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The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1] Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by

The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1] Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection. It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload. The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last. All those problems are coming to naval warfare. [1] https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project

palmotea 1y ago
> Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Only when we're forced. There's an ego problem with military acquisitions, people want big fancy things. When million dollar missiles are outmatched with thousand dollar drones and that becomes an actual threat is when these things change. Ukraine is working as a reality check and learning experience for what modern war would actually be like on a large scale.
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    This, agree completely. History is rhyming with the WW1 generals who viewed machine guns as an irrelevant distraction from the main job of getting the cavalry charging. It's fascinating seeing the nature of warfare literally changing before our eyes in Ukraine and still everyone's focused on building big beautiful weapons
- bigyabai 1y ago
  You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.
  - elictronic 1y ago
    This is incorrect. You have layered responses. Faster drones mean less range, speed, or payload. So you layer your defense response to account for the different categories. This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems. Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned. I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
- elictronic 1y ago
  They have been demonstrated already. Lasers for small/medium drones are already being tested live in conflict regions as well. We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
- owlbite 1y ago
  There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).
  - palmotea 1y ago
    But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now. Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      The difficulty is choosing to fire a lower probability of kill weapon while defending a high-value asset (the ship) during a limited window of engagement. By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails. The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article. Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.
      - MichaelZuo 1y ago
        I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to defend an aircraft carrier sized target against a sufficiently concentrated missile/drone attack within say a 5 minute window 200 km offshore. Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…
        ethbr1 1y ago
        I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms. Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted. https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboard-electronic-warfare-system-can-actually-do https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  Not drones, high-power lasers. The US has been testing laser weapons for terminal defense extensively, with quite a bit of success. A laser shot has about the same cost as a single 20mm cartridge and you don’t need to reload.
  - Animats 1y ago
    That may work, but the enemy might attack with a thousand drones at once. So far, laser mounts are one per ship, and need several seconds on target to take down a drone. This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
    - jandrewrogers 1y ago
      A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses. You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures. The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
      - Animats 1y ago
        > A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Not any more. DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000. Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given. Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM [2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-drone-survives-strike/ https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr... [3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolika-mark-6 https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  a.k.a... cheap missiles. They don't even need to have a payload, they just need to hit the enemy drones before they get to close.
colechristensen 1y ago
I think it's been obvious for quite a while that in a real war ships are now going to be pretty useless as they're far too vulnerable to cheap and easy weapons. The Houthis demonstrated this to folks who weren't aware or in denial, but it's been true for a while.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  Vulnerable is not the same as obsolete. Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
- nradov 1y ago
  The Houthis haven't actually managed to hit any warships. In fact the opposite of what you claim has been demonstrated. The defenses work well, although at great expense. Of course whether they can survive a determined attack from a near-peer adversary remains to be seen.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  > Houthis demonstrated this The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged. It's hard to sink a ship. It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control. The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat. Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack
  - chipsa 1y ago
    Holes full of air tend not to do a good job of sinking ships. Holes full of water are good at sinking ships. Small warheads aren’t going to be effective at making holes full of water. They may be good at blowing up stuff on top, that make the ship not useful for doing it’s mission though.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik. The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield. Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need. How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion? Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel. I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages. And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
- scheme271 1y ago
  Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses. Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
jemmyw 1y ago
> The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.
- Xixi 1y ago
  Just two days ago: "F-35 Had To Maneuver To Evade Houthi Surface-To-Air Missile", "Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses" [1] They also shot down seven MQ-9 drones [2]. I don't know how close Houthis were to actually shoot down that F-35 (probably not that close). But if their Iranian SAMs can threaten F-35s, what can state of the art Chinese or Russian systems do? Could NATO even establish air superiority in Ukraine? [1] https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi-surface-to-air-missile-u-s-official https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi... [2] https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-backed-houthis-in-yemen-reports https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-back...
  - zmgsabst 1y ago
    US isn’t deploying its best SEAD tech against Houthis either, though. I don’t disagree with the general discussion; but it’s worth remembering the US would also change tactics against Russia or China.
    - Xixi 1y ago
      I don't disagree with what you are saying, and tactics also evolve a lot during conflicts. But my point is that the actual effectiveness of US forces against top-tier Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems is unknown. And getting more unknown by the day rather than less.
      - jemmyw 1y ago
        I would say though that we can probably look at the Ukraine war and understand how their air defense systems are working. And the answer to that seems to be: not as well as previously assumed, they do work but have been vulnerable. This is mainly the S300 and S400. I couldn't find much about the newest system, Russia isn't able to do much manufacturing of the most complex weapons at the moment. If I had a guess, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, US forces would shred the Russians in the air and water, but ground forces would be far behind when it came to drone warfare. I'm just a chump sitting at home though so... China is a whole other story and honestly I'm ok never finding out that answer.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bell-cot 1y ago
> Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. Nothing new there. Attacking ships from shore worked fine in WWII. (And in dozens of wars, over multiple centuries, before that.) Operationally, the drones and anti-ship missiles look very similar to WWII Axis shore-defense batteries and air forces. The latter included both kamikazes and stuff like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X - both of which knocked out multiple Allied capital ships. Major Allied air and naval forces could spend month wearing shore-based defense down, in preparation for amphibious invasions.
invalidname 1y ago
One major thing that's missing from this analysis is the rise of cheap mobile laser defense systems that can stop these missiles/drones pretty quickly. If the weather isn't ideal for lasers a ship can just move out of range.
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
Wasn't the Moskva caught sitting there with its defence radars switched off? I think that was a big fumble by the Russian navy but not necessarily reflective of any fundamental shift in the broader landscape of ships vs missiles.
timewizard 1y ago
> The Moskva Crew of 500 and one helicopter. > The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection. Crew of 10,000 plus an entire airwing. > The Ukraine war A "war" in which civilian casualties are intentionally limited. This serves as a very limited example of what modern full out war would entail.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
> The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last. This is true for any military conflict and always has been. It's basically a game of resource denial/destruction. If you poke through all the propaganda, ideology, etc. most wars boil down to which side has the best economics and can best deny access to essential resources for the other side in order to gain access to resources the other side controls (oil, minerals, land, water ways, trade routes, etc.). Many modern conflicts are actually proxy wars where large countries subsidize minor conflicts in a plausibly deniable but otherwise very open way. China, the US, EU, Russia, the Saudi's, etc. are all parties in such conflicts and they are fighting against each other and with each other depending on where you look (Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.). In the background you have trade relation ships, oil & minerals, and economical sanctions. And in some parts of the world water access. Those are the resources that sustain conflicts. Modern weaponry changes the tactics. But the strategy is always the same: go after resource access and you might win. You can see that happening in Ukraine and if China goes there, it will be a factor in Taiwan. It's why they mainly talk about that without going there. China is much smarter than Russia on this.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  Outside of the initial stages of the conflicts this is usually. One of the most interesting facts of the Rhodesian Bush war was they only really gave up when the fuel refinery and depot was destroyed.
rjsw 1y ago
That isn't all that new, HMS Glamorgan was hit by a missile mounted on a truck in 1982 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_...
jonwachob91 1y ago
I don't see any USNI articles that echo your comment, so idk why you linked them as a source...

