, intercept all the drones all the time, or secure the entire coastline. It's simply a task air-power and naval power can't perform. Not without major casualties and without attacks going through. The US navies ships are good for real wars, but for casualties to be accepted, there has to be a real purpose. Escorting a bunch of privately owned oil tankers to bring down the price of gas does not really cut it.

I mean, you can't blame them. It's not like there was any recent precedent for a large thundering superpower to start a conflict (not a "war", of course)--under the assumption that a quick decapitation strike would end things in a few days--with an underestimated asymmetric adversary (one supported by a larger enemy) that responds with cheap drones and the like, resulting in an increasing quagmire, not to mention one resulting in the loss of valuable and irreplaceable airborne command-and-control aircraft during the conflict

I think our navy is mostly designed for prestige too, but it seems like you could use the current carriers to transport like a million disposable drones?

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.

> 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?

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.

Aircraft carriers will always be needed. However, I doubt that the huge and vulnerable carriers of today have any future. Carriers designed not for manned aircraft, but only for drones, missiles and guns would allow the use of a much greater number of small carriers instead of a few huge and expensive carriers. Such carriers could be mostly automated and they would need much smaller crews, instead of being floating cities.

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.

Who stops using a mosquito or drone fleet to do clear it?