So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:
- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.
- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.
- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.
- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.
- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.
Yes, a drone is the same thing as a cruise missile, so a drone swarm is precisely a missile barrage. But I think you're missing two key points.
First, you're underestimating the importance of things being cheaper. Consider that an iPhone is basically a Cray Y-MP with packet radio, just cheaper. But in the 01980s could you have looked at a Cray and KA9Q and predicted Uber, sexting, revenge porn, Instagram influencers, Russian trolls on Twitter working to influence US elections, and Bitcoin?
In the same way, reducing the cost of a cruise missile from US$2M (Block V Tomahawks) to US$1000 will change the military situation not just in degree but in kind. Current CIWS are designed for gunboats and conventional cruise missiles appearing in groups of 1-16. Current carrier group defense in depth is designed for fighter-bombers that appear in groups of 16-128. They will not be useful against drone swarms that appear in groups of even 256, let alone 1024 or 8192.
Second, you're thinking of brute-force payloads like hand grenades, and that leads you to drastically underestimate the importance of small drones penetrating. But hand grenades are the epitome of dumb weapons: they have a timer, no guidance, and just a fragmentation charge. A US$1000 drone that manages to make it to a carrier deck does not have to be as dumb as a hand grenade. Instead, think of it as being like a frogman who has successfully boarded an enemy ship on a suicide mission, but lost almost all his equipment in the process. How much damage could he do before he gets killed? What if, instead of one frogman, it's 1024 frogmen? What if they're almost invisible?
Frogmen can short out wires, gather intelligence, plant bugs, pierce jet engines, set fires, cut throats, plant claymores, poison food, distract sentries, jam signals, booby-trap small arms, breach reactor containment, disable reactor coolant circuits, release potent poison gases deep below deck, falsify sensor readings, extinguish indoor lighting, frag sleeping sailors, and interchange fuels with solvents. And so can drones: if not today, 20 years from now.
> Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement.
I have little interest in discussing drone swarms (so does the article to be fair - a good two thirds are strictly about drones which could as well be by themselves) but this statement is simply untrue.
It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group. So would a submarine intelligently positioned. The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
>It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group.
I agree. But the only platform able to consistently engage a carrier group with this kind of firepower is another carrier group. Land-based artillery can be kept out of range or engaged using the force projection of the carrier.
>So would a submarine intelligently positioned.
Submarine capabilities are some of the most well-kept military secrets of the world. There is no way to assert that. In modern doctrines, they are mostly used for intel and as a platform for launching ICBMs, so I would really not bet on that.
>The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
That is true. Spamming ICBMs could work, and they don't need to be nuclear to defeat a modern carrier group :)
>Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
This is absolutely and provably false. No systems allows for the force projection that a carrier group afford. France was able to deploy & support an incredible amount of power from the Charles de Gaulle against the Islamic State. No other system could have achieved that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...
There is no question that a modern offensive submarine could sink a carrier. Theoretically a carrier group should be able to detect it but it’s a very real threat.
The exemple you give for the relevance of carrier is not a symmetric conflict. Thankfully the equipment available to the Islamic State was garbage compared to what a modern army can do.
In a conflict between for exemple the US and China, carriers would be useless. They would probably be amongst the first things to be targeted.
>Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
Phalanx has a magazine of 1,550 rounds, and each burst fires 100 rounds. Firing continuously, it would expend its magazine in 20.6 seconds. Firing perfectly, (with no hostile ECM) it could splash fifteen incoming targets.
As the threat had evolved, the US Navy has started phasing out the Phalanx CIWS and replacing it with various RIM-116 (RAM) launchers. These are much more capable against high-speed maneuvering targets.
But realistically the limiting factors for point defense are more likely to be detection and engagement range rather than magazine depth. Hence the focus on layered air defense including longer range missiles, countermeasures, and decoys.
A carrier move with a large screen of ships, each bringing their own missiles defenses, plus pans with their own missiles that are likely to pick up and shoot stuff large enough not to be launched in range of the carrier group suppression zone
An actual attack intended to overwhelm point defenses would be a single wave, obviously. There wouldn't be any chance to reload anything. Whatever you have in the magazines and VLS cells at that moment would be all you get.
I agree with most everything you say here about the limitations of drones, but there's a high likelihood that current aircraft carriers are quite vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. A DF-26 costs ~$10M, so launching several at a carrier, though expensive, would still be massively cost-effective in a real war. This article on WotR discusses the threat a bit more (I don't have an opinion on the solution/approach it advocates for the US military): https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/when-it-comes-to-missiles-....
>Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?
If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.
The USMC had become a second land army, and decided they needed a mission and set of capabilities of their own. They've pivoted to facing off against China in the Pacific theatre and decided that tanks just don't fit into their requirements for that mission. If they do need tank support, the army has plenty.
I did not work for the USMC and the strategic goals of the IDF (land defense, small area) are very different so I can't answer for sure. In many modern battle scenarios (specifically urban warfare scenarios) tanks aren't of much use so I totally see binning them in favor of better combined arms.
