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A Shahed is only useful against stationary soft targets, which an aircraft carrier is not. It also doesn’t have the kind of heavy warhead or terminal guidance required to defeat the armored structure of naval ships. Shahed doesn’t have any kind of countermeasure avoidance. Adding these would massively increase the cost.

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.

Modern Shaheds can be controlled through satellite links like StarLink, with high quality video. Also, targeting a large pile of metal in the sea should not be difficult with something like a radar.

This underestimates the requirements. It requires sophisticated real-time terminal guidance. This is not a cheap feature. Modern anti-ship drones dynamically select a precise point of impact based on their observation of the target to maximize probability of hitting a vulnerable spot. Especially with a weak warhead like the Shahed, most points of impact would be scratching the paint.

The model you are talking about was basically how things worked in the 1970s. Technology has improved a lot over the last half century.

For now only the USA has reliable access to anything like Starlink / Starshield. Radar isn't any kind of magic solution: it has limited range and field of view.

Any kind of radio control should be discounted when attacking a US carrier fleet, they will just be jammed.

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...

"The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed "

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.

> An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000

If that's right, then 10000 would cost $350 million. That's a lot of money to spend to not sink a carrier.

Ok, if there are really 10000 in a attack at once, I am pretty sure a carrier would burn so much, it is basically scrap metal. But I suppose 1000 already, or even 100 at once would be a serious threat with grave damage. I suppose we will find out sooner or later.

And now the cost has increased again, because you need to field enough simultaneous launches to get 10k in the air at the same time. It doesn’t mean you need 10k launchers, but you still need a lot

Yeah, but those launchers are really cheap. Just a metal rail and a booster (and alternatives are possible, Iran has lots of steep mountains).

Suppose the ship is immobilized or under tow after hitting a mine for example. Or even just in port in range of cheap dumb drones.

Basically these make it much more likely you loose ships if they stop moving for any reason.

If your aircraft carrier is mobility kill what are you even doing? These things operate in a group with supporting vessels for a reason. Never mind that the point of a carrier is that its air group can reach out pretty far so you don't have to drive where the mines are.

>A Shahed is only useful against stationary

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...

right, but like, 10,000 of them? that's a lot and only a small fraction of the cost of more capable systems of destroying an aircraft carrier

I feel like this and many other responses are missing the point, e.g. focusing on the specifics of a current Shahed drone.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

And yet the U.S. navy is unable to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

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.

I can bankrupt you before running out of my arsenal of Shahed drones if you’re spending 1000 times the cost of a drone to bring it down.

The U.S. is incredibly rich but not that much richer.

I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.

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?

A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.

I suppose there is an opportunity cost to saving up all your weapons. What is the enemy doing in that time where you stop throwing things at them?

Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...

I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.

Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.

Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.

> at least in terms of the carrier being sunk

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?

> If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.

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

True, but if you can't land planes, then you can only launch each plane once.

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.

> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.

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.

It is about force projection though. Ok, you have a bunch of drones in the US, now how do you use them to attack Iran or in the pacific theatre?

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.

Projection works up until someone calls the bluff, just like Iran did.

Projection always "works". If someone drives a car into a lake the car wasn't the problem.

This was the Millennium Challenge, which was leaked to the press in the early 2000s. I remember reading about it in 2006 in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, as an example of the power of intuition and rapidly-shifting command & control lines.

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.

Also the wargame was flawed because the computer simulations in 2002 allowed the enemy general to put anti-ship missiles bigger than speed boats on the speed boats, and basically 'spawn' the speed boats almost next to the blue fleet.

Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....

I don't think it's clearly established that 10,000 Shahed drones would actually be a threat to an aircraft carrier though.

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.

How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.

Hasn't this always been the case? A hmmv vs random ieds. A tank vs a bunch of shoulder-mount rpgs. etc.

The after action report was only recently declassified. This war game has been pretty widely publicized. Especially after the retired marine general that ran the OPFOR complained about it being rigged.

There are 3 aircraft carriers near iran. Iran has multiple 10,000 of shahed drones.

> I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.

$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.

what is a superdome?

Giant metal cover, maybe like an eyelid.