palmotea 1y ago

> Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?

colechristensen 1y ago
Only when we're forced. There's an ego problem with military acquisitions, people want big fancy things. When million dollar missiles are outmatched with thousand dollar drones and that becomes an actual threat is when these things change. Ukraine is working as a reality check and learning experience for what modern war would actually be like on a large scale.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  This, agree completely. History is rhyming with the WW1 generals who viewed machine guns as an irrelevant distraction from the main job of getting the cavalry charging. It's fascinating seeing the nature of warfare literally changing before our eyes in Ukraine and still everyone's focused on building big beautiful weapons
bigyabai 1y ago
You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.
- elictronic 1y ago
  This is incorrect. You have layered responses. Faster drones mean less range, speed, or payload. So you layer your defense response to account for the different categories. This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems. Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned. I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
elictronic 1y ago
They have been demonstrated already. Lasers for small/medium drones are already being tested live in conflict regions as well. We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
owlbite 1y ago
There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).
- palmotea 1y ago
  But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now. Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    The difficulty is choosing to fire a lower probability of kill weapon while defending a high-value asset (the ship) during a limited window of engagement. By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails. The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article. Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.
    - MichaelZuo 1y ago
      I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to defend an aircraft carrier sized target against a sufficiently concentrated missile/drone attack within say a 5 minute window 200 km offshore. Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms. Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted. https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboard-electronic-warfare-system-can-actually-do https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
jandrewrogers 1y ago
Not drones, high-power lasers. The US has been testing laser weapons for terminal defense extensively, with quite a bit of success. A laser shot has about the same cost as a single 20mm cartridge and you don’t need to reload.
- Animats 1y ago
  That may work, but the enemy might attack with a thousand drones at once. So far, laser mounts are one per ship, and need several seconds on target to take down a drone. This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses. You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures. The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
    - Animats 1y ago
      > A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Not any more. DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000. Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given. Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM [2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-drone-survives-strike/ https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr... [3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolika-mark-6 https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
slowmovintarget 1y ago
a.k.a... cheap missiles. They don't even need to have a payload, they just need to hit the enemy drones before they get to close.

colechristensen 1y ago

I think it's been obvious for quite a while that in a real war ships are now going to be pretty useless as they're far too vulnerable to cheap and easy weapons. The Houthis demonstrated this to folks who weren't aware or in denial, but it's been true for a while.

