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First your opponent would have to find the carrier. Easier said than done. Next they would have to be able to target it with these drones. The drones would hav

• logfromblammo 11y ago
  If my mission were to take out a carrier group, and I had a budget of $100M, I would go a slightly different direction. I'd shop Alibaba for 300 hp diesel outboard motors, and rigid-hull hydroplaning inflatable boats with at least 2000 kg maximum cargo weight. Then I'd build some one-ton armor-penetrating bombs and 19 times that number of cheap decoys. My engineers would rig up the steering and throttle controls to some servos, connected to a system-on-a-chip, connected to some cheap sensors that could determine distance and direction to nearby objects and discriminate between big ship and little boat. The software on the SOC would have a flocking/schooling AI that would maintain separation between vessels while seeking to maneuver the bows of many small boats into contact with any large ship. Any boat carrying a non-decoy bomb detonates it on contact. It would be about as complex as an insect brain. For bonus points, the boats would be spitting flares, smoke, mylar helium balloons, and chaff everywhere as they approach. Perhaps a few would conceal a conventional torpedo. As you say, the hard part is getting the weapons to the targets. With a setup like this, you really need to have the carrier group come to you. The inflatables can certainly outrun a carrier, but they have much shorter range. Perhaps the boats could be deployed by submarines? I think each decoy boat could probably be deployed for less than $2000. The bomb boats would be that, plus the cost of the bomb. There would be no radios to jam. There's no particular reason the drones need to be airborne, other than for speed and maneuverability, and you're trading that in for sheer numbers (40000+) anyway. Besides that, it's a lot easier to float a one-ton bomb than it is to fly it, and it would do more damage at or below the waterline than on a deck. If US carrier groups are not wargaming this type of scenario, they probably should, both as underway-at-sea and in-the-harbor attacks.
  • greedo 11y ago
    Are you sure the inflatables can outrun a carrier? Though the top speed is classified, it's widely acknowledged that a CVN can make 30+ kts indefinitely, and in sea states that would make inflatables untenable. And "armor penetrating bombs" usually do so by one of two methods, kinetic energy imparted via gravity or rocket engine, or via something similar to an explosively forged projectile (like the fancier Iranian IEDs). And there may not be any radios to jam (assuming your swarm can maneuver intelligently without communication), but that doesn't mean that your control servos etc are immune to jamming. The electromagnetic spectrum is pretty wide, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was something that couldn't be fried by a clever Aegis array. The wattage those arrays put out is pretty incredible.
    • logfromblammo 11y ago
      An aircraft carrier displaces 100k tons. A fully loaded inflatable displaces maybe 2 tons, and can hydroplane. As long as the outboard motor is not damaged, an inflatable is definitely faster and more maneuverable than a carrier. The carrier beats the inflatable in range and seaworthiness, though, which is a significant advantage. So again, the major problem is how to get the inflatables close enough to the carrier in the first place. Inside a harbor or straits, you accomplish that via stealth or trap. On open seas, well... probably better to guess where the carrier group is going and wait for it there. The threat of an attack like this can cause a carrier group to maintain an impassable cordon at a certain distance from hostile coastlines, just like anti-ship ballistic missiles. 500 guys can spend all night prepping and launching boats from transport trucks and a floating pier, and two can pilot the "flock leader" close enough to your ships that the attack behaviors can trigger. As far as I know, you can craft a bomb using engineered shapes and controlled detonation timing to drive a lance of molten copper through a hardened steel armor plate. It does require a certain level of technical expertise and precision machining. That's why so many boats have decoys on them; too expensive to put bombs on all of them. But even so, the USS Cole attack used only 0.3 tons of dumb explosive and still opened a big hole. But it neither sank the ship nor damaged its keel, which is why bigger, smarter bombs are needed to take down a warship. You have to pierce through more than just the outer hull, otherwise the built-in passive defenses of a modern warship mean you only inconvenience the enemy for a few months, rather than putting their asset on the seafloor. Couldn't you place all electronics inside a Faraday cage and ground it to a metal part in your hull? The steering and throttle can be done with purely mechanical linkages.