Hacker News Reader

Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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…

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-shipboa...

How does this work against a sufficiently concentrated attack?

I think the point is that the ship is itself an expensive and vulnerable method of delivering drones to a target (because warfare has become all about delivering more drones to the target than the other guy can cope with).

If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.

Define drones. Define missiles. How big are these drones? Are they group 1? Group 3[0]? Can this ship with missiles use its group 4 drones to find and fix these patrol boats so it can toss missiles at the opposing patrol boats? Can the patrol boats do anything about the missiles incoming at M3? Can I use some group 4 drones to drop a bunch of group 1 drones in the vicinity of those patrol boats, where they have no response because they don’t have medium anti-air capability?

Vulnerable does not mean obsolete.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAS_groups_of_the_United_State...

None of those. As we're seeing in Ukraine, the new drone wars are all about tiny commercial/consumer drones being repurposed as weapons in huge numbers [0].

Obviously, everyone scoffed at this when reports first came out. How can a $250 consumer drone take out a multi-million-dollar modern tank?

Yet here we are. Neither side are fielding tanks any more because they're vulnerable to drones, and therefore obsolete [1] (caveat: we haven't seen the end of this cycle of development and response, so it's possible that tanks work out how to defend against drones and continue being relevant. I suspect it's more likely that tanks go the way of cavalry. Machine guns were the answer to cavalry. Tanks are an answer to machine guns. Drones are the answer to tanks. The answer to drones won't be better tanks).

The Ukraine war is not a naval war, so we're not seeing the same rapid development of new naval military doctrine. But if a naval war kicked off, it's reasonable to expect the same rapid adoption of new technology would play out, with the same results. Large, expensive, weapon systems (in Ukraine tanks, in naval war ships) are vulnerable to massed attacks by smaller, cheaper, weapons using new tech that we haven't used like this before.

[0]https://theaircurrent.com/ukraine-special-report/ukraine-dro...

[1] https://www.army-technology.com/features/mbts-vs-drones-are-...

Patrol boats are fine for low intensity coastal security missions but mostly useless in any high intensity conflict. They can't operate effectively far from shore. And close to shore you might as well use land based aircraft and missiles.

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.

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

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.

> 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

[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...

[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...

None of these are applicable to the naval context here. That $30k drone has a measly 10km range. You can't navigate visually on the open ocean. The payload requirements are at least 100kg if you want to do any damage, which none of these come close to. None of them can withstand modern military countermeasures; the "EW resistance" in this case just means operating in a denied environment, which is pretty old and basic tech.

Completely different class of drone capability. Something that could actually do damage in a naval context against modern countermeasure tech would be much more expensive.

Ok. Flying drones that we've seen in Ukraine lack the range to survive a naval deployment.

Ukraine has had some success engaging Russian surface warships with small aquatic craft type drones.

Does a ground-based operator pose a threat to modern navies by means of some swarm of jet-ski robots?

Yes, but only in the littorals or protected waters. Small unmanned surface vessels can't really operate effectively out in the open ocean. They lack the necessary sensors, endurance, and sea keeping ability.

for now

What does that even mean? There isn't any magic technology on the horizon which will allow small USVs to operate effectively in blue water.

How much does a swarm of extremely long range jet ski robots with hardened military electronics and large explosives packages cost?

Getting enough of anything that can do serious damage to a ship to overwhelm the defenses is going to be an expensive undertaking. Maybe if some idiot sails a $10 billion aircraft carrier close to shore such a mass attack is justified, but it is simply not at all evident that "some success engaging Russian surface warships" equates to posing a serious threat to modern navies.

> That $30k drone has a measly 10km range.

You don't necessarily need a lot of range if you launch them from a small drone vessel[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY0JP__hm4s

I literally had this exact same discussion here about 3 years ago when people were scoffing about the idea that tanks would become unusable archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.

At the moment, yes, if you want to field a drone that can kill a ship then it's going to be expensive. But we haven't seen any real development of ship-killing drones because the Ukraine conflict is land-based with only limited naval conflict.

Military doctrine only really advances during wartime, by people in the field desperately trying new things to survive. If we had a naval war you'd very quickly see new advances in all this tech and I think you'd very quickly end up in the same situation; that large ships become useless archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.

Also EMPs and microwaves to fry swarms of drones at once.

What EMPs? This is the real world, not some sci-fi movie. Due to the inverse square law, generating an EMP powerful enough to act as a weapon takes an extremely powerful explosion.

EMP weapons are directional, and thus aren't affected by the inverse square law. Further, the power that a ship can output can exceed what a drone could tolerate by many orders of magnitude. EMP weapons do not require an explosion.

You appear to be referring to some sort of jammer or directed energy weapon, not an "EMP" as the term is usually defined.

I think they were conflating EMP with directed RF weapons. The latter is a standard feature set for anything with a beam steering transmitter. Those can dump a lot of focused RF energy on a targets. That has been an automated defense response since the mid-20th century and would likely kill most drones.

EMP is, of course, extremely inefficient no matter how you pump it.

You can direct an EMP so it’s close to linear losses — the difference between a laser and a lightbulb.

You wouldn't want your EMP devices to have the range to go from your position to enemy object, you would mostly be fucking all your stuff up. What you would want to do is lob an EMP device at the enemy object, and detonate it as close as possible. Not only does it minimize damage to your own equipment, you need a MUCH smaller device. And it can be done without a ton of effort with a fast explosive, a neodymium magnet, and some copper wire to blast the magnet through, potentially launched mortar style.

I think the only reason we don't see more EMP devices is because it will screw up all your communications and potentially other equipment too, and piss off every other country within 1,000 miles with all the EM noise. You can't really protect your radios equipment from EMP devices other than to coordinate taking them all down and shielding them all. It could also potentially be a prelude to nuclear EMPs and thus nuclear war but im not all that sure what a countries response would be to EMP weapons and attacks.

You can want those things, but outside of nuclear weapons they don't actually exist. Practical and effective conventional (non-nuclear) EMP weapons remain in the sci-fi realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...

Also I don't want them, nmobody wants them. They will mess up all your own stuff just as good as the enemies and piss off the entire world with the EM noise.

Yes, I am aware of those experiments. They are not really effective because the pulse range is miniscule. So you're not making any sense.

You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com