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Whether or not professional military strategists and planners anticipated this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones, it is n

Whether or not professional military strategists and planners anticipated this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones, it is nearly certain that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military has not. And if the Commander is involved in the either the day-to-day operations or the strategic level of planning, I can’t imagine that whatever reasoning about these shifts in power dynamics has taken place will influence U.S. operations.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)
- khalic 7mo ago
  Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles Where? When? > if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
    - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
      Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable?
      - 1659447091 7mo ago
        > Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable? The USS Plunkett? A destroyer, not a carrier, that sustained the best the Germans could throw at her and kept on going; earning 5 battle stars while participating in all the major allied invasions in europe. What part was the tragedy of her? That she was scrapped in 1975 instead of being turned into a museum?
    - khalic 7mo ago
      Where? Any war games in the last 10 years. It’s a known issue with aircraft carriers agiants anti ship missiles. What’s protecting them right now is what would happen to a country if they attacked one of those. Retribution is not a great defensive capability in the long run. Contrary to popular belief, an aircraft carrier does more than just launch airplane. Its optimal deployment zone will be defined by the range of its helicopters. So not as far as you think. Take the helicopters out and you have easily 50% less missions this thing can launch per day.
  - panick21_ 7mo ago
    You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying. Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger. The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach. Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
    - mrguyorama 7mo ago
      Also the standard Shahed-136 style drones carry less than 200 pounds of explosives, and deliver that to the surface of a target. Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
    - XorNot 7mo ago
      You don't even need to say "lasers" : that's the future. CIWS is already a thing today and Ukrainians have downed Shaheds with ground fire from small arms. There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic). There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).
      - randomNumber7 7mo ago
- citrin_ru 7mo ago
  Both can be true - carriers and traditional air force are not obsolete but also western armies are unprepared to deal with the threat posed by a large number of cheap drones which can quickly deplete traditional air defense (based on SAM systems).
  - guzfip 7mo ago
    Wasn’t this the exact sort of reason we were developing laser weapons? I thought at least one US Navy ship was equipped with one now.
    - citrin_ru 7mo ago
      From what I see in news both the US and the UK are using expensive missiles to shut down Shahed drones and laser weapons are not mentioned at all - either they are too rare or not yet working reliably enough to risk letting a drone to get withing the range or laser weapons (which I assume is smaller than for missiles).
      - marcosdumay 7mo ago
        I dunno about what Israel is doing, but a ship usually has enough power to fire 1 or 2 lasers at a time. It takes 10s of seconds to destroy a drone, and each drone stays in range for 1 or 2 minutes. Or, that is their advertised capabilities. Countries that buy them usually complain that they don't work as well on practice.
        thaumasiotes 7mo ago
        Well, assume the advertised capabilities are realistic. Assume it takes 15 seconds to destroy a drone, the drone stays in range for 2 minutes, and you can fire on 2 drones at a time. You can destroy 16 drones every 2 minutes. If you get attacked by 50 drones, you'll get 16-20 of them. Did that help you?
        marcosdumay 7mo ago
- avianlyric 7mo ago
  If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space. The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world. > change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon. It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now. > the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
    - panarky 7mo ago
      The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth. You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes. But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
- mcphage 7mo ago
  > Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. What are ours doing during this war?
  - dingaling 7mo ago
    Adding 70+ strike and AEW aircraft apiece, individually more than most national air forces could muster.
  - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
    Are you joking? Sending F-18s into the air.
    - mcphage 7mo ago
      No, just asking—I know they're staying out of the gulf, but I don't know how involved they are, and I figured someone here did.
      - chasd00 7mo ago
        They're the only thing involved pretty much. The gulf nations have not allowed the US to launch from their bases in the region. Maybe that will change as they keep getting attacked but as of now the carriers (and now the base on Cyprus) are where the planes are coming from. The strategic bombers, prior to Cyprus, were taking off from the US and flying all the way to Iran and back.
        fakedang 7mo ago
