Not a laser expert btw.
In this scenario it takes 361 drones to land one on an aircraft carrier, sinking it unless the attacker totally fucks up. If they're like these Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones the article says have destroyed 750 land vehicles (I guess in the Ukraine war alone?) that cost US$5M each, that's US$1.8 billion dollars to sink the aircraft carrier. That's not too bad; you can build a new aircraft carrier for US$9 billion or so.
But what if the drones cost US$5000 each? Or US$50? Or what if they travel at mach 2? Or are submarines, like loitering torpedoes or guided mines?
It may be more economical to just send drones to the country where the aircraft carrier is from to kill the family members of its military officers, or at least the ones who don't cooperate.
Although I have no particular love for US foreign policy and military adventurism, I fear we are passing out of a period of relative peace and entering a period of extreme unpredictability. There is no guarantee that the new stable equilibrium will have states or civilization in it.
If each drone costs US$50 then you can launch 180 million drones for the cost of an aircraft carrier. I don't think increasing the number of lasers from my 5 to 10-20 is going to help much.
I don't know what is needed for a munition to damage an aircraft carrier, but I feel like once it's on the deck it's already past the strong defenses and into the soft targets. It could be as simple as a wheeled robot that runs around stabbing random people, or a poison gas canister that fills the interior of the ship with mustard gas, or hundreds of hand-grenade-sized mini-claymores that deploy to random parts of the ship and conceal themselves quietly until a sailor happens to walk by.
Swimming + flying cheap drones doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC9EJhs0pc0&ab_channel=Rutge...
At (wild overestimate) $1k per drone an attacker can wield 13 million drones for the equivalent cost of an aircraft carrier, not including ongoing expenses.
Clearing the flight deck with antipersonnel warheads would probably work better, but I wouldn't count on that to keep a carrier out of action for very long. If you really want to sink a ship, either use proper anti-ship warheads or don't bother trying.
There could be an interim period of many years where very important stuff is very vulnerable.
Though actually I'm coming around to the idea that a bunch of AI-targeted flak guns are sufficient, and that carriers are probably fine either way due to how close a series of missiles containing the swarm would have to get anyway.
But there's no particular reason to expect that this future will be a Mohist one in which peace is ensured because magically cheap defensive drone swarms make every fortress impregnable and thus combatants' home territories always remain unscathed; at least as likely is a Second Variety future in which drone swarms are more effective for attack than for defense, perhaps even after all the human combatants are dead.
In a world of frictionless pulleys and spherical cows yes, in the real world, no. In the real world aircraft carriers and their attendant battle groups do not just park within visible range of a coast. Your drone swarm needs to find the carrier's battle group, get within launch range for your $50 drones (without being shot down), maintain some sort of identification of the carrier (or whatever ship), and then make a terminal approach.
A carrier's air group maintains a perimeter hundreds of miles away from the carrier group. Not just fighters flying CAP but AWACS planes keeping track of the airspace. No one is going to hide a million drones launching towards a carrier group. It would be unlikely hide even a hundred drones. A drone carrier large enough to launch a non-trivial number of suicide drones is also unlikely to go undetected.
Even if everything went right and someone managed to damage an aircraft carrier with a drone swarm, the carrier group alone has enough land attack weaponry to seriously hurt the source in retaliation. A nuclear response to an attack of a US carrier would not be outside the realm of possibility either.
Attacking a US carrier group is a really dumb idea even if you've got a really clever weapon.
But you might be able to, if they're small enough. Or underwater.
If you can provoke nuclear retaliation, you win twice, at least to the extent that anyone can "win" a battle nowadays: first, you sink Enemy A's carrier (or, more realistically, permanently incapacitate it), and second, you draw Enemy A's nukes onto Enemy B's territory where you launched the drones from.
It's all about targeting smarts and precision! This has been well demonstrated in Ukraine, where GPS-guided missile artillery can simply "reach out and touch someone" 50 miles away.
Even tiny drones could do fantastic damage if precisely targetted using on-board AI. They could target personnel, fuel, electrical equipment, optics.
Don't think about a 50kg bomb dropped on the deck. Think of a swarm of 500g drones with 100g shaped charges making a beeline for the control tower, and the engine intake of every parked plane.
Which have laughable range and can't handle anything heavier than a stiff breeze, let alone weather conditions at sea.
You're not going to sink a ship with 500g explosive fish-shaped torpedo-launched drone things. This plan boils down to a really weird and elaborate method of throwing hand grenades at a super-carrier until it sinks. This whole line of discussion is absurd.
... and is on fire?
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCqXmzzWFA
[1] https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/images/pubs/Chisholm-Chapt...
If you don't think drones of the future will be the most horrifyingly effective weapons of war, you lack imagination.
Maybe you wouldn't even need to have them come above the water line. Maybe the drone is just a weight and a magnet that can clamp onto the ships haul below the water line. Again, you can't combat that without having thousands of divers below your ship scraping the hull.
That would take a ridiculous amount of energy.
Of course the question is open: how efficient would the rock-stacking drones be? If they're 50% efficient the scale of the operation is different than if they're 0.05% efficient.
Also, I imagine somebody will notice this rock-stacking activity at some point over the (days? weeks?) it will to swamp the aircraft carrier, and take care of the problem with plain old birdshot. Or just a bunch of sailors with brooms or fire hoses.