jltsiren 1y ago
Vulnerable is not the same as obsolete. Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
nradov 1y ago
The Houthis haven't actually managed to hit any warships. In fact the opposite of what you claim has been demonstrated. The defenses work well, although at great expense. Of course whether they can survive a determined attack from a near-peer adversary remains to be seen.
ethbr1 1y ago
> Houthis demonstrated this The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged. It's hard to sink a ship. It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control. The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat. Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack
- chipsa 1y ago
  Holes full of air tend not to do a good job of sinking ships. Holes full of water are good at sinking ships. Small warheads aren’t going to be effective at making holes full of water. They may be good at blowing up stuff on top, that make the ship not useful for doing it’s mission though.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik. The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield. Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need. How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion? Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel. I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages. And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.

scheme271 1y ago
Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses. Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.

jemmyw 1y ago

> The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.

Xixi 1y ago
Just two days ago: "F-35 Had To Maneuver To Evade Houthi Surface-To-Air Missile", "Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses" [1] They also shot down seven MQ-9 drones [2]. I don't know how close Houthis were to actually shoot down that F-35 (probably not that close). But if their Iranian SAMs can threaten F-35s, what can state of the art Chinese or Russian systems do? Could NATO even establish air superiority in Ukraine? [1] https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi-surface-to-air-missile-u-s-official https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi... [2] https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-backed-houthis-in-yemen-reports https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-back...
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  US isn’t deploying its best SEAD tech against Houthis either, though. I don’t disagree with the general discussion; but it’s worth remembering the US would also change tactics against Russia or China.
  - Xixi 1y ago
    I don't disagree with what you are saying, and tactics also evolve a lot during conflicts. But my point is that the actual effectiveness of US forces against top-tier Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems is unknown. And getting more unknown by the day rather than less.
    - jemmyw 1y ago
      I would say though that we can probably look at the Ukraine war and understand how their air defense systems are working. And the answer to that seems to be: not as well as previously assumed, they do work but have been vulnerable. This is mainly the S300 and S400. I couldn't find much about the newest system, Russia isn't able to do much manufacturing of the most complex weapons at the moment. If I had a guess, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, US forces would shred the Russians in the air and water, but ground forces would be far behind when it came to drone warfare. I'm just a chump sitting at home though so... China is a whole other story and honestly I'm ok never finding out that answer.

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bell-cot 1y ago

> Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. Nothing new there. Attacking ships from shore worked fine in WWII. (And in dozens of wars, over multiple centuries, before that.) Operationally, the drones and anti-ship missiles look very similar to WWII Axis shore-defense batteries and air forces. The latter included both kamikazes and stuff like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X - both of which knocked out multiple Allied capital ships. Major Allied air and naval forces could spend month wearing shore-based defense down, in preparation for amphibious invasions.

invalidname 1y ago

One major thing that's missing from this analysis is the rise of cheap mobile laser defense systems that can stop these missiles/drones pretty quickly. If the weather isn't ideal for lasers a ship can just move out of range.

mitthrowaway2 1y ago

Wasn't the Moskva caught sitting there with its defence radars switched off? I think that was a big fumble by the Russian navy but not necessarily reflective of any fundamental shift in the broader landscape of ships vs missiles.

timewizard 1y ago

> The Moskva Crew of 500 and one helicopter. > The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection. Crew of 10,000 plus an entire airwing. > The Ukraine war A "war" in which civilian casualties are intentionally limited. This serves as a very limited example of what modern full out war would entail.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

> The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last. This is true for any military conflict and always has been. It's basically a game of resource denial/destruction. If you poke through all the propaganda, ideology, etc. most wars boil down to which side has the best economics and can best deny access to essential resources for the other side in order to gain access to resources the other side controls (oil, minerals, land, water ways, trade routes, etc.). Many modern conflicts are actually proxy wars where large countries subsidize minor conflicts in a plausibly deniable but otherwise very open way. China, the US, EU, Russia, the Saudi's, etc. are all parties in such conflicts and they are fighting against each other and with each other depending on where you look (Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.). In the background you have trade relation ships, oil & minerals, and economical sanctions. And in some parts of the world water access. Those are the resources that sustain conflicts. Modern weaponry changes the tactics. But the strategy is always the same: go after resource access and you might win. You can see that happening in Ukraine and if China goes there, it will be a factor in Taiwan. It's why they mainly talk about that without going there. China is much smarter than Russia on this.

sidewndr46 1y ago
Outside of the initial stages of the conflicts this is usually. One of the most interesting facts of the Rhodesian Bush war was they only really gave up when the fuel refinery and depot was destroyed.

rjsw 1y ago

That isn't all that new, HMS Glamorgan was hit by a missile mounted on a truck in 1982 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_...

jonwachob91 1y ago

I don't see any USNI articles that echo your comment, so idk why you linked them as a source...