War game exposed U.S. vulnerability to low-tech warfare
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So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.
Naval anti-ship drones have been around for many decades. This is a highly evolved area of military technology with a long history of real-world engagements upon which to base design choices.
The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed and you still need a swarm of them to get through.
The model you are talking about was basically how things worked in the 1970s. Technology has improved a lot over the last half century.
Autonomous optically guided missiles/drones would fare better, but those are still vulnerable to being blinded by laser systems like HELIOS[0], and of course being shot down by anti air missiles or CIWS.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Laser_with_Integra...
Those are called guided rockets and of course are more capable but also way more expensive.
Shaheds can and did get basic guidance very cheap. Add a video, basic image processing to find big grey object in sea as target, send them radio controlled in the right direction .. so when they get jammed, they autonomously find that big target.
And you surely can blind/shoot down a couple. But we were talking about 10000 of them at once. The carrier would maybe not sink, but it would burn.
If that's right, then 10000 would cost $350 million. That's a lot of money to spend to not sink a carrier.
Basically these make it much more likely you loose ships if they stop moving for any reason.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/18/russian-drone-hits-...
https://en.usm.media/chinese-vessel-comes-under-attack-in-th...
>or terminal guidance
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-shahed-dive-bomb-shah...
My main thesis is that the cost of small autonomous drones have dropped enormously over the past 20 years, and that increasingly drone swarms look like a much more capable and cost effective way of waging war than giant, incredibly expensive, slow moving targets. These giant but powerful machines (not just aircraft carriers but also things like tanks) are simply poorly suited to the future (and maybe even the present) of warfare.
There's a whole new generation of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks being designed and metal bended right now with that very threat in mind.
Not to mention tons of short range air defense supporting systems.
And how about the cost of drone countermeasures? Ukrainian interceptor drones are already a fraction of the price of a Shahed, and drone jamming systems are evolving at a lightning pace. Every weapon development seems like an unstoppable game changer until an effective defense is widely fielded, but that defense does tend to wind up getting fielded, or the offensive technology is completely superseded, by the time the next major conflict breaks out.
In the current Iran conflict not a single US warship has been damaged by a drone or similar system. Iran is among the leaders in drone technologies and started the war with a substantial stockpile. The US navy had not previously gone up against an adversary in the drone age and all of its ships were designed prior to the start of the Ukraine war. If there was ever a time where a large number of drones could overwhelm a ship with inappropriate defenses, it would have been then. In 5 years there isn't going to be a combat vessel in any first rate navy without dedicated counter-drone defenses and every officer will be well versed in counter-drone tactics. The best drones in the hands of the most experienced units may still be able to defeat these countermeasures, but the idea that you're going to overwhelm an aircraft carrier with 10,000 cheap drones is a fantasy.
Iran has no reason to take down a U.S. ship. In fact, it will try and avoid it as much as possible because taking down a ship would be an insult the U.S. would have to respond to with an incredible escalation of violence.
The purpose of the Shahed drones arsenal right now is to allow Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz, which it is achieving despite many promises/threats by the U.S. to wrest control from Iran, and to economically damage the US’s partners in the Middle East so they contribute pressuring the U.S. to end the war.
Thats also something Iran is achieving.
The U.S. is incredibly rich but not that much richer.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?
Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...
You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.
If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks
To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.
Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.
When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.
Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?
Both of these statements are wrong. Carriers generally rely on the radar systems of their escorts and their early warning aircraft much more than their own systems.
Similarly, even if the landing deck was damaged, again the carrier's escorts are its primary defense
But I have a suspicion that the US navy practices damage control and recovery. Repairing a landing deck seems like a thing they would practice very extensively.
There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.
All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.
$13 billion dollar military toybox?
Let’s think.
EMP.
Nets.
Defensive Drones.
Superdome.
Finding the solution isn’t hard - choosing and implementing it takes time when you’re a stumbling behemoth.
See also: NFL stadiums in the US
Also, it’s not even a bad idea.
What, is it too heavy?
Finding a solution isn't hard until your adversary adjusts their tacts slightly and bypasses it a week later
So, better be Agile, and have segmented groups doing really different things in different regions,
not taking 10-25 years to develop new overpriced platforms
while World Wars are being fought on DJI.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
On January 17, 1961, in this farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."
In a speech of less than 10 minutes, on January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his political farewell to the American people on national television from the Oval Office of the White House.
Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, "old soldier" speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Melty-laser systems look cheap, compared to losing that even once.
how much ammunition did the US navy use to shoot down incoming drones, and what are the cost of those vs the attacker's cost?
They might have enough stockpiles to continue this war for a while, but it thins out the capabilities in other theaters, making the US generally more vulnerable.
If the decaying industrial base is that easy to fix please, by all means; go ahead and do it.
I don’t think you can fix it without long term, competent industrial policy and we have the absolute opposite of that in power currently.
Yes.
800 Patriot missiles were used within the first 3 days in the Iran war. This is greater than the total number of Patriot missiles received by Ukraine during the entire war with Russia.
The USA is rapidly depleting it's missile stocks, and the Orange president is displaying some funny priorities.
The statement being responded to was effectively that the carrier is indefensible, and that is clearly not the case.
I totally agree with the rest of your post. The U.S. military now feels like the British Navy in the inter-war years, where they had massive battlecruisers like HMS Hood that were completely spotless, the pride of the British Navy, but also completely unsuited for combat and blew up the first time they saw it.
Remember that 10k drones can't just be conjured into the air all at once or act with perfect coordination. There are operational limitations that prevent effectiveness from scaling up past a certain point.
Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force; a pre-emptive cruise missile attack sank sixteen Blue warships and led to the exercise's suspension. The simulation was restarted with Blue forces fully restored, and Red forces heavily constrained from free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted"
More of a political exercise than anything else. But this has been cited as an indication of the effectiveness of modern drone-based warfare.
Did they make a note of the lesson? Did anything change?
I mean, I guess they noticed enough to classify the results for 25 years...
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
Have there really been no other more interesting war games in the last quarter-century, or did all the negative attention this got just result in us never hearing about another one?
This one shows the the US narrowly winning against China in a conflict over Taiwan. The US wins but with tremendous losses -- specifically in the form many munitions that take years to decades to replace.
And it just so happens that we witnessed a conflict play out just a few months ago and that resulted in a similar depletion of munitions albeit with minimal losses of American ships and aircraft.
What's very troubling about this is that in response the US moved munitions from the pacific into the middle east, leaving Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in a very vulnerable position.
This may explain why the current US president was unusually obsequious to the leader of China when in the past he had been particularly bellicose.
Also, cool fact: While researching this subject I learned that the engines for most American cruise missiles come from a single company.[1]
[0] https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/se...
Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."
For ex $300k antiship missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_Affordable_Capac...
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."
https://www.google.com/search?q=iran+launched+spy+satellite+...
>13 killed (including 1 CIA officer and 4 non-combat deaths)[11]
if that was not a decisive victory, then I don't know what is.
the rest of the so-called war was a low intensity insurgency during 20 years of which the US lost fewer soldiers than Russia loses in 20 hours.
It's not nothing, and it seems that the scale of such things are enough to impact decisions and directions and lead to long low level churn with no particular outcome.
Radar, AA, expensive jets, core infrastructure. All attacked as part of an opening salvo which could cripple the enemy's forces on the first day.
The difference is these days satellite surveillance makes it harder to secretly move military forces into place. Drone carrying cargo ships is the biggest risk.
I see it repeated a lot, but Iran is not a direct descendent of some Persian empire, it was conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Turks and Mongols and ruled by Arabs and Turks for most of its history.
These nationalist myths are not taken seriously for western countries but that criticism usually does not extend to foreign myths
Also the Iranians have cultural continuity going back that far, unlike the Egyptians, Iraqis or Indians. Only the Chinese rival them in that respect.
Is the Islamic Republic more culturally similar to the Arab Khalifate it professes to emulate or Cyrus?
Also you brought up Sumer, how is Iran related to Sumer more than it is related to the actual Mesopotamian empires? I never heard someone claim that
Being occupied by foreign powers doesn't break cultural continuity, otherwise you'd claim the modern Greeks don't have continuity with ancient Athens, despite speaking the same language.
Continuity also doesn't mean being static. Modern Greek is not the same as classical Attic. Modern Greeks are Christian, not again, and so on.
Some hermetic cultural continuity except for language is also doubtful, Iran culture is grounded in Arabian culture no less than it is grounded in Persian culture. Hence the entire national unifying concept of Islamic Republic and heir to the Khalifates.
Regarding Susa, as far as I understand they haven't spoken an Indo-European language and Elamite is not related to Persian at all, so why do you think it shows cultural continuity?
This is a systematic issue which very few people care about.
In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.
But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.
The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?
The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.
I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.
The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.
The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.
I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.
I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.