[Pelic4n]

So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:

- 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.

[kragen]

Yes, a drone is the same thing as a cruise missile, so a drone swarm is precisely a missile barrage. But I think you're missing two key points.

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.

[WastingMyTime89]

> Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement.

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.

[Pelic4n]

>It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group.

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...

[WastingMyTime89]

There is no question that a modern offensive submarine could sink a carrier. Theoretically a carrier group should be able to detect it but it’s a very real threat.

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.

[sbierwagen]

>Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.

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?

[nradov]

As the threat had evolved, the US Navy has started phasing out the Phalanx CIWS and replacing it with various RIM-116 (RAM) launchers. These are much more capable against high-speed maneuvering targets.

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.

[avereveard]

A carrier move with a large screen of ships, each bringing their own missiles defenses, plus pans with their own missiles that are likely to pick up and shoot stuff large enough not to be launched in range of the carrier group suppression zone

[varjag]

you reload

[sbierwagen]

Here's a video of a crew reloading a Phalanx turret. Note how long it takes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk6HL8URIcI

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.

[CamperBob2]

Also, how good is Phalanx at detecting and killing something that comes in 6 feet above the water's surface?

[WastingMyTime89]

Somewhat good. That’s the whole point. It was put in service specifically to counter sea skimming missiles. Its effectiveness is questionable however.

[marshray]

It's definitely designed for that scenario.

[jonstewart]

I agree with most everything you say here about the limitations of drones, but there's a high likelihood that current aircraft carriers are quite vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. A DF-26 costs ~$10M, so launching several at a carrier, though expensive, would still be massively cost-effective in a real war. This article on WotR discusses the threat a bit more (I don't have an opinion on the solution/approach it advocates for the US military): https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/when-it-comes-to-missiles-....

[anonymousDan]

What if you could design a swarm that can somehow combine their individual payloads at the point of attack?

[Pelic4n]

You could even use rocket fuel-based drones for the superior range, speed and efficiency compared to electrical motors or jet engines.

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