Keep in mind that we once had many battleships in the fleet. They were rendered obsolete by the airplane.
Battleships are very fat targets in this age.
Bismarck and Musashi were eventually sunk by bombs. Then there was the near-successful attempt sinking USS Cole reflecting the potency of asymmetric warfare, and of course current drone technology which, if Ukrainian boat drones are able to sink large Russian missile cruisers, what more with a battleship about the size of an Iowa?
He’s in it mainly for the belief he wants to show a bigger e-peen.
Its a bigger issue than just battleships versus carriers.
Its a doctrine issue. The US military industrial complex selected a US defense/ war strategy that would be most profitable for them as consultants. This has almost always meant that bigger, more complex, more high tech, is always better from the eyes of a consultant. Hence the Iowa. Hence the F-35. Hence the Virginia Class. US military doctrine hasn’t been selected for based on what a good doctrine would be. Its been selected for based on what would be profitable for consultants.
And both the war in Ukraine and October 7th just, blow that up. Hamas, literally, an almost comically underfunded barely-a-military in the grand scheme of global conflict got past one of the most heavily militarized borders on the planet in fucking hand made gliders. Like honestly, not NEARLY enough credit is given to what Hamas accomplished on that day. It should be studied, for generations, for millennia. What they did was horrible, but what the accomplished, it should change peoples minds about what is possible and the “value” of technology like the iron-dome. And then there is Ukraine. And the value of cheap, mass production shines, yet again.
There is a very important footnote about October 7th and Israel/Hamas.
Notably that most of the military units that were supposed to be guarding the gaza border had been moved away from the border.
By one Benjamin Netenyahu.
Where did he move them? To harass and intimidate the judges presiding over his corruption trials.
More like he allowed it to happen despite forewarning so that he would then have casus belli for which to destroy an entire population.
Yeah, I mean he’s been funding Hamas for a long time for that exact reason
I’m no conspiracy guy, but there’s no way I believe that one of, if not the, finest intelligence groups on Earth had no idea October 7th was coming. Defending against hostile neighbors is the very raison d’etre of the Israeli intelligence apparatus.
Now that I said that out loud, I hate it, but I still believe it.
They had all the information, but chose to ignore it. Whether the decision to ignore the many warnings was due to incompetence or malice is less certain. Personally I believe the latter, mostly because Netanyahu has been blocking a proper investigation for years now.
*“Israeli officials had obtained Hamas’s plan for an unprecedented attack on Israel over a year in advance, but had deemed the scenario to be aspirational”
“In July, however, an analyst from the elite signals intelligence Unit 8200 warned that Hamas had just conducted a military exercise that in many respects resembled the “Jericho Wall” document’s attack plan.”
"the Israeli army turned a deaf ear to repeated warnings from women soldiers posted as spotters on the border with Gaza in the days leading up to the October 7 Hamas attack. "*
The only way it makes sense otherwise is if they did a 9/11 intel situation where some parts of the apparatus knew but nobody who could use that information got it in time. In 2023. On one of the most aggressively monitored land borders on the planet.
The conspiracy theory is that they didn’t know.
What makes sense to me is that Netanyahu was under massive pressure due to the corruption scandal, etc. Because of that, a lot of the state’s surveillance apparatus was turned inwards.
I’m in the same boat.
Given how aggressive Israel has been in Gaza and how desperate Bibi has been to not go to court, all signs point to Oct 7 being permitted as an excuse.
We are in a seriously dark timeline
The US military industrial complex selected a US defense/ war strategy that would be most profitable as consultants.
Yeah, it’s the profit that comes first. Nearly every piece of US hardware is so overdesigned in a way that politicians are wowed but government is forced to spend much, in due contrast to how outfits like Hamas, the Houthis, and FARC build cheap but very destructive weapons that continue to keep governments stumped and sometimes outgunned.
I’m… not sure Oct 7 is a great example. They got past the border yes, but then they’ve lost continuously for the next two years. Cheap mass production worked once in an attack that was brutally effective… and then it’s done nothing. It’s a great example of how effective “exploiting overconfidence” is as a tactic, but the gazan war pretty conclusively shows the benefits of holding technological superiority.
(wait, no, hang on: the virgina class is a great submarine, what’s the issue there?)
It’s about high technology versus low. The Virginia class, the F35, Iron Dome, these are some of the most complex pieces of military technology in existence. They cost more than a medium national military spending to build one of them. They depend on incredible expertise and support systems to stay functional. The supply chain is maybe one of the most complex in the world.
