Summarizer

Ship Damage vs Sinking

Technical discussion that mission kills through radar damage, flight deck damage, or fire are much easier than sinking ships but equally effective tactically

← Back to Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

Technical discussions regarding modern naval warfare center on the efficacy of "mission kills," where low-cost drones or missiles neutralize a vessel's combat capability without necessarily sinking it. Proponents argue that targeting fragile, high-value assets like radar arrays and flight decks can render a multi-billion-dollar destroyer as useless as a common container ship, potentially for months of repair. While skeptics maintain that modern warships are designed to survive massive structural damage and that cheap drones lack the penetrating power to "scratch the paint" of armored hulls, others point to historical carrier fires as proof that even small munitions can cause catastrophic operational failure. Ultimately, this asymmetric threat suggests that swarm tactics could overwhelm defensive systems and achieve tactical victory by exploiting the vulnerability of exposed sensors and aircraft.

32 comments tagged with this topic

View on HN · Topics
> 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
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
> 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.
View on HN · Topics
Yeah not so much for it's radars, or for the f35 parked on the flight deck, which may be you know loaded with thousands of gallons of fuel and hundreds of pounds of missiles and bombs. Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
View on HN · Topics
Days? If a laundry fire can take out a carrier for weeks, how long do you think a flight deck repair takes?
View on HN · Topics
And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone. As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink. Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat. There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships. Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire. The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
View on HN · Topics
It proved nearly impossible to sink the Bismarck and Yamato battleships in WW2 just by shelling them.
View on HN · Topics
Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle. The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
> it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel you don't need to damage it severely. Some holes in radar, on board aircrafts and missiles containers will reduce capability by 80%
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
To sink it, yes. To render it useless for a while is easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_fire All from a little drone-sized warhead.
View on HN · Topics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire (~20kg warhead)
View on HN · Topics
That was over half a century ago. Completely irrelevant.
View on HN · Topics
Imagine trying to launch fighters when there are explosions on the deck from swarms of drones. And of course the fighters themselves could be hit and destroyed. An aircraft carrier that can't launch fighters is pretty much worthless.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
You could fly an FPV drone into the hangar and smash a plane full of ordinance if you get lucky. Unfortunately warships have a lot of flammables and explosives aboard.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
Large aircraft are the cheapest and most scalable way to deliver a ton of explosive on target. That's why aircraft carriers exist. Everything else either is too expensive per unit of destruction or sacrifices too much lethality. The size of the ship has little bearing on the visibility of it to sensors. You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
View on HN · Topics
> Large aircraft are the cheapest and most scalable way to deliver a ton of explosive on target. An important variable missing from your calculus is distance from munitions factory/supply depot. There are far cheaper and scalable ways to deliver tons of explosives if your supply lines are short, such as rail when you're defending your homeland. Carrier groups are both transport and FOBs > You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship. How did that turn out for the Russian Black Sea flagship, the Moskva?
View on HN · Topics
Where? Any war games in the last 10 years. It’s a known issue with aircraft carriers agiants anti ship missiles. What’s protecting them right now is what would happen to a country if they attacked one of those. Retribution is not a great defensive capability in the long run. Contrary to popular belief, an aircraft carrier does more than just launch airplane. Its optimal deployment zone will be defined by the range of its helicopters. So not as far as you think. Take the helicopters out and you have easily 50% less missions this thing can launch per day.
View on HN · Topics
Also the standard Shahed-136 style drones carry less than 200 pounds of explosives, and deliver that to the surface of a target. Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
View on HN · Topics
Very few Americans realize the scale of the defeat that the US military is facing in this war. Loss of CSG capabilities as well as anti missile radars, refueling planes, AWACS and ground bases all over the Middle East means this is the worst damage the US has taken since WW2.
View on HN · Topics
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.
View on HN · Topics
They meant the Gulf. You cross the straight into the Gulf, then what? Iran hit an E-3's antenna in an airport in Riyadh with a precision strike. Was it not worth defending? How many tankers inside the Gulf do they need to hit before the rest of the world decides it's a bad idea to send new tankers to the Gulf? And if new tankers don't go into the Gulf, then it's simply not open for business. That's their leverage.
View on HN · Topics
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?
View on HN · Topics
The chances of a ballistic missile hitting a ship - a small, moving target in the middle of the sea - are negligible. And a 4kg bomblet wouldn't do much damage anyway.
View on HN · Topics
Sinking a US ship would be a drastic escalation. Iran has done a lot of damage to US assets but inflicted few casualties, demonstrating both capability and restraint. If they destroyed the American boomers' few remaining illusions of supremacy by sinking a ship and potentially killing hundreds of crew, the loss of face would likely instigate a drastic response that could lead to a worst-case scenario. Much better for Iran to keep playing bloody knuckles and force the US and Israel to beg for peace when their missile defenses and appetite for war run dry.
View on HN · Topics
Who says they didn’t? Although not widely reported in mainstream US media, there are lots of claims online that US Navy ships were hit by missiles, including a clip from Trump himself. Why is the Ford and Lincoln so far away?