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> 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 launche

> 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
    Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable?
    - 1659447091 8mo 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 8mo 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_ 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
citrin_ru 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
avianlyric 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
> Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. What are ours doing during this war?
- dingaling 8mo ago
  Adding 70+ strike and AEW aircraft apiece, individually more than most national air forces could muster.
- cosmicgadget 8mo ago
  Are you joking? Sending F-18s into the air.
  - mcphage 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
      That would change if there was any perception that a carrier could be lost. At the moment such things are theoretical
- jandrewrogers 8mo 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.

khalic 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable?
  - 1659447091 8mo 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 8mo 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_ 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago

citrin_ru 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago

avianlyric 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago

> Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. What are ours doing during this war?

dingaling 8mo ago
Adding 70+ strike and AEW aircraft apiece, individually more than most national air forces could muster.
cosmicgadget 8mo ago
Are you joking? Sending F-18s into the air.
- mcphage 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
    That would change if there was any perception that a carrier could be lost. At the moment such things are theoretical
jandrewrogers 8mo 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.