They are the result of a military doctrine whose ass was shown on Oct 7, and which continues to be shown in Ukraine. October 7th is an important example because of just the extreme disparity between the two forces in the technology, materials, and funding available to both nations. Ukraine is important because it shows us what a sustained example looks like. Mass production, loser cost, more available, consumer grade: these are antithetical to US military doctrine.
It’s not that a five billion dollar submarine isn’t a useful fighting tool, it’s that if a five hundred dollar drone can keep it in port… what really is its value?
The US military doctrine has been basically “highest if the high technology only”. And I’m arguing that it’s ass is showing.
I’m really confused by a bunch of what you’re saying here:
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Oct 7 happened because iron dome had a huge hole in it’s coverage: namely, it was never designed to protect against extremely short range, low speed gliders. Iron dome is incredibly effective at what it was designed to do, protect against low-tech rockets and artillery (as seen during the 2025 israel-iran war). Hamas identified and masterfully exploited that, but it’s not exactly a failed technology because it was circumvented once with an unanticipated strategy, and has since continued to be proven extremely effective at the thing it was designed to do.
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How is Ukraine showcasing a failure in doctrine for the west? I’m just confused, given the amount of western equipment and aid flowing into Ukraine and their spectacularly effective resistance to what-was-once-thought-to-be the 2nd most powerful military in the world, you’d think the conclusion would be that the soviet derived strategies of the russian army (cheap + simple = good) would be the ones being most clearly highlighted as outdated.
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Why is complexity inherently bad? You’re asserting that’s the case, but you’re not really making an argument as to why that’s the case. Yes, the supply chain is complex, but the supply chain for the F35 isn’t more complex than for things like the F-16E, one of the most effective fighter aircraft of the modern era, it’s just less broadly established (well it was, as F35s have been delivered to NATO countries that supply chain is now extremely robust).
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A $500 drone is not keeping a submarine in port. I don’t even know what you’re trying to say here with that one. What could a $500 drone even do to threaten a submarine, besides report it’s position to an artillery battery (and if that happened, why wouldn’t the submarine just… not stay in port?).
And as a concluding point: You know that drone warfare in Ukraine consists of significantly more than just $500 FPV drones (which rely on foreign supply chains), right? They’re incredibly effective for their role, but Ukraine uses much more highly sophisticated drones all over the battlefield. Presenting the drone development work they’ve done as being centered around “cheap mass produced drones” belies a serious lack of understanding as to the most basic mechanics of the Ukrainian war.
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Well maybe they should make them so they’re not magnets for bombs? Perhaps use a different non-magnetic metal? /j
The obvious answer is to spray ocean water all over the boats because magnets don’t work when they get wet (according to Mango Mussolini.)
he will add some gold plating to the entire hull.
Ah yes. What a genius :3 /s
They keep going back to the past … might as well go all the way back to the age of wooden Galleons and sailing ships
Wait…that would be badass though…
Battleships were at the top. Until the airplane. After that the battleship was just a large target.
How is it going to stop a swarm of cheap drones?
Well how many CWIS do you need to stop 20 million dollars worth of drones?
200 million worth
Cheap drones ain’t gonna take a US warship.
From the sky? Ever seen a phalanx gun in action?
From the sea? We have a pretty good lock on torpedo defense.
The US Navy isn’t the Russian Navy, old-ass ships cruising around all by themselves. They’re part of a battle group with interlocking defenses.
Not saying they can’t get hit by asymmetrical warfare means! But no one’s sinking a US Navy warship without serious weapons.
From the sky? Ever seen a phalanx gun in action?
Against a single multi-million dollar missile? Yep. Against a cloud of 500 cheap drones, each one moving in an unpredictable way? No. I suspect it would kill a lot of them, but some of them would get through.
Apparently a Phalanx fires 4500 rounds per minute, but that “rounds per minute” figure is deceiving because it can’t fire for a minute. It has a magazine that holds about 1500 rounds, enough for about 20 seconds. The original “Block 0” phalanx took 2 men 10-30 minutes to change a magazine. Block 1 improved that to less than 5 minutes. This makes sense with their original threat model: one, maybe 2 very expensive missiles coming at the ship.
It seems to me that if you can spend 100 drones to draw fire for the Phalanx for 20 seconds, you now have a 5 minute window where there’s no CIWS to protect the ship.