        > The gulf nations have not allowed the US to launch from their bases in the region. This is a categorically false assertion that they have been putting to assuage their local populations - which are heavily opposed to the war and the US support. Maybe not all of them, but some of them, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are clearly hosting and allowing the US to prosecute the war from their soil. If they weren't, you wouldn't have had the AWACS aircraft getting turned to smithereens in Riyadh.
- Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  Would it not be preferable to launch drones from less of a big target? The issue is that the carrier is clearly visible and targetable. You could go submersible or just spam much smaller ships with smaller payloads. In those cases you get the benefits of the same level of assault without the potential of a hugely expensive loss. At a guess, I assume much of the scale of carriers is tied to the logistics of air power, which are considerably less relevant in drone warfare. Carriers will always remain useful for more accurate strikes and operating aircraft that work at higher altitudes, but this broadside idea of volume might work better on a platform that scales better instead of the huge and expensive carrier footprint.
  - randomNumber7 7mo ago
    I think this strategy is effective for Ukraine and Iran because they fight an enemy that is superior in terms of weapon capabilities. If you are the big boy with the bigger gun you don't necessarily need that. PS: I will take that back when someone manages to hit a carrier with a low cost drone boat.
    - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
      sure but America's ship building doesn't appear to be at the level of being able to cranking out carriers should they start losing them. Conversely I imagine it might have a better shot at cranking out a smaller blue print en-masse.
      - edgyquant 7mo ago
        That would change if there was any perception that a carrier could be lost. At the moment such things are theoretical
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    Large aircraft are the cheapest and most scalable way to deliver a ton of explosive on target. That's why aircraft carriers exist. Everything else either is too expensive per unit of destruction or sacrifices too much lethality. The size of the ship has little bearing on the visibility of it to sensors. You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
cosmicgadget 7mo ago
How exactly do drones project power globally?
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
  - dmitrygr 7mo ago
    >> How exactly do drones project power globally? > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb "The next country over" != Worldwide
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      You could do this anywhere in the world for a very small amount of money. The implications of the Ukrainian war have changed the balance of power for ever. No airport will ever be safe again.
      - dmitrygr 7mo ago
        sneaking weapons into some countries is harder than into others, making things that fly long distances gets exponentially harder as distance goes up linearly.
        jacquesm 7mo ago
        That's true, but when things get cheaper you can afford to lose a lot of them. Suddenly every container vessel is suspect. That trick has a lot of potential and harbors are relatively soft targets and easily accessible from just outside international waters. You could do a shitload of damage to most countries by just targeting a few key locations well within the reach of a basic drone and what sub $1000 drones can do is changing by the day. Armor and artillery are basically useless against a fleet of seaborne drones.
jandrewrogers 7mo ago
An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target. The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago
  These boat drones ukraine used to sink some russian ships seem to be very hard to avoid.
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    All large ships in the US Navy have automated weapons for killing swarms of small surface craft. They added that capability a few decades ago because they were regularly attacked by swarms of suicide speed boats packed with explosives. No one tries that anymore. Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. Easier than avoiding torpedos, which are also long-range drones.
    - justin66 7mo ago
      > Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. It's pretty hard to imagine a scenario from the nineties where there are so many speedboats in an attack that all four CIWS on a carrier use all their ammo at once. (that's an awful lot of suicidal jihadis, or whatever) On the other hand, if the CIWS are targeting clouds of aerial drones and jetski drones at the same time, that could be a pretty bad scene. About fifteen seconds of fire per CIWS (1550 rounds), five minutes downtime to reload, between one and three seconds to service each target...
skeletoncrew2 7mo ago
The article is reflecting on the observed reality that US Navy operations in this war are taking Iran’s littoral combat power into account by operating its ships further from the Iranian coast…why can’t you imagine that they are operating this way under Trump?
azernik 7mo ago
Commander-In-Chief is not a career military post, it is an elected politician. Your barefaced assertion that he would have professional-level knowledge is resting on one an array of assumptions - that he has an interest in the details, that he respects and listens to professionals, that he has the attention span to read written briefings - that reporting indicated are false.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago

