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.
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.
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jarrett
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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…
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’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.)
They have that budget overall. Not $500k just to sink one ship.
Yes, because the Russians have been smart enough to keep their ships in Russian-controlled ports.
Which means they’re somehow immune to being attacked by drones? Russia has had naval assets repeatedly damaged by drones (both aerial and seababies) while in port, and yet none of those many attacks have been enough to truly take down one of those ships (also there are several examples of a warship being damaged, and even destroyed, while not in port by a drone… specifically by bayraktar TB2s firing missiles) (Might need to be doublechecked on that claim, I think it’s right although I didn’t did too deeply into the exact location around snake island several vessels were at when they were destroyed so they may have actually been in ports and I was just unable to confirm that)). The attack on the Moskva used (at least) two Neptune missiles, which cost between $1m - $1.5m each, and boy did that work spectacularly.
Again, I’m not disputing that any weapon systems, under ideal conditions, can destroy any other weapon system (see again Digby Tatham-Warter (it was a Sd.Kfz. 234 not a panzer, whoops)). What I am disputing is that the drone units absolutely have that budget (and more), and yet despite having ample choice of high-value targets, and their choice of an inventory of extremely versatile drones, they have yet to find a solution that works, even when the ship is in a vulnerable place near land and with limited maneuvering options.
What you’re claiming as a nearly forgone conclusion is much much more difficult than the thing they have already repeatedly tried and failed to do. The reasons to use missiles and planes to attack ships are manifold, as are the reasons to use drones in roles they are suited for. But they complement each other; the maneuverability of a drone is not somehow a straight replacement for the ability to carry a 500kg warhead.
edit: bayraktar is hard to spell
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.