But no one’s sinking a US Navy warship without serious weapons.
The USS Cole was nearly sunk by a small fiberglass boat. And, you don’t even need weapons. The USS John McCain almost sunk itself by running into another ship, just a month or so after something similar happened to the USS Fitzgerald.
Anytime someone mentions the CIWS in a situation that isn’t about cruise missiles or drone boats I instantly disregard what they have to say.
People like that only bring it up because it’s the only thing they know about and they only know about it because it’s extremely flashy.
That’s usually because they’re referring to the Phalanx CRAM system, which is a derivitave of the Phalanx CIWS system used by the US navy. The two look extremely similar (for obvious reasons, they share many components) and often the CIWS label is (incorrectly) used interchangably to refer to both systems. CRAM, which for at least the last fifteen years has been deployed on Navy vessels operating close enough to a coastline that the whole “swarm of drones” tactic is a feasible threat, is more than capable of engaging with those threats, and has repeatedly demonstrated that capability. It’s massively expanded magazine capacity, cheaper ammunition and (greatly) improved mechatronics on top of a more-accurate-at-engagement-range weapon are extremely flashy, but also extremely effective.
It’s super flashy, that’s why you see it in movies and stuff. But the CI in CIWS stands for Close In, meaning they’re one of the last layers of defence before something hits the ship. If the Phalanx has to fire, all the other layers of defence have failed. Like most military stuff, stats about it are not available to the general public. But, we do know about some of the failures. For example:
An Iraqi battery at al-Finţās fired two Silkworms at the formation of allied ships, at 0452 on 25 February 1991. One of the Silkworms misfired and crashed into the sea shortly after the Iraqis launched it, but the other missile hurtled toward Missouri at 605 knots and a height of 375 feet above the water. The U.S. and British ships tracked the incoming missile on their radar. From the bridge of the Jarrett, Lt. Craig Isaacson ordered chaff, torchs, and decoys to be launched to confound the missile’s guidance.[4] Missouri also fired its SRBOC chaff at this time. The Phalanx CIWS system on Jarrett, operating in the automatic target-acquisition mode, fixed on Missouri’s chaff, releasing a burst of rounds. From this burst, four rounds hit Missouri which was 2–3 miles (3.2–4.8 km) from Jarrett at the time.
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No military hardware from decades ago has effective counter measures for drone warfare.
WWII battleships would have been more than capable of dealing with a drone swarm, things were encrusted with flak of which most could fire 40mm proximity airburst shells.
Modern networked CIWS systems can track hundreds of targets at once and engage consecutively - the idea of a bunch of small RC craft swarming a navy ship has been around for decades, and we’ve developed plenty of countermeasures (“A big net” is currently among the moslt effective). It’s a powerful tactic sure, but the idea that anyone was surprised by the advent of swarms of loitering munitions is ridiculous.
For the most part, Russian naval losses have been down to russian incompetence. Their CIWS equipment has been shut down or entirely nonoperational because its barely maintained, their crews have no access to emergency equipment or in some cases even small arms, they’ve been jamming their own comms so outlaying vessels can’t warn eachother about incoming threats, etc. which erros Ukraine has been incredibly good at finding and capitalizing on.
things were encrusted with flak of which most could fire 40mm proximity airburst shells
Almost all of which missed. And they were firing at relatively large, relatively predictably moving planes, not tiny drones that can change direction on a dime.
As for swarms of drones attacking US Navy ships, we really don’t know how well they’d handle it. Even before the war in Ukraine, it wasn’t an unknown threat, but they’d never actually had to deal with it. Sure, occasionally there’s one civilian drone that goes where it’s not supposed to, and it gets taken down by a net, or a military drone, or a rifle. But, they’ve never faced trained and motivated drone warfare specialists. And, in Ukraine drone warfare has gone through multiple generations of move and counter-move. If there were a US Navy ship in a harbour, or one that had to pass through a narrow strait and it was the Ukrainians who were trying to attack it with drones, I’d definitely bet on the Ukrainians. They have a ton of up-to-the-minute experience with the latest tactics and counters. The US Navy may have done some training, but they’ve never had to do it for real the way the Ukrainians have.
I’m sure the US military would learn quickly if it got into a real drone war. The US military has issues, but not the massive corruption, nepotism, theft, and rigid command structure that the Russians have. And, even the Russians have adapted somewhat. But, my guess is that it will take a significant loss for the US military before the right people are put in charge and given a free hand. That’s not a US military issue, it’s just a general issue with what happens before a crisis and after a crisis.