> this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)

khalic 7mo ago
Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles Where? When? > if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
  - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
    Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable?
    - 1659447091 7mo ago
      > Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable? The USS Plunkett? A destroyer, not a carrier, that sustained the best the Germans could throw at her and kept on going; earning 5 battle stars while participating in all the major allied invasions in europe. What part was the tragedy of her? That she was scrapped in 1975 instead of being turned into a museum?
  - khalic 7mo ago
    Where? Any war games in the last 10 years. It’s a known issue with aircraft carriers agiants anti ship missiles. What’s protecting them right now is what would happen to a country if they attacked one of those. Retribution is not a great defensive capability in the long run. Contrary to popular belief, an aircraft carrier does more than just launch airplane. Its optimal deployment zone will be defined by the range of its helicopters. So not as far as you think. Take the helicopters out and you have easily 50% less missions this thing can launch per day.
- panick21_ 7mo ago
  You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying. Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger. The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach. Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
  - mrguyorama 7mo ago
    Also the standard Shahed-136 style drones carry less than 200 pounds of explosives, and deliver that to the surface of a target. Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
  - XorNot 7mo ago
    You don't even need to say "lasers" : that's the future. CIWS is already a thing today and Ukrainians have downed Shaheds with ground fire from small arms. There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic). There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).
    - randomNumber7 7mo ago
citrin_ru 7mo ago
Both can be true - carriers and traditional air force are not obsolete but also western armies are unprepared to deal with the threat posed by a large number of cheap drones which can quickly deplete traditional air defense (based on SAM systems).
- guzfip 7mo ago
  Wasn’t this the exact sort of reason we were developing laser weapons? I thought at least one US Navy ship was equipped with one now.
  - citrin_ru 7mo ago
    From what I see in news both the US and the UK are using expensive missiles to shut down Shahed drones and laser weapons are not mentioned at all - either they are too rare or not yet working reliably enough to risk letting a drone to get withing the range or laser weapons (which I assume is smaller than for missiles).
    - marcosdumay 7mo ago
      I dunno about what Israel is doing, but a ship usually has enough power to fire 1 or 2 lasers at a time. It takes 10s of seconds to destroy a drone, and each drone stays in range for 1 or 2 minutes. Or, that is their advertised capabilities. Countries that buy them usually complain that they don't work as well on practice.
      - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
        Well, assume the advertised capabilities are realistic. Assume it takes 15 seconds to destroy a drone, the drone stays in range for 2 minutes, and you can fire on 2 drones at a time. You can destroy 16 drones every 2 minutes. If you get attacked by 50 drones, you'll get 16-20 of them. Did that help you?
        marcosdumay 7mo ago
avianlyric 7mo ago
If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space. The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world. > change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon. It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now. > the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
  - panarky 7mo ago
    The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth. You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes. But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
mcphage 7mo ago
> Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. What are ours doing during this war?
- dingaling 7mo ago
  Adding 70+ strike and AEW aircraft apiece, individually more than most national air forces could muster.
- cosmicgadget 7mo ago
  Are you joking? Sending F-18s into the air.
  - mcphage 7mo ago
    No, just asking—I know they're staying out of the gulf, but I don't know how involved they are, and I figured someone here did.
    - chasd00 7mo ago
      They're the only thing involved pretty much. The gulf nations have not allowed the US to launch from their bases in the region. Maybe that will change as they keep getting attacked but as of now the carriers (and now the base on Cyprus) are where the planes are coming from. The strategic bombers, prior to Cyprus, were taking off from the US and flying all the way to Iran and back.
      - fakedang 7mo ago
        > The gulf nations have not allowed the US to launch from their bases in the region. This is a categorically false assertion that they have been putting to assuage their local populations - which are heavily opposed to the war and the US support. Maybe not all of them, but some of them, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are clearly hosting and allowing the US to prosecute the war from their soil. If they weren't, you wouldn't have had the AWACS aircraft getting turned to smithereens in Riyadh.
Quarrelsome 7mo ago
Would it not be preferable to launch drones from less of a big target? The issue is that the carrier is clearly visible and targetable. You could go submersible or just spam much smaller ships with smaller payloads. In those cases you get the benefits of the same level of assault without the potential of a hugely expensive loss. At a guess, I assume much of the scale of carriers is tied to the logistics of air power, which are considerably less relevant in drone warfare. Carriers will always remain useful for more accurate strikes and operating aircraft that work at higher altitudes, but this broadside idea of volume might work better on a platform that scales better instead of the huge and expensive carrier footprint.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago
  I think this strategy is effective for Ukraine and Iran because they fight an enemy that is superior in terms of weapon capabilities. If you are the big boy with the bigger gun you don't necessarily need that. PS: I will take that back when someone manages to hit a carrier with a low cost drone boat.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    sure but America's ship building doesn't appear to be at the level of being able to cranking out carriers should they start losing them. Conversely I imagine it might have a better shot at cranking out a smaller blue print en-masse.
    - edgyquant 7mo ago
      That would change if there was any perception that a carrier could be lost. At the moment such things are theoretical
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  Large aircraft are the cheapest and most scalable way to deliver a ton of explosive on target. That's why aircraft carriers exist. Everything else either is too expensive per unit of destruction or sacrifices too much lethality. The size of the ship has little bearing on the visibility of it to sensors. You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.