Failing that, just cruise away from the drone swarm. They'll run out of gas long before the carrier runs out of U235.
100'000 tonnes is 100 million kg, so for a million drones it would be 100 dives.
I agree that stacking rocks on the deck of a carrier, or even gluing or magnet-clamping them to its hull, is probably not the most effective way for drones to damage it. Firing birdshot at sailors, for example, would be more effective; blinding them with lasers more effective still. The point is that even ridiculously primitive attacks become effective when you multiply them by enough orders of magnitude.
Anyway, if you are in position to bring something close to a carrier from underwater, an heavy torpedo will do the job for a lot less money that your swarm.
- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.
- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.
- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.
- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.
- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.
Phalanx has a magazine of 1,550 rounds, and each burst fires 100 rounds. Firing continuously, it would expend its magazine in 20.6 seconds. Firing perfectly, (with no hostile ECM) it could splash fifteen incoming targets.
What if they launch thirty?
An actual attack intended to overwhelm point defenses would be a single wave, obviously. There wouldn't be any chance to reload anything. Whatever you have in the magazines and VLS cells at that moment would be all you get.
https://navalpost.com/searam-ram-vs-phalanx-goalkeeper/
But realistically the limiting factors for point defense are more likely to be detection and engagement range rather than magazine depth. Hence the focus on layered air defense including longer range missiles, countermeasures, and decoys.
I have little interest in discussing drone swarms (so does the article to be fair - a good two thirds are strictly about drones which could as well be by themselves) but this statement is simply untrue.
It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group. So would a submarine intelligently positioned. The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
I agree. But the only platform able to consistently engage a carrier group with this kind of firepower is another carrier group. Land-based artillery can be kept out of range or engaged using the force projection of the carrier.
>So would a submarine intelligently positioned.
Submarine capabilities are some of the most well-kept military secrets of the world. There is no way to assert that. In modern doctrines, they are mostly used for intel and as a platform for launching ICBMs, so I would really not bet on that.
>The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
That is true. Spamming ICBMs could work, and they don't need to be nuclear to defeat a modern carrier group :)
>Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
This is absolutely and provably false. No systems allows for the force projection that a carrier group afford. France was able to deploy & support an incredible amount of power from the Charles de Gaulle against the Islamic State. No other system could have achieved that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...
The exemple you give for the relevance of carrier is not a symmetric conflict. Thankfully the equipment available to the Islamic State was garbage compared to what a modern army can do.
In a conflict between for exemple the US and China, carriers would be useless. They would probably be amongst the first things to be targeted.
You could paint the target using a laser, with the rocket-propelled drones homing on to it. Or extremely precise GPS coordinates!
Wait... It reminds me of something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_munition
First, you're underestimating the importance of things being cheaper. Consider that an iPhone is basically a Cray Y-MP with packet radio, just cheaper. But in the 01980s could you have looked at a Cray and KA9Q and predicted Uber, sexting, revenge porn, Instagram influencers, Russian trolls on Twitter working to influence US elections, and Bitcoin?
In the same way, reducing the cost of a cruise missile from US$2M (Block V Tomahawks) to US$1000 will change the military situation not just in degree but in kind. Current CIWS are designed for gunboats and conventional cruise missiles appearing in groups of 1-16. Current carrier group defense in depth is designed for fighter-bombers that appear in groups of 16-128. They will not be useful against drone swarms that appear in groups of even 256, let alone 1024 or 8192.
Second, you're thinking of brute-force payloads like hand grenades, and that leads you to drastically underestimate the importance of small drones penetrating. But hand grenades are the epitome of dumb weapons: they have a timer, no guidance, and just a fragmentation charge. A US$1000 drone that manages to make it to a carrier deck does not have to be as dumb as a hand grenade. Instead, think of it as being like a frogman who has successfully boarded an enemy ship on a suicide mission, but lost almost all his equipment in the process. How much damage could he do before he gets killed? What if, instead of one frogman, it's 1024 frogmen? What if they're almost invisible?
Frogmen can short out wires, gather intelligence, plant bugs, pierce jet engines, set fires, cut throats, plant claymores, poison food, distract sentries, jam signals, booby-trap small arms, breach reactor containment, disable reactor coolant circuits, release potent poison gases deep below deck, falsify sensor readings, extinguish indoor lighting, frag sleeping sailors, and interchange fuels with solvents. And so can drones: if not today, 20 years from now.
I do share the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph.
Tldr you've built an argument on top of a triad of features that actually are more of a 'pick two' deal.
Afterall, its just a focused heat beam of electromagnetic radiation.
A polished mirror surface might slow the heat build up a little bit but the best mirrors on the planet will still heat up if you're throwing enough energy at it; no mirror has a 0% absorption rate.
What's more, any imperfection on the surface will act as an focal point for the heat to build up; a spec of dust, a dew drop, a little oil from your fingertip, anything that can absorb the heat from the laser basically turns it into a hot spot that the laser will burn through rather quickly.
Dispersal requires consumables. You leave consumables behind when you move and you have to move because the laser can keep going indefinitely, so it's a losing proposition. Consumables are heavy and limited.