While I don’t disagree with your overall point here, there’s a couple things worth pointing out:
- The kind of drones that are a threat to a naval vessel both are not plentiful enough to overwhelm the defensive systems and are large enough that they very much move in predictable ways - they’re little more than teleoperated missiles.
- $500 FPV drones, while fairly effective in trench warfare, are utterly negated by things like a closed door or “a big net”, which is why both Ukraine and Russia have been extensively employing “big nets” and bunkers with doors extensively over the front. Cope cages, sadly, are very effective.
- A single civilian drone trespassing is effective because wide-area jamming isn’t possible in civilian area. Jamming is incredibly effective in anti-drone warfare, is something all US navy vessels can do (to a lesser or greater extent, that extent measured in kilometers of effective range) and is the reason for the development of optical-fibre drones. While that has removed the effectiveness of jamming (a single drone) completely, what it hasn’t done is make large swarms of unjammed drones feasible. The optical fibers just get tangled, and then they fall down (Russia has tried this and the videos of it failing are very funny I quite recommend looking them up)
- WWII era AA weapons are being very effectively employed in anti-drone roles across both the Ukrainian and Russian lines, as well as in Syria. They miss, yes, but drones have to be much much much closer to a ship to be a threat than WWII aircraft had to be.
I have doubts, given how closely AFU have been working with (and sending advisors to) western powers to work on the topic of anti-drone warfare, that there would be much difficulty getting the various militaries up to speed on the tactics. But yes, there would absolutely be a learning curve, especially around the purely home-grown varieties Ukraine uses (they extensively use NATO manufactured drones (bayraktar, switchblade) too, ofc). All that stuff about training being no replacement for experience etc. etc. absolutely holds true.
they’re little more than teleoperated missiles.
I think that’s true of drones that would attack a ship on the open sea. I don’t think that’s true of a drone you’d use to attack a ship in a harbour, in a narrow strait, in a canal like the Suez or Panama, etc. Especially with FPV drones that can be flown into a weak spot, you could get the standard quad-copter drones with a grenade-type charge to disable a ship.
$500 FPV drones, while fairly effective in trench warfare, are utterly negated by things like a closed door or “a big net”
They’re slowed down by doors and nets, but not negated. The bigger the net, more likely there will be a hole in it somewhere. A closed door works in a bunker where the door can be tens of metres from the target. But, a ship doesn’t have that much room to work with. In addition, a ship is a massively high value target. A bunker is only really as valuable as the people who happen to be inside it. But, the cheapest US navy ship comes in at about $100m.
To put the cost of a $500 drone in perspective, a single WWII era shell cost somewhere around $500 in WWII money. With inflation, that would be about $10,000 today. So, you could buy 20 $500 drones for the cost of a single unguided battleship shell. In the battle of the Denmark Strait, the battleship Bismarck fired something like 18 salvos, with each salvo using about 3-4 guns, for about 50ish rounds used. So, that’s about half a million dollars in shells. I strongly believe that if you gave $500 grand to a Ukrainian drone unit, they could find a way to sink a ship with it.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shells used by the 5 inch guns on a modern ship cost more than the drones Ukraine is using to harass the Russian soldiers. So, if the Ukrainians had the ammunition budget of a ship they were attacking, and even if every single shell scored a hit, the Ukrainians might have more $500 drones than the ship had $500 shells.
Maybe they’d use small drones to exhaust the countermeasures of the ships and just bleed them out of ammo. Maybe they’d use enormous heavy-lift drones to drop flares, chaff and fireworks to blind the ships. Who knows what their tactics would be. The main thing is that ships and their crews are designed, armed and trained to fight the last war, and drones are a big part of the current/next war.
You’re right that drones have limitations. Jammers can cut off radio controlled drones. Optical fiber drones have a shorter range, the fibers can get tangled etc. GPS guided drones can be jammed or misled. But, US ships haven’t been trained or equipped for all-out drone warfare. They’re still focusing on planes and missiles as being the main threats. And because of the costs associated with planes and missiles, they don’t have to plan to survive a swarm of hundreds or thousands.
I just think that ships are such high value targets, and drones are so versatile, that there will be a solution that works, at least when the ship is in a vulnerable place near land and with limited maneuvering options.
