Hacker News Reader

Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

And yet, in a recent conflict of the US navy vs swarms of drones, no ships were lost.

> no ships were lost

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?

Does that even matter? US GDP is orders of magnitude larger than Iran. The American way of war has long been based on minimizing casualties through overwhelming materiel superiority and profligate ammunition expenditure. Back in WWII the USA literally out produced Japan by 1000:1 in some types of munitions. Our industrial base has decayed a bit lately but that's a fixable problem.

It matters in so far as the production rate for e.g. air defense interceptors is much lower than the rate at which they've been used in the Iran war. Which is probably one of the reasons the US was ready for a ceasefire.

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.

This absolutely matters. It is not 1945, and we used years of supplies.

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.

> Does that even matter?

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 sound of a shifting goalpost.

The statement being responded to was effectively that the carrier is indefensible, and that is clearly not the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com