Summarizer

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.

Your scenario imagines a naive and completely fictional concept of how modern naval systems actually work. That you can’t conceive of why what you are suggesting is effectively impossible means you truly don’t understand the domain. The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses. You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?

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.

1000 drones of what size? If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore? If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted? For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area. You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control). You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it. [1] https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russias-new-jet-pow...

> 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

The Chinese have drone carrier ships already in fleet and I think that is likely the future addition to fleets that is necessary. I am not sure how much the era of human controlled flight is coming to an end but certainly substantial drone capability and anti drone defence is urgently required.

I agree that this conflict in Iran doesn’t really indicate that the aircraft carrier is any weaker now than it ever was. Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers. More than any air defense could ever stop.

All right, they have the range. Let's say a carrier is 700 km away and the drone has a range of 1200 km. Great. Now, does it have the kill chain to supply it with an accurate targeting fix and update it during the flight? Or, does it have a radar good enough to find the Lincoln on its own? If it doesn't, then it's a really big ocean. But sure, they've got the range.

Cheap drones are pretty useless against large naval vessels. Making a dent in those ships requires a heavy, specialized penetrating warheads. And even then you'll need to score several hits. Just the warhead alone on a standard anti-ship weapon weighs more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.

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.

Yes, but it is not certain that cheap drones have the range or navigational technology to reach and hit a carrier in the current circumstances. More expensive drones do, but that's a different matter.

> ... drones Regarding drones they are, by definition, not very sturdy: for they're drones and not B52 bombers or bunkers. What's very likely going to happen is that, just I can take a Browning B525 Sporter balltrap shotgun and shoot any civilian drone from afar because the gun shoots an expanding cloud of tiny, cheap, pellets, armies are now going to come up with systems to both defend and destroy drones. I'm not saying the drones used in war are the same as DJI drones: what I'm saying is that with the proper tech, they're much less expensive to take down than, say, a ballistic missile or an aircraft carrier. Anyone seeing this conflict and thinking that the militaro-industrial complex isn't hard at work working on solutions to take down drones is smoking heavy stuff. Ukrainian and Russian did it already (although it's nothing serious, it's just an example): here we were talking about actual tiny drones, carrying explosives, and running towards vehicles. As a cheap defense measures, they started immediately adding metallic "spikes" (not unlike hairs) to the vehicles, so that the drone wouldn't reach the vehicle's body and instead explode when hitting the mettalic spikes. War has always been about "tech x" / "anti tech x". This time is not going to be different. > Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers. China. They're demos of thousands of drones fully synchronized in the sky at night making nice 3D patterns with everybody on the ground going "aaaah" and "wooooow" is a display of military capability. I'm not saying it's not a concern: but it's not as if the US (and others) were going to sit and think "oh drones exists, the concept of war is over".

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.

All large ships in the US Navy have automated weapons for killing swarms of small surface craft. They added that capability a few decades ago because they were regularly attacked by swarms of suicide speed boats packed with explosives. No one tries that anymore. Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. Easier than avoiding torpedos, which are also long-range drones.

> 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...

Interestingly, the problem the existing weapons had is that they had terrible engagement characteristics for things that were close and fast at sea level. CIWS wasn’t built for that. It wasn’t in the original threat model. They were designed for low planes and cruise missiles. The boat swarms would close the distance fast, and the US Navy was reluctant to engage potentially stupid but non-hostile targets. By the time the threat was clear the defensive weapon systems were outside their design parameters. The alternative was killing everyone a long way out even if they weren’t a clear threat. Not an issue today, they have loads of weapons purpose-engineered for that threat. But they had to learn that lesson the hard way.

> 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.

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).

Wasn’t this the exact sort of reason we were developing laser weapons? I thought at least one US Navy ship was equipped with one now.

The US Navy has been experimenting with laser weapons but none of them are really operational for air defense yet. https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/03/31/...

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 news is outright wrong about that. Yes, as a last ditch measure patriots etc are used to shoot down leaker drones, but the primary weapon systems to take down the slow moving drones are APKWS rockets on fighters, and helicopter gunships using cannon fire. There is definitely an argument to be made that even APKWS is too expensive due to the cost of flying a F16 per hour, but it’s not at the level of a few million dollar missile. Obviously the US was in no way prepared for the Iranian response, but it’s not like zero development has happened in the last few years. It’s far too slow, but it’s deployed and in active use in combat. Hopefully this will be a wake up call that military procurement and domestic manufacturing needs to be wholesale reconfigured with breakneck speed. Doubtful though without much more pain felt directly by American citizens.

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.

I dunno about what Israel is doing, but a ship usually has enough power to fire 1 or 2 lasers at a time. It takes 10s of seconds to destroy a drone, and each drone stays in range for 1 or 2 minutes. Or, that is their advertised capabilities. Countries that buy them usually complain that they don't work as well on practice.

Well, assume the advertised capabilities are realistic. Assume it takes 15 seconds to destroy a drone, the drone stays in range for 2 minutes, and you can fire on 2 drones at a time. You can destroy 16 drones every 2 minutes. If you get attacked by 50 drones, you'll get 16-20 of them. Did that help you?

Yes, the scenario makes it clearer. I mean, they are helpful (if they work as well as the marketing material says). Just not transformative or sufficient.

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.

You just need a radar controlled anti aircraft gun. Most militaries phased these out as they had been considered obsolete (dosn't help against e.g. modern fighter jets).

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.

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.

Nobody is using Patriot to intercept Shaheds. PAC-2/3 are intended for ballistic missiles and fighter jets. In Ukraine, low-flying drones are primarily countered by FPV, MANPADS, drone-hunting aircraft and truck, and EW before point defense SAM and AA gun.

There are videos on r/combatfootage in the early weeks, patriot missiles shooting down drones.

I did a quick search and could only found a missed missile having self destruction. Shaheds have a very distinct noise it shouldn't be too hard to id. While I don't doubt Americans had used patriot on drones, I believe it is because they were(and still are) unprepared and they panicked.

Actually they are using everything they have to combat these cheap drones. That includes Patriot and THAAD systems as well. Specially UAE, which got struck with more drones than Israel. That is how Iran was able to take out a THAAD radar, because it was deployed so close to them. https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-uneasy-as-us-moves-air-def... https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us...

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?

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.

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.

In this instance, a flight of B-52's could wipe the concrete shielded missiles off the face of the Earth. Start off with F18s to secure the skies, then B52s to pound the missiles, then the Navy could stroll back in. It's just that no one has had the gumption to do it until now.

> if they are able to hit a few gas/oil carriers with drones there, nobody is going to use that body of water It’s a lot more feasible to escort tankers after the Strait than it is before, when American warships have to come close to shore. Iran doesn’t have the resources to deny access to the entire Indian Ocean.

> 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? Sure. Do you think that means worldwide shipping would shut down? And the point isn't to take the risk to zero. But to a level where military escorts can feel safe.

> Do you think that means worldwide shipping would shut down? I think there's a danger of that, at least if countermeasures are not easily available for normal shipping. Even 1-on-1 rather than 1-v-everyone, there's too many players (not all of them nations) with too many conflicting goals and interests. If Cuba tried to do it, could they credibly threaten to sink all sea-based trade involving the USA? If not Cuba, who would be the smallest nation that could? And the same applies to Taiwan and China, in both directions, either of which would be fairly dramatic on the world stage, even though China also has land options. Or North Korea putting up an effective anti-shipping blockade against Japan. > But to a level where military escorts can feel safe. Are there enough military ships to do the escorting?

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?

I meant intercepting missiles, drones, etc

Laser cannons should be a cheap way to shoot them down.

> 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.