It might be better to compare a modern example, the $4000 pricetag on NATO 155mm shells vs. $500 FPV drones. But for some reason artillery is in much higher demand, and accounts for far more casualties, than the FPV drones…
I strongly believe that if you gave $500 grand to a Ukrainian drone unit, they could find a way to sink a ship with it.
They have that budget, though. And yet none of the russian naval assets destroyed have been taken out by drones, let alone $500 FPV drones. And that’s the russian navy, who’s close in radar jams the ship-wide intercom (Moskva) and who’ve never demonstrated their own CIWS capabilities. It’s also ignoring things like the complete lack of the use of cheap drone swarms at any point in the Ukrainian war (and there’s technical reasons for that) - even operation spiderweb, the closest thing to a true drone swarm we’ve seen yet, only used 117 drones across all the deployment zones (and then those were still not truly simultaneously coordinated).
The argument that any weapon system can take out any other weapon system isn’t in dispute - there’s a confirmed kill on a panzer with an umbrella, for example. But what you’re presenting is pretty broad speculation that boils down to “Because I think this is right” and there’s not much to do with that.
The full quotation, by the way, runs:
“It has been said critically that there is a tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war” [Lieut. Col. J. L. Schley, 1929]
It’s not the presentation of a hard and fast rule, it’s a cautioning to avoid a lazy pitfall.
(I have a lot more I could throw out here and if I remember tomorrow morning I will, apologies for keeping it brief but it’s very late here.)
What are you thinking of when you say “drone”? Again, phalanx guns are automatic anti-air defenses that have been around since 1980. Can’t speak to sea defenses, but I’m pretty sure the Navy can defend against water-borne drones.
I think you’re looking at Ukraine taking Russian warships with drones. They’re throwing rocks at toddlers compared to American Naval might. Watched a Ukrainian water drone home in on a Russian warship of some sort. LOL, they had dudes firing guns at it, manually. That is not the sort of warfare I think we’re discussing.
Think on this; If it’s carrying enough explosives to seriously damage an American warship, it’s a fat target. Until someone comes out with “cheap” drones the size of a Cessna, with stealth tech, I’m not too worried.
Make boat smaller, so it’s harder to hit. 😌
If they were to do that, they may be mistaken for innocent fishing boats opening them up to bouts of friendly fire.
Jokes on them, we’re gonna make the bombs smaller too.
Battleships were rendered obsolete by the airplane but also by radar and radio.
Even in their heyday, battleships never went out alone. They were always protected by smaller ships like destroyers. A WWII battleship cost about $100m to build (about $2b in today’s money). A destroyer was only about $6m. Destroyers evolved from something called a “Torpedo Boat Destroyer”, which was a ship built specifically to kill torpedo boats. Torpedo boats were small boats that either launched torpedoes, or in the earliest days carried torpedoes affixed to the bow which they’d use to ram high-value enemy ships. In the “rock, paper, scissors” world of naval combat, a really cheap torpedo boat could take out a really expensive battleship, but the torpedo boat was countered by a (torpedo boat) destroyer.
Battleships come from a time when the only way to spot an enemy fleet was to see them visually across the water. It used to be that an entire battlegroup could “hide” by just chasing off or killing whatever had spotted them and then changing course. The ocean was a big place, and spotting something visually was really tough. Add night, clouds and weather and sometimes ships could be only a few km away and never spot each-other. By the middle of WWII radar and radio improvements had changed that (the radar for spotting, and the radio for relaying the information on what you found).
Radar makes spotting any ship nearby easy, even at night or in bad weather. Put that radar into a plane and now a tiny plane can spot and track a huge fleet, so it can no longer disappear. With the ease of communication with radio, that means that if the enemy fleet is too powerful, your fleet can stay in port or otherwise avoid it. If you have submarines (the modern version of the torpedo boat) you can try to set up an ambush.
So, even if airplanes didn’t exist, battleships would probably still be obsolete just because of radar and radio. And, up next, carriers will become because of drones and missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
This is flooding the zone.
he wants it turn it into his personal megayacht, off course it must be covered in gold plating.
Great video! Sounds unbiased to my ear, but what do I know.
I get that Trump’s senile and wants the “big guns” of his youth. But I’d love to ask him for what exact purpose would we want battleships. “Yeah, I get it. They’re big and scary. But how would the Navy use them?”
Not like anyone is going to nail him to the wall with simple questions like that. 🙄