cosmicgadget 7mo ago

How exactly do drones project power globally?

jacquesm 7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  >> How exactly do drones project power globally? > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb "The next country over" != Worldwide
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    You could do this anywhere in the world for a very small amount of money. The implications of the Ukrainian war have changed the balance of power for ever. No airport will ever be safe again.
    - dmitrygr 7mo ago
      sneaking weapons into some countries is harder than into others, making things that fly long distances gets exponentially harder as distance goes up linearly.
      - jacquesm 7mo ago
        That's true, but when things get cheaper you can afford to lose a lot of them. Suddenly every container vessel is suspect. That trick has a lot of potential and harbors are relatively soft targets and easily accessible from just outside international waters. You could do a shitload of damage to most countries by just targeting a few key locations well within the reach of a basic drone and what sub $1000 drones can do is changing by the day. Armor and artillery are basically useless against a fleet of seaborne drones.

jandrewrogers 7mo ago

An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target. The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.

randomNumber7 7mo ago
These boat drones ukraine used to sink some russian ships seem to be very hard to avoid.
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  All large ships in the US Navy have automated weapons for killing swarms of small surface craft. They added that capability a few decades ago because they were regularly attacked by swarms of suicide speed boats packed with explosives. No one tries that anymore. Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. Easier than avoiding torpedos, which are also long-range drones.
  - justin66 7mo ago
    > Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. It's pretty hard to imagine a scenario from the nineties where there are so many speedboats in an attack that all four CIWS on a carrier use all their ammo at once. (that's an awful lot of suicidal jihadis, or whatever) On the other hand, if the CIWS are targeting clouds of aerial drones and jetski drones at the same time, that could be a pretty bad scene. About fifteen seconds of fire per CIWS (1550 rounds), five minutes downtime to reload, between one and three seconds to service each target...

skeletoncrew2 7mo ago

The article is reflecting on the observed reality that US Navy operations in this war are taking Iran’s littoral combat power into account by operating its ships further from the Iranian coast…why can’t you imagine that they are operating this way under Trump?

azernik 7mo ago

Commander-In-Chief is not a career military post, it is an elected politician. Your barefaced assertion that he would have professional-level knowledge is resting on one an array of assumptions - that he has an interest in the details, that he respects and listens to professionals, that he has the attention span to read written briefings - that reporting indicated are false.