Also again: you are taking Russian armor survivability as proof for US armor survivability against the same threat. I totally get if you take my comments here with a (big) grain of salt because I can't provide citations and I'm not making any direct claims about US armor survivability against Javelins (and you'll note you won't find any videos/info online about that because of classification).
I read that the USMC ditched their tanks in preparation for a conflict with China in the South China Sea. In that environment, tanks don't really fit in an island-hopping scenario. In the place of the armor and aviation units they got rid of, they are looking at things like HIMARS systems. The U.S. Army on the other hand has kept it's tanks.
The numbers don't add up. The US has sent 7,000 javelins to Ukraine and overall they're been sent 30,000 anti-tank weapons and Ukraine is asking for hundreds more per day. It seems unlikely those javelins have killed 6,510 (.93 * 7000) Russian tanks, or that they will be destroying hundreds more per day. Many of the drone videos released by the Ukrainians show tanks hit by ATGMs but not actually being destroyed.
For sure the Russians have lots a lot of vehicles to ATGMs, they have proved to be extremely effective weapons, especially against tanks moving forward in tight formations without infantry support. However nobody is looking at the terrible infantry casualties Russia has suffered, due to poor tactics, training and resupply, and concluding that infantry are obsolete.
Here's a video of a Ukrainian tank ambushing a Russian convoy. Seems like a pretty effective weapon system to me.
Javelins are designed to be used for more than destroying armor, it has other selectable operating modes. They are being used by the Ukrainians against non-armor vehicles and as direct-fire weapons (US infantry uses this mode a lot). It also has a mode for helicopters.
On the video, the ukrainian tank is of course performing an effective ambush. I don't pretend I have the answers, but I wonder how would perform a bunch of infantry with NLAWs striking the column from multiple places at once, for cheaper than the tank, able to engage multiple targets at once, much less spottable, and so on.
Yeah, an anti-tank missile would be a pretty bad example of its category if it couldn't destroy a tank.
The point is that a properly equipped, prepared and trained military would have taken steps to use assets like tanks well and not marched them into oblivion, and perhaps researched and developed countermeasures to what is clearly a popular anti-tank missile system.
Such a military would also have conducted reconnaissance by drone, scouts, satellite etc. and concluded from the data gathered that driving a tank into [area with lots of unpacked Javelin crates] would perhaps be impractical, and focused on eliminating the munitions before playing the tank card.
The tank can wipe out infantry and survive anything with less-than-anti-tank weapons, the Javelin user can kill the tank, the sniper can kill the Javelin, the counter-sniper can kill the sniper, the artillery strike or sustained covering fire by infantry can cancel out the counter-sniper, etc.
The point is that simply driving tanks into a city full of people with anti-tank missile launchers and a strong inclination to attack invading tanks is not a good idea without mitigating the risk.
The existence of an anti-tank missile launcher does not make the tank irrelevant. Fighter jets still fly despite the existence of anti-aircraft missile systems.
What makes war technology irrelevant is whether it is prohibitively expensive to replace, assuming non-zero odds that the unit will be incapacitated/destroyed.
This is especially true against an opposing military force that has large amounts of existing man-made or natural shelter and cover, high motivation, *and* supplies/support from multiple wealthy countries, etc. that basically doesn't have to spend because it's defending with whatever it has, tooth and nail.
That isn't really fair, it is comparing 90's American tech which has presumably been updated over time to, essentially, minimally maintained Soviet tech. Maybe that last 7% is the tanks they've made since ~1990.
$4M tanks are defeated by a $40K NLAW. Much like cuirassiers cavalry who were rendered obsolete by muskets becoming rifles with increased penetration, it's not because tanks don't works, it's because it's so cheap to kill one and so expensive to make one.
Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.
Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before.
Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.
I would be wary of those numbers. There is a heavy selection bias, as we don't see the videos where the AT weapons fails, where the operator gets shot, etc.
We'll have better information once the fog of war lifts.
So this was found and photographed 1-2 days later and assumed to be the heart of said lizard, if nothing else happened to have its heart ripped out in the same area:
Don't you love it when the once in a lifetime opportunity for generational wealth is also a great fundamental investment? In case the biggest short squeeze the market would have ever seen, with the potential to crash the US economy, somehow doesn't happen (damn hedgies!). With all of that that, it doesn't matter that physical sales of video games are dying and that the company is bleeding out money with a loss of $100 millions in Q3 2021 alone.
I think the Q4 earnings report will show massive improvements, furthermore, them moving away from just being a brick-and-mortar store will help valuation in the long run. MOASS is unlikely to happen, but I think in the long term the valuation of GME will keep increasing considering their new plans and their new following/customers. They definitely gained in brand-name in the last year.
This whole saga seems to at least introduce some new rules and regulations. Although enforcing them will be the real game-changer.
